by A. R. Ammons
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:
(II, 693)
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: . . .
(II, 701)
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:
(II, 694)
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 2
SIX-PIECE SUITE (1978)
I
led by words into a multiplicity of contact, word to thing,
system to system, a reading out by one reading out about
the same way with another, one loses any kind of deep
reliance on one or the other, content to let words or things
5come or go and to find a way within a way, whichever: if
it snows tomorrow, one will do what one can still to get
around, and if it turns to slush, slogging boots will be a
measure worth taking: those concisions that run burning
like gullies through landscapes fall out from something
10already too concentrated sharp: and the wide floods that
sit metal still and polish everything (brush) off the ground:
when one is certain the word can reach, one seldom reaches
II
poetry though a big sport helps one bear what love
bears: what love enjoys enjoying nearly uses up or
15needs no word to help hold attention to it or siphon it off:
but the abused child, three and a half years old, dug up to
check evidence, is reburied in starved wood, the real ceremony
over, mere officials, priest, police, perhaps the held
father, standing by for the remarriage of astonished innocence
20with the ground: what love bears in silence it needs a word
for occasionally and the sense that if everything opens up
wide enough even grief can be swallowed: the wind, especially
as night closes in, is a good figure for this, it waves
everything, pond, leaf, curtain to constitute a waving away
III
25so many things sound contradictory because they have to
come round: such as, mind is completest where
mindless: in the lower reaches mind is firm with concretion
but without transmission, motion: but the higher one goes
toward the higher reaches, the more mind lets go or, rather,
30dissolves, flows definitions like fencerows or hedgerows
melting as if snowed under, mind fully present only when
the last shred of evidence, stricken, has found the concealment
of joining: at this height, nothing separable, nothing changes:
but from such severity, as if to tragic relief, one drops to jostle
35back, the enmeshing hardening, to our place, leaves to rake,
apples to sort, mind against change where change is all
IV
hope until there is no hope is hardly hope but being
cheerful about chances yet to take, evidences to turn
here and there with: it is hard to hope when there is
40no hope: I knew an old woman who knew when that time
had come and that’s what she told me, it’s hard to hope
eternal sounded to her like an intolerable foolishness, a
gaiety unhonoring honor: I used to know a lot of
45old people and they’ve all died, except for the two youngest
aunts, now in their eighties: when snow gets in your
hair, you just can’t wash summer back in: hope, as we use
it, means till you’re better, better be cheerful than mopey
V
the years pile up substanceless, busted dreams, sharp deductions,
50a large sense of a lost missing, clusters of turns taken
from familiar to unfamiliar, the popping new present, never
a return to the old known vanished, such a pile up of years
underfoot, between oneself and the ground, one thinks if anyone dies
it won’t be me, my real self, child brilliant in a
55midst, too far lost behind to be buried or recovered: it is
a nice thing, as if one may dream death and not die,
only adding a certain increase in height of another event
that left behind rooms, domes of perception, empty by recollection
of reality, lost but kept: blanketed with this spent fluff,
60reality becomes air-pliable, blows up and away, not death
VI
how snow can cling, interpenetrant with the needles, to
those long-shoal spruce boughs: a forty mile wind, gusty,
only worries the heavy woggles around: crows follow
garbage routes, cluttering the air where dog, wind, or
65snowplow has overturned and scattered: a weak high between
storm watches clears the morning, though, and I say, I
have to go upstairs and watch the sun shine on the jade
plant, and I do, it is so beautiful and rare: earlier
this morning, I went to the art museum but all there was
70dead, so I went to the art school but everything hung up
looked hanged, and I said, everything, the ridge so bright, is
beautiful except man’s work, why is that, why is that, for whom
A COAST OF TREES (1981)
for Phyllis
Coast of Trees
The reality is, though susceptible
to versions, without denomination:
when the fences foregather
the reality they shut in is cast out:
5if the name nearest the name
names least or names
only a verge before the void takes naming in,
how are we to find holiness,
our engines of declaration put aside,
10helplessness our first offer and sacrifice,
except that having given up all mechanisms of
approach, having accepted a shambles of
non-enterprise, we know a unity
approach divided, a composure past
15sight: then, with nothing, we turn
to the cleared particular, not more
nor less than itself, and we realize
that whatever it is it is in the Way and
the Way in it, as in us, emptied full.
1974 (1977)
Swells
The very longest swell in the ocean, I suspect,
carries the deepest memory, the information of actions
summarized (surface peaks and dibbles and local sharp
slopes of windstorms) with a summary of the summaries
5and under other summaries a deeper summary: well, maybe
deeper, longer for length here is the same as deep
_________
time: so that the longest swell swells least; that
is, its effects in immediate events are least perceptible,
a pitch to white water rising say a millimeter more
10because of an old invisible presence: and on the ocean
floor an average so vast occurs it moves in a noticeability
of a thousand years, every blip, though, of surface and
intermediacy moderated into account: I like to go
to old places where the effect dwells, summits or seas
15so hard to summon into mind, even with the natural
ones hard to climb or weigh: I go there in my mind
(which is, after all, where these things negotiably are)
and tune in to the wave nearly beyond rise or fall in its
staying and hum the constant, universal assimilation: the
20information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty
and communicating hardly any action: go there and
rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat
shot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts and
sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad.
(1975)
Continuing
Considering the show, some prize-winning
leaves broad and firm, a good year,
I checked the ground
for the accumulation of
5fifty seasons: last year was
prominent to notice, whole leaves
curled, some still with color:
and, underneath, the year
before, though paler, had structure,
10partial, airier than linen:
but under that,
sand or rocksoil already mixed
with the meal or grist:
is this, I said to the mountain,
15what becomes of things:
well, the mountain said, one
mourns the dead but who
can mourn those the dead mourned;
back a way
20they sift in a tearless
place: but, I said,
it’s so quick, don’t you think,
quick: most time, the mountain said, lies
in the thinnest layer: who
25could bear to hear of it:
I scooped up the sand which flowed
away, all but a cone in the palm:
the mountain said, it
will do for another year.
1975 (1977)
In Memoriam Mae Noblitt
This is just a place:
we go around, distanced,
yearly in a star’s
atmosphere, turning
5daily into and out of
direct light and
slanting through the
quadrant seasons: deep
space begins at our
10heels, nearly rousing
us loose: we look up
or out so high, sight’s
_________
silk almost draws us away:
this is just a place:
15currents worry themselves
coiled and free in airs
and oceans: water picks
up mineral shadow and
plasm into billions of
20designs, frames: trees,
grains, bacteria: but
is love a reality we
made here ourselves—
and grief—did we design
25that—or do these,
like currents, whine
in and out among us merely
as we arrive and go:
this is just a place:
30the reality we agree with,
that agrees with us,
outbounding this, arrives
to touch, joining with
us from far away:
35our home which defines
us is elsewhere but not
so far away we have
forgotten it:
this is just a place.
1979 (1979)
Weather-Bound
A strong southwester
brings up the south
and our moths having been
already under snow
5and freezing air
waken and search for
prominences, pebbles, straw tips,
> to flutter away from:
but they want to go where
10the wind is coming from:
they lift off and the
wind blusters them high:
they flutter hard
but glance away to the
15right or left or
fly backward forward:
maybe they really want
to go north
but must do so into the wind
20or tumble wind-fraught
against tearing shrubs:
overnight a shower barely wetting
settles them out of the air again
and seals their wings
25to macadam and concrete:
surface tension sets in
like gangrene
and their dust softens, mud:
this takes fluttering
30and destination out of them:
they sit
like aircraft, headed south,
their minds as if not
on the controls or removed.
1976 (1979)
Where
Where are the shifts
of the tide kept, so many:
(where are they put away) and
the wind’s changes:
5when glaciers breaking
down gaps
crawl through, where
