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

affairs: I think I will leave out China[.]

  (1, 638–39)

  Pursuing such reflections, he begins in 1976 to compose another winter diary, The Snow Poems, where his flirtation with the page creates the most unconventional poem he ever wrote, the one that charmed me into being a lifelong reader of his poetry.

  Ammons wrote memorable long poems, including the single-sentence Sphere (1974) and the tragic Glare (1997). They continued his pursuit of improvisation—a form of art known to every pianist, long accepted in music. About the eighty-page Garbage, he wrote:

  I’ve gone over and over my shorter poems to try to get them right, but alternating with work on short poems, I have since the sixties also tried to get some kind of rightness into improvisations. The arrogance implied by getting something right the first time is incredible, but no matter how much an ice-skater practices, when she hits the ice it’s all a one-time event: there are falls, of course, but when it’s right, it seems to have been right itself.3

  Ammons is speaking here of the constant will-to-form in the maker’s mind, a will that seems to come from within the object itself rather than from “outside.” Of course, as the will to form changes, the creative results change with it. The elated reader always wants more of the same, while the transforming writer always writes under a new imperative. The extraordinary geography of Ammons’s inner world alters as the reader reads the Complete Poems: there are hills and declivities, creeks and snowstorms, dark weathers and brilliant ones, high altitudes and swamps. Although the actual geography of the world always came first, Ammons’s symbolic world grew from the natural one. Whether the original impulse of the poet was a technical one—“a vague energy”—or an intellectual one—“an intense consideration”—the impulse moved always toward a fusion of nature and sensibility:

  Nature is not verbal. It is there. It comes first. I have found, though, that at times when I have felt charged with a vague energy or when I have moved into an intense consideration of what it means to be here, I sometimes by accident “see” a structure or relationship in nature that clarifies the energy, releases it. Things are visible ideas.4

  Although Ammons, with his complex eye, has become one of America’s most compelling nature poets, one must not forget that a geometrical “seeing” creates his templates. In a strange essay, “Figuring,”5 published only posthumously in 2004 but probably written, according to Roger Gilbert, in the late sixties, Ammons startles the reader by admitting to a prior geometrical element in everything he writes: “Since I ‘see’ what to say and then attempt to translate the seen into the said, and since any translation distorts, I thought I might try by figuring here to get close to the given mental images themselves” (F, 535). “Mental images” follow, of which the first is a straight line going in a single direction indicated by its final arrowpoint: Ammons comments,

  This is flow, movement, motion. . . . The flow here is unidirectional, one-dimensional, unbounded: it is uncontested, unobstructed flow. It is motion “homogeneous,” meaningless. It is what the poetic line (except for special effect) should never be—loose, fluent, uninformed, unstructured. (F, 535)

  (This linear forward motion is of course the basic motion of prose, “meaningless” in the realm of lyric.) After the repudiated figure of the advancing straight line, Ammons offers a succession of fascinating geometrical alternatives, all directed against conclusiveness: “The poem, if it is to stop, must carry heterogeneity all the way to contradiction” (F, 538). The final geometrical shape, too complex to reproduce here, is a two-layered sphere with five named radii, providing Ammons with his ultimate belief and reassurance:

  If the earth, the mind, and the poem share a common configuration and common processes within that configuration, then it ought to be possible for us to feel at home here. (F, 543)

  “Figuring” will eventually modify critical discussions that fasten chiefly on the immediately appealing thematic dimensions of Ammons’s poems—emotional, philosophical, and epistemological. The dilatory “progress” of the long poems can seem exasperating until one recalls the active geometry of utterance subtending the poet’s utterances; one knows that he wishes, at all costs, to avoid complacency, conclusiveness, and conclusion. Weather, as he realized in The Snow Poems, is his perfect aesthetic counterpart: it cannot be arrested, never repeats itself exactly, and remains unpredictable in its changes. But underneath the geometry, underneath the metaphorical correspondences, lie the strata of personal suffering that the poet must understand and transform. Poetry, Ammons wrote in 1989, moves “the feelings of marginality, of frustration, of envy, hatred, anger into verbal representations that are formal, structuring, sharable, revealing, releasing, social, artful. . . . Poetry dances in neglect, waste, terror, hopelessness—wherever it is hard to come by.”6 Every reader of Ammons will recognize the dance of geometry among feelings.

  I had thought in the past that by reading all of Ammons, from epigrammatic “Briefings” through shapely lyrics through “epic” meditations (embodying “minor forms within larger motions”)7— I had seen all his qualities. Then, in 2005, after Ammons’s death, there appeared Bosh and Flapdoodle—composed in the late nineties but not published by Ammons, who by retaining his last book kept his poetry alive, cryopreserved, so that he would not be dead as a poet while still living in the flesh. That last volume so disconcerted me that I could not for some time find a way to write about it. Its subject (not a new one) is death, faced now not conceptually but directly and epigrammatically and dismissively: “Fall fell: so that’s it for the leaf poetry” (2, 713). Bosh and Flapdoodle is the most transparent of Ammons’s books: although airy on the page because printed in couplets, it is generated by a bizarre poetics, one where pathos is bathos and vice versa, all often confined to an arrantly simple diction. Why? I asked when I read it. I can answer only by giving a wonderfully original sample of bathos, pathos, humiliation, and primer-language, as we see old age (with heart trouble and diabetes) recalling an interview with a cheery hospital nutritionist. With barefaced inclusiveness Ammons ostentatiously names the poem “America”: everyone in America is dieting and backsliding, fasting and slipping. I can’t refrain from quoting from the superb comedy of the rebellious hungry self’s dialogue with itself:

  America

  Eat anything: but hardly any: calories are

  calories: olive oil, chocolate, nuts, raisins

  —but don’t be deceived about carbohydrates

  and fruits: eat enough and they will make you

  as slick as butter (or really excellent cheese,

  say, parmesan, how delightful): but you may

  eat as much of nothing as you please, believe

  me: iceberg lettuce, celery stalks, sugarless

  bran (watch carrots, they quickly turn to

  sugar): you cannot get away with anything:

  eat it and it is in you: so don’t eat it: &

  don’t think you can eat it and wear it off

  running or climbing: refuse the peanut butter

  and sunflower butter and you can sit on your

  butt all day and lose weight: down a few

  ounces of heavyweight ice cream and

  sweat your balls (if pertaining) off for hrs

  to no, I say, no avail: so, eat lots of

  nothing but little of anything: an occasional

  piece of chocolate-chocolate cake will be all

  right, why worry:

  (2, 688–89)

  The preposterousness of dieting when one is dying (or nearly so) suits Ammons’s gift for social satire. But by including himself with the rest of us, he writes a humane satire, not a scornful one.

  Ammons’s final aesthetic aim, as he says outright in Bosh and Flapdoodle, is to say the most with the fewest words: this sparse poetry, which he wryly named “prosetry,” can express the hellish as well as the comic. The rage and frustration that was so constitutive of Ammons’s earlier years never vanished; it was in fact the fire from which the poems erupted
, poems that warmed readers while consuming the author:

  did I take my bristled nest of humiliations

  to heart: what kind of dunce keeps a fire

  going like this: what do people mean coming

  to hell to warm themselves: well, it is

  warm: . . .

  (2, 696–97)

  Yes, it is warm, but it has innumerable other qualities as well: sympathy, anger, love, irritability, patriotism, sadness, humor, risk—and most of all, original perceptions, rhythms, and cadences. Ammons’s poems, first to last, are a record of American life, speech, and imagination in the twentieth century, a master inventory of the vicissitudes of human life, worked by genius into memorable shapes. In one of the most touching poems in Bosh and Flapdoodle, the inescapable paradigm for Ammons’s own style of writing—a colloquial commentary on unceasing change—becomes the Ammonses’ address book. Everyone, it seems, lives life pell-mell, with addresses that change as friends move away or die:

  The people of my time are passing away: . . .

  it was once weddings that came so thick and

  fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

  now, it’s this that and the other and somebody

  else gone or on the brink: . . .

  . . . our

  address books for so long a slow scramble now

  are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

  index cards for Christmases, birthdays,

  Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

  (2, 689–90)

  Ammons’s style—one of wind and dynamics, of nature’s ebb and flow, as rapid and rapacious as time itself; a style of elemental views as it journeys over hills of drama and through valleys of lull; a style as stormy and as beatific as weather, expressed in constant humorous intimacy in everyday language—this inconclusive but powerful accreting of words in a singing current, shaped by a changing geometry of structure and producing torrents of unexpected words, is Ammons’s paradigm of the motion that is life. A voice of the rural South, modified by scientific modernity, observant and sardonic, he sounds like nobody else, his idiosyncrasy inimitable.

  1 An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A. R. Ammons, 1951–1974, edited by Kevin McGuirk (Victoria, BC, Canada: ELS Editions, 2013). Henceforth parenthetically referred to as Image.

  2 From “The Paris Review Interview,” conducted by David Lehman, in Ammons, A. R., Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, edited by Zofia Burr (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 95.

  3 “On Garbage,” Set in Motion, 125.

  4 “On ‘The Damned,’” Set in Motion, 124.

  5 “Figuring,” in “This is Just a Place: An Issue Devoted to the Life and Work of A. R. Ammons,” Epoch 52.3 (2004), 535–44. Henceforth parenthetically identified as F. Roger Gilbert, in an email to me, says of it: “It was written in an undated notebook, actually a ‘travel sketch diary.’ . . . Based on the content alone, I would guess it was written in the late 60s or early 70s, perhaps around the time of ‘Essay on Poetics.’”

