The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
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I wish I could put into words the coming-round I have experienced (intellectually) the last few years. I once despised feeling as worthless, evanescent, of no “eternal significance.” I thought only of the “permanent” outside, the revolving galaxies, the endless space, and man on his tiny speck seemed meaningless. Can I now make the shift to humanity? Can I feel again? Can my blood stir at last? I now see feeling as incorporating the intellect—I once thought them separate. Intellect is the slow analytic way—the unexperienced way to action: feeling is the immediate synthesis of all experience, intellect as well as emotion. (Image, 165)
“Can I now make the shift to humanity?” the poet asks himself. A decade later, in a 1971 letter to Harold Bloom, he put his creed somewhat differently. When he gave up the neo-Platonic philosophical One—a “saving absolute”—in favor of the Many—the vicissitudes of human life—existence took on luster, presence, significance:
I ran my motor fast much of my life seeking the saving absolute. There is no such item to be found. I had known these thoughts for a long time, and they meant very little, until I experienced them. I remember the hour I experienced them. Nothing changed, and yet everything changed. Grief, fear, love, life, death, everything goes on just as before, but now everything seems lifted, just a bit, into its own being. (Image, 375)
As we pursue Ammons’s poetry from its early scientific phase to its most explicitly human phase in Bosh and Flapdoodle, we cannot represent either end of the continuum as sovereign, nor could Ammons himself. The most solid proof of his vacillation between the One and the Many is his vacillation between short poems and long ones. He could publish a volume (Briefings) full of short poems; or he could publish a volume (Garbage) consisting of one book-length meditation. The worry he felt about the long poems—into which he deliberately inserted as much manyness as possible—arose from the doubt that he could carry off such a degree of arbitrariness and multiplicity and still call the result a poem. His fretfulness about the short poems arose from the contrary doubt that they could represent the grand inclusivity of thought and language to which he aspired. And—for Ammons was musical, played the piano, and had a fine singing voice—he worried about what sort of music the lines would convey. That restlessness drove his perennial reinvention of style.
Ammons’s first two books were uncertain ones. Ommateum (1955) indeed found a style, philosophical but colloquial, which allowed appealing dialogues with items in nature—the indispensable sun, the poetic moon:
I went out to the sun
where it burned over a desert willow
and getting under the shade of the willow
I said
It’s very hot in this country
The sun said nothing so I said
The moon has been talking about you
and he said
Well what is it this time
She says it’s her own light
He threw his flames out so far
they almost scorched the top of the willow
Well I said of course I don’t know
(I, 6–7)
Comic diffidence before supreme items of nature remained a part of Ammons’s psyche, as did the Emersonian truculence of the moon, here rebelliously (however incorrectly) declaring her light to be her own, not borrowed from the sun. Poetry—immemorially connected to the moon—existed side by side with solar nature, and claimed its own inspiration.
Ammons never forsook the delights of the colloquial; his last book, like his first, makes ordinary speech a fundamental principle of style. Nonetheless, he was—as he must have known—the first American poet to whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural. He had been saturated in it as an undergraduate at Wake Forest, and it had for him a moral intimation as well as an intellectual one: it spoke provable truth, and so became an object of alliance in his disaffection with Christianity. His second book, Expressions of Sea Level, contained some rather unintegrated science-speak:
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,
the gastric transformations, seed
dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge
(I, 56)
Yet in both Ommateum and Expressions of Sea Level, there were, besides scientific declarations, poems of tender pathos, among them “Nelly Myers,” commemorating a mentally disabled woman who lived with the Ammonses, and “Hardweed Path Going,” an achingly sorrowful poem commemorating the young Archie’s pet hog, Sparkle, slaughtered by his father. “She’s nothing but a hog, boy,” says the father, holding the axe, but to the boy she is a friend, her execution horrifying:
Bleed out, Sparkle, the moon-chilled bleaches
of your body hanging upside-down
hardening through the mind and night of the first freeze.
(I, 67)
It was in his third book, Corsons Inlet, that Ammons developed the two central tenets of his poetics: that life is motion, and that there can be no finality, no absolute vision. (In this, he resembles Wallace Stevens, one of whose poems is entitled “Life is Motion.”) Walking the Jersey shore, Ammons realizes that he is not satisfied with “narrow orders, limited tightness,” but hopes to describe the “widening scope” of perception, rejoicing in his new freedom:
enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
(I, 96)
Various structural experiments occur on the page, as the poet prolongs a single sentence into an entire poem (“Prodigal,” “The Misfit”) or, as in “Configurations,” turns to writing in columns down rather than in links across:
when
I
ambringing
singingthosehome
, twoagain
summerbirds
comes
back
(I, 111)
Such an arrangement provokes a reader’s question: Does this patterned sentence truly differ from its prose replication—“When I am singing, summer comes back bringing those two birds home again”—and if so, how and why? The erratic comma, the lowercase spelling, and the absence of end-punctuation speak of E. E. Cummings; the careful downward progress of the words resembles the tentative cat steps in Williams’s “Poem.” Such lines directly contest the Whitmanesque long lines to which Ammons was so attracted. And although both choices of line—short and long—offer freedom from ordinary lineation, still Ammons is not truly free. He has not yet learned that his poetics will not permit poems to end with conventional summings-up: he is still relying on such assertive conclusions as “I faced // piecemeal the sordid / reacceptance of my world” (I, 139). Such a conclusive termination is incompatible with the ever-anticipated “new walk” promised tomorrow. And although the poet celebrates the casual tone of the placid “new walk,” he has yet to accept, intellectually, that violence will perpetually break out as one of the indispensable and inevitable ingredients of his lyric world, confronting the pastoral of the seashore with a furious wind: “Song is a violence / of icicles and / windy trees: . . . violence / brocades // the rocks . . . a / violence to make / that can destroy” (I, 120). Acknowledging hostility in himself, and seeing an equivalent violence in nature, Ammons is preparing for the emotional explosions in his later poems.
In 1965, Ammons publishes the first of his winter diaries, Tape for the Turn of the Year. Convinced that a poem aspiring to true manyness must be cut off, in both breadth and length, at a perfectly arbitrary place, he shapes his journal-poem to the narrow breadth and unforeseeable length of an adding-machine tape fed into his typewriter, his truncated lines confined between the left and right edges of the tape. A portion of Ammons’s winter improvisation, at its most extreme, becomes a concrete poem:
*
* * *
* * * * *
* * *
*
clusters!
organizations!
* * * * *
* * * * *
* * * * *
shapes!
)/(/(/)/)/(/(/)/)/(
designs!
(I, 192)
Since Ammons saw forms visually, as shapes, we can take it that these instances represent, first, a single module (*) repeated in diamond shape (succeeded by an excited interpretation declaring such assembled forms “clusters!”); there follows a rectangular form composed of identical repetitions of the same module (preceded by a new triumphant announcement, “organizations!”). Then there arrives a more complicated and varying pattern of four ingredients—(concave parenthesis, convex parenthesis, virgule, and underline) upon which the poet bursts out in sheer pleasure, declaring them “designs!” (a word implying a mind behind such configurations, as the words “clusters” and “organizations,” which arise in nature, do not). We deduce from this visual example that this is the way Ammons views the accreting form of his poems: first an intelligible module in a recognizable shape; then a repetition of the same module in a new shape; then a more complex set of new modules, unintelligible at first glance but interpretable as a whimsical and intended design. Substituting for such abstract module-arrangements traditional poetic shapes (alliteration, anaphora, quatrain, paradox), we can see sentences embodying them as they construct themselves in Tape for the Turn of the Year.
Sitting down once again at the turn of the year in 1970–71, Ammons opens a new winter diary, Hibernaculum, with a Keatsian landscape (“I see a sleet-filled sky’s dry freeze”), and later, parodying Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” the hibernating poet (now in his mid-forties, married and with a son) narrates his “studies” of a comically comprehensive world always assembling itself into design:
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much have I studied, trashcanology, cheesespreadology,
laboratorydoorology, and become much enlightened and
dismayed: have, sad to some, come to care as much for
a fluted trashcan as a fluted Roman column: flutes are
flutes and the matter is a mere substance design takes
its shape in: take any subject, everything gathers up
around it:
(I, 623)
Although Hibernaculum exhibits Ammons’s preferred end-punctuation, the colon (representing the unbroken continuity of sentence-thoughts in a stream of consciousness), the poem still appears relatively conventional, with 112 stanzas, each containing nine broad lines laid out as three tercets, with the stanza breaks completely arbitrary. Without an artificial container—the unchanging nine-line tercet-stanzas of Hibernaculum—Ammons fears that shapelessness will overtake his poetic diaries. Toward the end of Hibernaculum, he mocks his own irrepressible inclusiveness that can’t decide what to leave out:
if there is to be
no principle of inclusion, then, at least, there ought
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to be a principle of exclusion, for to go with a maw at
the world as if to chew it up and spit
it out again as one’s own is to trifle with terrible
affairs: I think I will leave out China[.]
(I, 643)
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” (II, 717). 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: