The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1 Read online

  Sight Can Go Quickly, Aerial, Where

  These Days Most

  The Cardinal, Slanted Watershed

  One Desires the Cutting

  I Wonder if Pagan Is

  Rage Spells More of My Words Right

  On This Day Noteworthily Warm

  Some Nights I Go Out to Piss

  My Structure Is, Like the

  You Think of the Sun That It

  Snow

  It Snowed All Night Snow

  Drip Drip

  Some Fluffy, Long-Swaggly Catkins

  My Father, I Hollow for You

  I Knew

  I Cannot Re-wind the Brook

  Considering the Variety

  Variable Cloudiness Windy

  On Walks I Go a Long Way along

  One Trains Hard for

  Will Firinger Be Kissed: Will

  If Walking through Birdy Trees

  They Say It Snowed

  HIGHGATE ROAD (1977)

  Shuffling

  Enterprise

  For Louise and Tom Gossett

  Significances

  Release

  Modality

  Meanings

  Handle

  Speechlessness

  Gardening

  Blue Skies

  Camels

  Immediacy

  Recording

  Early Woods

  Enough

  North Street

  Reading

  One Thing and Another

  Self

  For Doyle Fosso

  Generation Gap

  Natives

  Catch

  Lofty

  Famine

  Imaginary Number

  Fortitude

  Ghosts

  Soaker

  NOTES

  INDEX OF TITLES

  INDEX OF FIRST LINES

  PREFACE TO VOLUME 1

  The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons aims to offer authoritative texts of all the poems for which Archie Randolph Ammons arranged publication, as well as a body of mostly late work that first saw print in the decade following his death. The edition’s two volumes thus present the 966 poems gathered in his books, including those from three limited-edition chapbooks most of his readers have likely never seen. This first volume begins with his debut collection, Ommateum with Doxology, published in 1955, and ends with the long poem The Snow Poems and the chapbook Highgate Road, both of which appeared in 1977. The second volume begins with the 1978 chapbook Six-Piece Suite and continues through the collection Bosh and Flapdoodle, which appeared posthumously in 2005; the second volume’s appendices add 127 previously published but hitherto uncollected poems.

  In this volume and its counterpart, the text of each poem has been established after careful consideration of the manuscripts and other prepublication materials in the two major archives of Ammons’s writing: the Archie Ammons Papers held by the Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, and the A. R. Ammons Papers in the Reid and Susan Overcash Literary Collection, a holding of the Special Collections Division of East Carolina University’s J. Y. Joyner Library. Also helpful were the A. R. Ammons Papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection, and the poet’s marked copies of his books, held by his widow, the late Phyllis Ammons, and their son, John Ammons.

  The archives include many interesting unpublished poems, drafts, and fragments that deserve to see print—and perhaps in the future there will be an edition dedicated to that unpublished manuscript material, clearly presenting it as such. In this edition, however, only two previously unpublished poems appear, both in this volume: “Finishing Up,” from 1985, serves as a proem to the entire edition, and “Bookish Bookseller,” an undated comment on Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974), is included with the notes to that long poem.

  As a rule, this edition defers to Ammons’s final judgment, insofar as that could be determined, with regard to each poem. Those revised and reprinted in his retrospective volumes (the three Selected Poems published during his lifetime, plus the Selected Longer Poems, the Collected Poems 1951–1971, and The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons) appear here as sequenced in the books where they originally appeared, but as revised for those retrospectives.

  For his Collected Poems 1951–1971, the three Selected Poems, and the Selected Longer Poems, Ammons ordered his work chronologically, by date of first composition; he seems to have thought that date the one most worth preserving, as he very rarely recorded dates of revision. Although he did not date some of his earliest poems, nearly all those from his second book, Expressions of Sea Level (1964), through Collected Poems 1951–1971 (1972) are dated precisely, with the month, the day, and the year. The poems of his later books, however, are dated more sporadically: exact dates are attached to many, but many others have no dates at all. For this edition, then, arrangement of all the poems by chronology of composition was impossible. Especially since most of the early books have been out of print for some time, the best approach seemed to be to present the poems as originally sequenced, book by book.

  No poem appears twice in this edition: in this volume, therefore, only the poems first gathered in Collected Poems 1951–1971 represent that book, and the same is true of The Really Short Poems (1990) in Volume II. Readers interested in considering the sequencing of all the poems in those two books will find that information in the notes to them. The sequences of poems in the three Selected Poems and the Selected Longer Poems, books that include no previously uncollected work, are given in Volume II at the notes’ conclusion.

  Each poem Ammons dated is here followed immediately by the year of composition, outside parentheses; the endnotes give the complete date, as specifically as the poet recorded it. Each poem that appeared in a periodical, anthology, or other venue before being collected in one of the poet’s books is followed here by the year of that first publication, inside parentheses; the notes give detailed information about those appearances. Ammons’s books sometimes credit with first publication little magazines not indexed by print or electronic resources; a few of those have remained elusive, and so for half a dozen poems the notes give only the title of the venue the poet credited.

  Lines are numbered here for convenient reference, but the poems sometimes complicate the issue of what should be included in that numbering. As one would expect, titles are generally not included in the line count, but the titles of poems within poems are counted. The one exception to this rule is The Snow Poems, which, despite the book’s plural title, Ammons regarded as one long poem: it is divided into titled sections, but in each case the title is nothing but a heading that exactly repeats the section’s first line, and so it is not included in the overall line count. In poems Ammons divided into numbered sections, the section-heading numbers are generally not counted—but if a poem within a poem is divided into numbered sections, those numbers are counted. The long poems sometimes use special characters to mark off passages; some seem no more than boundary markers, but some invite further consideration, and so all are included in the line numbering.

  In assembling, editing, and annotating the Complete Poems, I have depended on the resources of several institutions and the assistance and advice of many people. A Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP) Senior Fellowship from Mississippi State University’s College of Arts and Sciences funded research travel. English Department Head Rich Raymond approved a helpful semester-long sabbatical leave and also granted me a second semester’s release from teaching; for that and the many other ways he and his successor, Daniel Punday, have supported my work, I am deeply grateful. For their generous hospitality and fellowship during my research trips to New York and North Carolina, I thank Marlene Elling, Robert and Nancy Morgan, Margaret Bauer and Andrew Morehead, Maury and Dru York, and Stephen Craig and Joanne Promislow.

  The research for this edition would have been impossible without the holdings, database subscriptions, and services of at least five lib
raries, and so I offer thanks to the deans, librarians, and other library staff of the Cornell University Library, East Carolina University’s J. Y. Joyner Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library, and the Mississippi State University Libraries. For assistance with the A. R. Ammons Papers in the Overcash Literary Collection at ECU’s Joyner Library, thanks to Jonathan Dembo, Special Collections Curator; Ralph Scott, Curator for Printed Books and Maps; Dale Sauter, Manuscripts Curator; and Maury York, then Head of the Special Collections Division. For assistance with the Archie Ammons Papers at Cornell’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, thanks particularly to Elaine Engst, University Archivist and, for most of my time there, Director of the RMC; Katherine Reagan, Assistant Director for Collections and Ernest L. Stern Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts; Patrick J. Stevens, Curator of the Fiske Icelandic Collection; Laura Linke, Senior Reference Specialist; Ana Guimaraes, Head of Reference Services and Reproductions Coordinator; and Hilary Dorsch Wong, Reference Coordinator. For assistance with the A. R. Ammons Papers in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC–Chapel Hill, thanks go to Manuscripts Research and Instruction Librarian Matthew Turi; thanks also to Robert Anthony, Curator of UNC–Chapel Hill’s North Carolina Collection. For help locating previously published but uncollected poems not found in the aforementioned collections, thanks to Ellen Daugman, Humanities Librarian at Wake Forest; Amanda Clay Powers, then Coordinator of Research Services for MSU Libraries; and Ben Nagel, Library Associate with MSU Libraries.

  Four graduate research assistants also provided essential help with gathering materials, in addition to helping me study Ammons’s revisions, set up electronic texts, proofread, and identify dedicatees and others mentioned in the poems: Tyler Trimm, Christie Collins, Jessica Burton, and Carol Hogan-Downey. Further assistance came from Academic Research Services’ Mary L. White, who photographed for me some manuscript material held at Cornell, at a juncture when I could not travel to Ithaca.

  Others have offered valuable information and perspective, as well as important encouragement: Alex Albright, Ted Atkinson, John Burt, the late Kathryn Stripling Byer, Seth Dawson, Joe R. Farris, Jesse Graves, William Harmon, Holly Johnson, Nancy Jones, Matthew Little, Kelly A. Marsh, Michael McFee, Kevin McGuirk, Robert L. Phillips, the late Noel Polk, Shelby Stephenson, Malvern and Nancy West, and the many other friends, colleagues, and students who have in one way or another contributed to the work and its progress. I owe a great deal to Roger Gilbert, Ammons’s Cornell colleague and an essential scholar of his life and poetry, for his generous responses to my many queries.

  For help with research and preparation of the manuscript, as well as much good counsel, I am deeply indebted to my wife and colleague, the always clear-thinking and resourceful Laura West. Our daughter Lena has my gratitude too, for her interest in the work and for understanding when it required me to spend time away from home.

  Special thanks to Glen Hartley of Writers’ Representatives, for his good advice and good humor; to Emily and Ed Wilson, for their sustaining friendship and support; and to Helen Vendler, for her wisdom and cheerful collegiality. I am very grateful to Jill Bialosky at W. W. Norton for her interest in this manuscript, her patience through its long assembly, and her editorial guidance. Thanks also to Maria Rogers and Drew Weitman, for their efficiency and camaraderie; to Becky Homiski, for all her work as Norton’s project editor for both volumes; to Amy Robbins, for her eagle-eyed copyediting; and to everyone else who contributed to this edition’s production..

  Final thanks go to Phyllis and John Ammons for their support and their trust. I met Phyllis in 2001, at a memorial event for her husband at Wake Forest. In that first conversation, she volunteered that some had suggested to her that there should be a Complete Poems, but she was unsure how she felt about that possibility. Eight years later, we were meeting in Ithaca and discussing the contents of this edition. I wish she could have seen its publication—and offer it now to John, in her memory.

  RMW

  June 2017

  INTRODUCTION

  by Helen Vendler

  ARCHIE RANDOLPH AMMONS (1926–2001) became one of the great American poets of the twentieth century. He remained less widely known than his contemporaries because he avoided reading his poems in public (“I get stage fright,” he wrote), and even when he received the National Book Award in 1993, his intimidating anxiety forbade his appearing in person to accept the award: “As you’ll recall,” he wrote to me, asking me (as one of the judges) to read aloud his acceptance speech, “I show off but not up.” In spite of that intense and lifelong emotional fragility, he wrote tirelessly, ever seeking to reinvent lyric poetry for contemporary America, deliberately suppressing overt mention of the poetry of England while feeling free to allude to it often—almost invisibly—within his own work. In the perpetual standoff between tradition and the individual talent, Ammons chose to exhibit the individual talent more openly than poetic tradition. Eliot, with his allusive multilingual poems, chose to display an open recognition of the European and English tradition, establishing his individuality against it. Ammons, however, declared with every volume that he defined himself explicitly as an American poet writing of American places and American people.

  Yet Ammons’s America stretched from the magma underneath the American continent to the expanding universe above, ranging from the invisible subatomic particles of the laboratory to the constant proliferation of the innumerable galaxies. He extended Whitman’s America by incorporating into his own work not only the vocabulary and formulae of modern scientific discovery but also the imaginative revolution that has followed in the wake of modern science. He became a writer of Whitmanian amplitude and excess, but he adopted a geometrical idea of poetic structure rather than Whitman’s more geographic one. Each volume published in his lifetime revealed a new and surprising phase of Ammons’s creative experimentation. He had the great good luck of remaining a striking poet into old age.

  But when I read Ammons’s posthumously published last volume, with its self-mocking authorial title Bosh and Flapdoodle, I at first could not understand—in spite of the transparency of the language—what he was up to as a poet. That bewilderment had also been present in the late seventies when I first encountered Ammons in The Snow Poems: who was this poet of dazzling language who so insouciantly filled up his page any way he liked—with doodles, with word lists, with a careening progress from personal events to weather reports to sublime testimony? Ammons regarded The Snow Poems as a single long poem in spite of its plural components because he made the sequence cohere as a grim and comic calendrical chronicle of Ithaca’s near-interminable snow, from the first flakes in the fall to the last sleet in the spring. From The Snow Poems I read backward to Ammons’s first volume, Ommateum, and forward through every subsequent volume. I became more and more moved and delighted by Ammons’s inventiveness, humor, and daring as he expanded lyric possibility. Under his accounts, short and long, of personal and cosmic comedy, meditation, satire, elegy, and wonder, lay tragedy, first encountered at the age of four.

  I lamented, with others, the absence of any comprehensive volume after the 1972 Collected Poems. Now, at last, under Robert West’s expert and learned editorship, Ammons’s volumes have all been assembled in this Complete Poems, together with a gathering of poems published in journals during Ammons’s lifetime but never collected in volume form. Another smaller group of poems saw periodical publication after Ammons’s death. West includes only two unpublished poems: one, “Finishing Up,” opens the collection, and the other, “Bookish Bookseller,” appears in the notes for Sphere. There remains a large amount of writing not yet in print, including letters and journals (some of which are reprinted in the raw and revealing collection of youthful documents called An Image for Longing).1 But at last, in West’s helpfully annotated edition, we have a properly ample register of Ammons’s life-work as a poet. It will no doubt generate a new Selected Poe
ms.

  We will also have in the future a stirring comprehensive biography of Ammons now being written by Roger Gilbert of Cornell University, an expert on Ammons and the Ammons archive. It will shed light especially on Ammons’s obscure rural beginnings, including his unpublished early work. With gratitude for his permission, I have drawn on Professor Gilbert’s early chapters for some of the biographical information below.

  Ammons, of Scots-Irish descent, grew up poor, the child of William Ammons (a farmer known as Willie) and his wife Della. They lived near Whiteville, North Carolina, in a frame house with no electricity (they had kerosene lamps) and no indoor toilet, scraping by at first as subsistence farmers with a mule and a plow, raising pigs and chickens. (Later, they attempted commercial tobacco farming, but fell into debt and lost the fifty-acre farm when Ammons was seventeen.) Willie and Della’s first child, a daughter, died at five months, before Archie was born; and a few years later, when Archie was four, he suffered the decisive trauma of his life when his little brother Elbert died of a fever. The poet-to-be underwent a kind of breakdown, related in the unforgettable elegy “Easter Morning” and narrated more specifically in the volume Glare. It was Archie’s first encounter with irremediable tragedy and personal guilt: the little brother had eaten raw peanuts while Archie was nearby, and “a rupture” caused the baby’s death. (The family’s last child, a son, was stillborn; Archie and his sisters Mona and Vida survived.)

  When Archie’s dramatic childhood Christianity (experienced chiefly in the charismatic Pentecostal Fire-Baptized Holiness Church) failed him, he found in his late teens a system he could credit intellectually—the universal and inflexible laws of the universe in disciplines from the bacteriological to the astronomical. The conflict between those lofty (and inhuman) laws and the physical life of the body generated much of Ammons’s poetry. As he wrote in 1970 to the Yale critic Harold Bloom, his first academic admirer, “I think what I’ve tried to bring off is a further . . . secularization of the imagination. . . . [T]he spiritual has been with us and will remain with us as long as we have a mind. . . . I don’t feel the desertion Stevens felt [when the gods disappeared], but how could I, I never felt the comfort he imagines before the desertion” (Image, 362). What Ammons had chiefly felt during his early exposure to religion was terror—the dread of Hell and the fear of the Rapture.