  6 “Making Change,” Set in Motion, 118.

  7 “On ‘Motion Which Disestablishes Organizes Everything,’” Set in Motion, 116.

  THE COMPLETE POEMS OF

  A. R. AMMONS

  VOLUME 1

  Finishing Up

  I wonder if I know enough to know what it’s really like

  to have been here: have I seen sights enough to give

  seeing over: the clouds, I’ve waited with white

  October clouds like these this afternoon often before and

  5taken them in, but white clouds shade other white

  ones gray, had I noticed that: and though I’ve

  followed the leaves of many falls, have I spent time with

  the wire vines left when frost’s red dyes strip the leaves

  away: is more missing than was never enough: I’m sure

  10many of love’s kinds absolve and heal, but were they passing

  rapids or welling stirs: I suppose I haven’t done and seen

  enough yet to go, and, anyway, it may be way on on the way

  before one picks up the track of the sufficient, the

  world-round reach, spirit deep, easing and all, not just mind

  15answering itself but mind and things apprehended at once

  as one, all giving all way, not a scrap of question holding back.

  1985

  OMMATEUM WITH DOXOLOGY (1955)

  To Josephine Miles

  So I Said I Am Ezra

  So I said I am Ezra

  and the wind whipped my throat

  gaming for the sounds of my voice

  I listened to the wind

  5go over my head and up into the night

  Turning to the sea I said

  I am Ezra

  but there were no echoes from the waves

  The words were swallowed up

  10in the voice of the surf

  or leaping over the swells

  lost themselves oceanward

  Over the bleached and broken fields

  I moved my feet and turning from the wind

  15that ripped sheets of sand

  from the beach and threw them

  like seamists across the dunes

  swayed as if the wind were taking me away

  and said

  20I am Ezra

  As a word too much repeated

  falls out of being

  so I Ezra went out into the night

  like a drift of sand

  25and splashed among the windy oats

  that clutch the dunes

  of unremembered seas

  1951

  The Sap Is Gone Out of the Trees

  The sap is gone out of the trees

  in the land of my birth

  and the branches droop

  The rye is rusty in the fields

  5and the oatgrains are light in the wind

  The combine sucks at the fields

  and coughs out dry mottled straw

  The bags of grain are chaffy and light

  The oatfields said Oh

  10and Oh said the wheatfields as the dusting

  combine passed over

  and long after the dust was gone

  Oh they said

  and looked around at the stubble and straw

  15The sap is gone out of the hollow straws

  and the marrow out of my bones

  They are

  brittle and dry

  and painful in this land

  20The wind whipped at my carcass saying

  How shall I

  coming from these fields

  water the fields of earth

  and I said Oh

  25and fell down in the dust

  1951

  In Strasbourg in 1349

  In Strasbourg in 1349

  in the summer and in the whole year

  there went a plague through the earth

  Death walked on both sides of the Sea

  5tasting Christian and Saracen flesh

  and took another turn about the Sea

  In a black gown and scarlet cape she went

  skipping across the Sea

  freeing ships to rear and fly in the wind

  10with their cargoes of dead

  Vultures whipped amorous wings

  in the shadow of death

  and death was happy with them and flew swiftly

  whirling a lyrical dance on hidden feet

  15Dogs ate their masters’ empty hands

  and death going wild with joy

  hurried about the Sea

  and up the rivers to the mountains

  The dying said

  20Damn us

  the Jews have poisoned the wells

  and death throwing her head about lifted

  the skirts of her gown

  and danced wildly

  25The rich Jews are burning on loose platforms

  in 134
9

  and death jumps into the fire

  setting the flames wild with her dancing

  So I left and walked up into the air

  30and sat down in a cool draft

  my face hot from watching the fire

  When morning came

  I looked down at the ashes

  and rose and walked out of the world

  1951

  I Broke a Sheaf of Light

  I broke a sheaf of light

  from a sunbeam

  that was slipping through thunderheads

  drawing a last vintage from the hills

  5O golden sheaf I said

  and throwing it on my shoulder

  brought it home to the corner

  O very pretty light I said

  and went out to my chores

  10The cow lowed from the pasture and I answered

  yes I am late

  already the evening star

  The pigs heard me coming and squealed

  From the stables a neigh reminded me

  15yes I am late having forgot

  I have been out to the sunbeam

  and broken a sheaf of gold

  Returning to my corner

  I sat by the fire with the sheaf of light

  20that shone through the night

  and was hardly gone when morning came

  1951

  Some Months Ago

  Some months ago I went out early