by A. R. Ammons
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
