The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF A. R. AMMONS

VOLUME 2

1978–2005

Edited by Robert M. West

Introduction by Helen Vendler

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION by Helen Vendler

SIX-PIECE SUITE (1978)

I (“led by words into a multiplicity of contact . . .”)

II (“poetry though a big sport helps one bear . . .”)

III (“so many things sound contradictory . . .”)

IV (“hope until there is no hope . . .”)

V (“the years pile up substanceless . . .”)

VI (“how snow can cling . . .”)

A COAST OF TREES (1981)

Coast of Trees

Swells

Continuing

In Memoriam Mae Noblitt

Weather-Bound

Where

Strolls

Getting Through

Eventually Is Soon Enough

Density

Vehicle

Response

Easter Morning

White Dwarf

Distraction

Rapids

Neighbors

Keepsake

Antithesis

Traveling Shows

Breaking Out

Range

Dry Spell Spiel

Mountain Wind

Night Finding

Fourth Dimension

Country Music

Wiring

Sunday at McDonald’s

Sweetened Change

Parting

Feel Like Traveling On

Poverty

Givings

An Improvisation for the Stately Dwelling

An Improvisation for Jerald Bullis

Persistences

WORLDLY HOPES (1982)

Room Conditioner

Extravaganza

Righting Wrongs

Subsumption

Immoderation

Vines

Extrication

Spruce Woods

I Went Back

Snow Roost

Shading Flight In

Precious Weak Fields

Night Chill

Calling

Reaction Rates

Progress Report

Lost & Found

Epistemology

The Role of Society in the Artist

Scribbles

Hermit Lark

Shit List

Limits

Sizing

Bride

Rainy Morning

The Scour

Meditation

Oblivion’s Bloom

Immortality

Design

Augmentations in Early March

Working Differentials

Winter Sanctuaries

Cold Spell

Hollows

Volitions

Providence

Going Without Saying

Devastation

Merchandise

Pairing

Rivulose

LAKE EFFECT COUNTRY (1983)

The Bright Side

Zero and Then Some

Localizing

Theories of Height

The Spiral Rag

The Fairly High Assimilation Rag

I Could Not Be Here At All

Written Water

Retiring

Nature Poetry

Holding Still

Windy Morning with a Little Sleet

Playback

Positive Edges

On Being

By the Boulder Cluster the Wind

Instancing

Trigger

Apologetics

Songlet

Is the Only Enough None

Giving Up Words with Words

Settling Up

Negative Pluses

Yadkin Picnic

Laces

The Only Way Around Is Through

Old Desire

Making Room

Exchangers

Lips Twisted with Thirst

The Eclipse Goes by Drawing

Dusk Water

Pet Panther

Singling & Doubling Together

Motioning

Love’s Motions

Helping Hand

Debris

Coming Round

Dismantlings

Down Low

We, We Ourselves

Measuring Points

Section

Buttermilk Falls

Spring Vacation

Meeting Place

SUMERIAN VISTAS (1987)

1: The Ridge Farm

1 (“The lean, far-reaching, hung-over sway . . .”)

2 (“last night, the wind clunked . . .”)

3 (“a poet hands me his poem and says . . .”)

4 (“if nature could speak . . .”)

5 (“knowledge, perception, this action . . .”)

6 (“there is no tedium, apparently . . .”)

7 (“some branches . . .”)

8 (“we went for a raw walk . . .”)

9 (“cauliflowers are either real or . . .”)

10 (“the clumps and small reservoirs . . .”)

11 (“rather than the play of the mind . . .”)

12 (“how to exclude the central . . .”)

13 (“I like the ridge, its rolls my fixed ocean . . .”)

14 (“I’ve had all the apples . . .”)

15 (“considering mutability and muck . . .”)

16 (“nature that roots under us . . .”)

17 (“we live again in the bellies . . .”)

18 (“I go to nature not because . . .”)

19 (“I wouldn’t give up a hair . . .”)

20 (“when the hand falls apart . . .”)

21 (“heaven can be as purified . . .”)

22 (“once you’ve caught the notion . . .”)

23 (“slice thirty degrees off the summer . . .”)

24 (“last year we got this strawberry . . .”)

25 (“the rat was a mole . . .”)

26 (“there is something about . . .”)

27 (“I like, as I have said before . . .”)

28 (“it doesn’t matter to me if issues . . .”)

29 (“I wake from a nap . . .”)

30 (“words cast up . . .”)

31 (“I was this . . .”)

32 (“today Jerry, Fran, Phyllis and I went . . .”)

33 (“I’m split but not . . .”)

34 (“don’t think we don’t . . .”)

35 (“wherever mortality sets up a net . . .”)

36 (“straitened narrow, river-wound . . .”)

37 (“everyone watches the world end once . . .”)

38 (“I don’t care if I don’t tell the truth . . .”)

39 (“in the small walks & chasms . . .”)

40 (“the honeysucklebushes already weighty . . .”)

41 (“we were talking about our MFA program . . .”)

42 (“minutiae is a fussy word . . .”)

43 (“the high farm beseeches my mind . . .”)

44 (“sweeps of space haunt the slopes . . .”)

45 (“the thought that . . .”)

46 (“culture, hardened . . .”)

47 (“peeling the bark off a crabapple . . .”)

48 (“at dusk rabbits settle . . .”)

49 (“little showers yesterday evening . . .”)

50 (“a light catches somewhere . . .”)

51 (�
��I like nature poetry . . .”)

2: Tombstones

1 (“the chisel, chipping . . .”)

2 (“it breaks the heart . . .”)

3 (“the ground flat . . .”)

4 (“set on the line . . .”)

5 (“the spirit, though . . .”)

6 (“but why put a stone there . . .”)

7 (“rivulets of scattering . . .”)

8 (“dust’s shape in air . . .”)

9 (“the stone-name signifies . . .”)

10 (“as if the name . . .”)

11 (“the grooves fill with moss . . .”)

12 (“a mockingbird sings . . .”)

13 (“the wind roars, sweeps, whirls . . .”)

14 (“a stone sinks in soil . . .”)

15 (“when gliding perhaps under a glacier . . .”)

16 (“stones, names in them . . .”)

17 (“what does it matter . . .”)

18 (“stones, as if forms of intelligence . . .”)

19 (“the things of earth are not objects . . .”)

20 (“the stone makes . . .”)

21 (“not coarse, hard . . .”)

22 (“if love is fine . . .”)

23 (“the light in an eye . . .”)

24 (“the universe is itself . . .”)

25 (“nothing, though, not stone . . .”)

26 (“if the tombstones . . .”)

27 (“a flock . . .”)

28 (“this boundary stone plunked down . . .”)

29 (“the letters . . .”)

3: Motions’ Holdings

Questionable Procedures

Frost’s Foretellings

20 January

Early Indications

Loft

Chiseled Clouds

Scaling Desire

Tertiaries

Upper Limits

Laboratory Materials

A Tendency to Ascendancy

Information Density

Stone Keep

Autonomy

Backcasting

Checking Out the Resources

Dominion (“Glittery river, I said . . .”)

Hairy Belly

Entranceways

Dominant Margins

Power Plays

Target

Postulation

Subsidiary Roles

Working Out

Remembering Old Caves

Becoming Become Of

Holding Sway

The Dwelling

The Hubbub

Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Red Shift

Saving Spending

Long Sorrowing

Eidos

White Passages

A Way Away

Pots and Pans

Aquarium Watch

Earliest Recollection

Liquidities

Surgeons

Motion’s Holdings

Burnout in the Overshoot

Telling Moves

Coming Round

Recoveries

Trivial Means

Tracing Out

Some Any

Memory

Sight Seed

Negative Symbiosis

Citified

PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS FROM THE REALLY SHORT POEMS OF A. R. AMMONS (1990)

Weathering

Hype

Over and Done With

Cousins

Equilibrations

Second Party

Digging Wonder

Tryst

Success Story

Glacials

Stoning Stone

Substantial Planes

Settlement

Deaf Zone

Scarecrow

Filling in the Dots

Figuring Belief

Crinkling Trails

Cracking a Few Hundred Million Years

Soul’s Seas

Clarifications

Celestial Dealings

Waking

Glass Specialty

Pedagogy Agog

Touching

Planet Actions

Worky Shallows

Still Frame

This

Spring Tornado

Bottommost

Time Spans

Crow Ride

Roundel

Calling

That Day

Poetry to the Rescue

Ah

Pebble’s Story

Whitelash of Air Rapids

Late November

Leaning Up

Twangs & Little Twists

Night Post

Late Look

Grove’s Way

Nearing Equinox

Circling Splinters

Squall Ball

Teleology

Negligence These Days

Theory Center

Around Here

Salute

Grisly Grit

Close Relations

Spring Clearing

Resurrections

Course Work

Quit That

Swoggled

Likely Story

Market Adviser

Stills

Bulletin

The Upshot

Milepost

Coming Right Up

Their Sex Life

Kingpin

Kith

Layabout

Resolve

Cold Rheum

Reorganization

Preexistence

Permanence

Orchard

Lost and Found

Capture

GARBAGE (1993)

1 (“Creepy little creepers . . .”)

2 (“garbage has to be the poem of our time . . .”)

3 (“toxic waste, poison air, beach goo . . .”)

4 (“scientists plunge into matter . . .”)

5 (“dew shatters into rivulets . . .”)

6 (“a pain in the knee or hipjoint . . .”)

7 (“is it all going to be like this . . .”)

8 (“sometimes old people snap back . . .”)

9 (“you don’t want to succeed too early . . .”)

10 (“in your end is my beginning, I repeat . . .”)

11 (“an early June morning in early June . . .”)

12 (“a waste of words . . .”)

13 (“the real trouble with a blabbermouth . . .”)

14 (“take, in leavetaking, the leavings . . .”)

15 (“what are we to think of the waste, though . . .”)

16 (“a bird dabbed me, a virgin soil . . .”)

17 (“the heap of knickknacks . . .”)

18 (“should I go on, fearful of the phobias . . .”)

BRINK ROAD (1996)

A Sense of Now

Picking Up Equations

Enameling

Up-Country

Sparklings

Cool Intimacies

Fascicle

Loving People

Standing Light Up

Establishment

Broad Brush

First Cold

Regards Regardless

The Time Rate of Change

Greeting Verses

Mind Stone

Downing Lines

Whitewater

Erminois

Construing Deconstruction

Elite Street

Good Morning, This Morning

Walking Song

Sentiment

Anxiety’s Prosody

The Land of the Knobble-Jobble Tree

Capabilities

Minutial Impress

Showups

Modes Against Too Much

Sky Rides

Heights Known

Conservationist

A Little Thing Like That

Getting About

December Starlings

Strings

Winding Up

Middling Seasons

Looking Way Off

Obsession

Anger Tangle

The Deep Slow

Saying Saying Away

Line Drawings

Prey

Very High Condition

The Category of Last Resort

The Clenched-Jaw School

Ceppagna

Pit Lines

Silvering Shadow

Abscission

Microinscriptions

Readings by Ways

Abandon

Local Antiquities

Changing Stations

Collapsed Structures

Flat Rock

Flurries

The Deep End

Reasoning Power

Tenacities

Blues in the Valley

Packaging

Serpent Country

Early Stones

Connecting Misses

Evasive Actions

Tenure’s Pleasures

Pressing On

The Story

Period

The Way of One’s Desire

Hurricane

The Crystal Tree

A Pretty Looking Sight

Focus

God Is the Sense the World Makes Without God

Painlessness, to Pain, Is Paradise

Flaws in Dominance

How Things Go Wrong

Eternity’s Taciturnity

Killing Stuff Off

Boon

Downstream

Ruin’s the Palace of Commencement

Holding Heights

Walking About in the Evening

Museums

Second-Rate Perfection

The Planet That Was There

Terebene Scene

Rain Gauges

Safe

Reading Ta’o Chien

Geezerly

An Improvisation for Soot and Suet

An Improvisation for the Killers of Meat

Reckless Endangerment

Swimming Night

Ontology Precedes Teleology

Disclaimer

Spike-Tooth Harrows

Picking Where Out of When

Odysseus for Eva Maria Rodtwitt

High Desiring

The Damned

What Was That Again

Prisons There and Not

Moving Figures

All’s All

Hard and Fast

So Long, Descartes

Marginals

Day Ghosts

Next to Nothing

For My Beloved Son

Outlines of Absence

Same Old Story

Beautiful Woman

Cognoscenti

Continuity

Gung Ho

Appendix

Stand-In

Magic

Rarities

Old Geezer

Financial Services

Rolling Reality

Thresher

Putting on Airs

Superstars

Standing on the Corner Watching All the Wheels Go By

Home Place

Postmodernist Views

Expropriations

Nitty Gritty

Enfield Falls

The Many Ways Not Supreme

Sojourning

Death and Silhouettes

Fall’s End

A Part for the Whole

Lofty Calling

Weightlessness

Rosy Transients

The Incomplete Life

Chosen Roads

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