The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

by A. R. Ammons

  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 libraries, 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 Poems.

  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.

  In his childhood house, the poet said, there were only three books: the family Bible and two others. And there were as well (who knows how) eleven pages of Robinson Crusoe, which, along with sermons and hymns, helped form his literary imagination. In the eighth grade, Ammons’s teacher, Ruth Baldwin, recognized his verbal gift and highly praised his first composition; he wrote to her in gratitude until her death. He began to read voraciously, and read copiously throughout his life in various fields—the sciences, anthropology, ancient history, and of course poetry. After high school, he worked in a shipyard in Wilmington; when the war began, he enlisted in the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army. (He did not see combat, but as his ship sailed into the harbor at Tokyo, a mine exploded near it.)

  His ship was the USS Gunason, a destroyer escort in the Pacific theater. Archie began to keep a journal, to amass vocabulary lists, and to study the materials available from the Navy for courses in speech and composition. (After being trained as a sonar man, he became a yeoman, was assigned to a clerical job, and had his first access to a typewriter, a machine later indispensable to some of his poetic effects.) During night watches, he wrote his first groups of poems, inept pieces in standard rhyme and meter, varying from the sentimental to the comic. More essential to him than these early attempts at verse was his awed realization of the dynamics of sea and land: these earthly phenomena replaced the biblical account of creation and separated Ammons forever from denominational Christianity:

  The whole world changed as a result of an interior illumination: the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of actions—runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves—motions and bodies. . . . I was de-denominated.2

  The multiple separate actions absorbed into ocean swells and affecting the bordering shore tutored the young sailor in the vexed relation between multiplicity and unity, an absorbing lifelong theme.

  After the war, the G.I. Bill enabled Ammons to enroll in Wake Forest University, taking premedical and English courses, and graduating with a BSc in General Sciences. After his graduation, he married his young Spanish teacher, Phyllis Plumbo; we know from his letters to her before their marriage the agony he felt in trying to arrange his adult life so as to support a family and still write. The young couple went to Cape Hatteras, where for a year Ammons taught and acted as principal in an elementary school. Finally deciding to risk the uncertainty of a poet’s life, he enrolled in an MA program (which he left unfinished when his father fell ill) at the University of California at Berkeley. There, for the first time, he received ongoing encouragement from the poet Josephine Miles, to whom he showed his work (although he silently chafed under the friction of their incompatible poetic tastes). After he left Berkeley, his wife’s father offered him a job as a salesman in his New Jersey scientific glassware business: in a very dignified letter Archie explained that he could not betray his own nature by taking a position that would threaten his resolve to write poetry. However, not long after, realizing that he and Phyllis could not live on his writing, he accepted the job, and for the next nine years, somewhat to his surprise, was by his own account a successful sales manager, rising to be Executive Vice-President. He seems not to have been beset in that role by the anxiety always attending his self-presentation as a poet.

  Even while holding the job, Ammons continued to compose poems and send them out to literary journals. The poems were almost uniformly rejected (except by the Beloit Poetry Journal and The Hudson Review), and he became so discouraged that in 1955, at the age of twenty-nine, he self-published with Dorrance (a vanity press in Philadelphia) a small book called Ommateum, the word for the compound eye of an insect. Motivated by a profound distrust of ideological prescriptiveness, whether religious or political, he explained his perspectivism in a letter to The Hudson Review:

  [In] the complex eye of the insect, each facet . . . perceives a single ray of light, the whole number of facets calling up the image of reality. Each of the poems is to be a facet, of course, and the whole collection to call up the stippled outlines of the image of truth, truth, from the human point of view, as a growing thing, filling out. (Image, 59)

  Ommateum did not sell (the royalty for the first year was, he told me, four four-cent stamps), and Ammons humbly decided that he needed further instruction in how to write. The Chicago poet John Logan was offering a correspondence course in poetic composition, and in 1956, from New Jersey, Ammons sent him Ommateum: in this lucky moment of his life as an author, he found an enthusiastic reader who understood his achievement. Logan wrote, “I have read your book several times and I find it completely beautiful” (Image, 103). Subsequently, through the
sponsorship of the poet Milton Kessler (met at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1961), Ammons’s second book, Expressions of Sea Level (1964), was published by the Ohio State University Press; on the basis of its success he was appointed to the faculty at Cornell University and moved to Ithaca, in upstate New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. After the move to Cornell, books came in a cascade: in 1965, both Corsons Inlet and Tape for the Turn of the Year, and in 1966, Northfield Poems (all published by Cornell). His publisher then became W. W. Norton, with Uplands in 1970, Briefings in 1971, and in 1972 the premature Collected Poems 1951–1971. Volumes subsequently came out from Norton at frequent intervals until Ammons’s death (and even after his death, in the case of Bosh and Flapdoodle). Although the poems won increasing recognition—a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, the National Book Award in 1973 for the Collected Poems, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and a second National Book Award in 1993 for Garbage—Ammons never again issued a Collected Poems. This edition of the poetry offers the first complete record of Ammons as a poet of singular originality and insight.

  In a 1960 journal entry, Ammons reported the crucial change in his idea of poetry, tracking his evolution from an overintellectual poet to one who had come to respect feeling. This passage marks the watershed in the poet’s poetry between an “objective,” abstract, scientific language of thought and a broader language in which feeling—the larger entity summoned by experience—incorporates the intellect: