by A. R. Ammons
“Forerunners”: First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1987).
“Slights of Sight”: Oct. 17, 1974. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1987).
“Rosalie”: Dec. 26, 1985. First appeared in The New Republic, Mar. 7, 1988.
“Generally Clear with Scattered Slippery Spots”: Jan. 18, 1982. First appeared in Panoply, vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter–Spring 1988).
“Saving Account”: First appeared in Panoply, vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter–Spring 1988).
“Spot Check” (“The least boring way . . .”): First appeared in Grand Street, vol. 7, no. 4 (Summer 1988).
“Commissary”: June 6, 1973. First appeared in Prairie Schooner, vol. 62, no. 2 (Summer 1988).
“Time after Time”: First appeared in The Ohio Review, no. 41 (1988). Formerly titled “Finding Baxter.” Ammons’s Cornell colleague Baxter Hathaway died in 1984. Lines 9–10: “Speroni / Speroni” is Ammons’s misspelling of the name of the sixteenth-century Italian writer Sperone Speroni.
“The Surprise of an Ending”: Dec. 19, 1983. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1988.
“Work Notes”: First appeared in Literary Vision (Nov. 1988), the catalogue to an exhibit of visual art by celebrated writers, at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City. Responding on October 21 of that year to Tilton’s solicitation of text to appear with Ammons’s ink drawings, Ammons wrote, “I have several pages of notes, of which these are the first six. I don’t know whether you will think them worth setting in type, but it’s about all I can do at the moment.”
“Castaways”: First appeared in Chattahoochee Review, vol. 9, no. 3 (Spring 1989).
“Settlements”: First appeared in I Have Walked: Stories and Poems about Poverty, edited by Ruth Moose. Greensboro: North Carolina Poverty Project, 1989.
“Winter Crop”: First appeared in Banyan, vol. 2 (1990).
“Countercurrency”: First appeared in Typographica 2 (Fall 1990).
“Time Being”: Dec. 24, 1977. First appeared in Partisan Review, vol. 58, no. 1 (Winter 1991).
“Religious Matters”: Feb. 19, 1972. First appeared in The Southern Review, vol. 27, no. 1 (Jan. 1991).
“An Improvisation for Angular Momentum”: First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1991.
“An Improvisation for the Pieties of Modernism”: First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1991.
“Harry Caplan”: First appeared in the Oct. 1991 issue of the Cornell Alumni News. The classical scholar Harry Caplan (1896–1980) earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Cornell before beginning a nearly fifty-year career there as a faculty member. When he retired in 1967 he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Languages and Literature.
“Oops”: July 25, 1979. First appeared in University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3 (Spring 1992). Asked to comment on the practice of allusion, Ammons responded with this poem, which appeared with this preface by him: “I have a little poem called ‘Oops’ . . . about alluding that tells my story. . . . What it says is that I’ve done what I could to wipe out most/some of the western traditions by failing to refer to them. So, there is little talk of places & people & events in my work. I try to start over with a clean slate—rocks, trees, hills, sky; the pagan. So I hate all alluding that alludes. My, my. . . .” A postscript follows the poem: “PS I don’t know your lingo but the title Oops for me means I mistakenly referred to western culture in saying I don’t refer to it.”
“Following Tragedy”: First appeared in Harvard Review, no. 2 (Fall 1992).
“Opinion’s Pinions”: May 26, 1985. First appeared in Harvard Review, no. 5 (Fall 1993).
“For Emily Wilson from a Newcomer”: Oct. 1974. First appeared in Chelsea, no. 55 (1993). Poet Emily Herring Wilson studied with Randall Jarrell at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, and later with Ammons at Wake Forest University during his 1974–75 appointment there as poet in residence. With Betty Leighton and Isabel Zuber she cofounded Jackpine Press, for which Ammons served as advisor. The author of numerous books, in 2007 she received the North Carolina Humanities Council’s Caldwell Award for the Humanities. See also the posthumously published poem “For Emily Wilson.”
“The Sale Sale”: Apr. 19, 1978. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (Spring 1993).
“Turning Things Out Good”: First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (Spring 1993).
“Alligator Holes Down Along About Old Dock”: Dec. 31, 1974. First appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (1993). In his afterword to the revised edition of The North Carolina Poems, editor Alex Albright says he learned from Ammons’s sister Vida Cox and some of her friends that “Nakina” is pronounced with a long i, and that “Gause’s” sounds not like “gauzes” but like a rhyme for “tosses.”
“Somers Point”: First appeared in Poems for a Small Planet, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993.
“White Echo”: First appeared in Poems for a Small Planet, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993.
“Pileup”: First appeared in the Raleigh, NC, News and Observer, Nov. 14, 1993. The text here adopts the one revision Ammons made to the poem after its publication: the enclosure of line 5 in parentheses.
“Ping Jockeys”: May 27, 1993. First appeared in the Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 55, no. 3 (Spring 1994). The poem refers to three major members of “the New York School” of poetry: James Schuyler (1923–1991), Frank O’Hara (1926–1966), and John Ashbery (b. 1927). Like Ammons, Schuyler and O’Hara served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
“Keeping Track”: Dec. 19, 1983. First appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, vol. 2, no. 1 (1994). For the family’s mule Silver, see “Silver” in Expressions of Sea Level, as well as the “22 Dec:” section of Tape for the Turn of the Year.
“Cornell’s Wee Stinkie”: First appeared in Ackee: The Literary Journal of Prospect Heights High School, no. 2 (June 1994).
“Candle Lit”: First appeared in Harvard Review, no. 9 (Fall 1995).
“Emerging Curves”: Apr. 2, 1974. First appeared in Poetry, Apr. 1996.
“Sumerian Vistas”: Dec. 13, 1985. First appeared in Poetry, Apr. 1996.
“Mucilage”: July 18, 1992. First appeared in Grand Street, vol. 16, no. 4 (Spring 1998). At the top of the Grand Street proof, Ammons wrote, “This piece may be hard to take unless you take it as a comment on the clownish aspects of government and media in our time, and even then it’s hard to take.”
“Clabberbabble”: First appeared in Poetry, Oct.–Nov. 1997.
“Birthday Poem to My Wife”: Aug. 1997. First appeared in The New Yorker, Oct. 20–27, 1997. Line 11: The New Yorker text’s “back yard” is emended here to “backyard,” following Ammons’s holograph and TS.
“Shot Glass”: Dec. 31, 1997. First appeared in The New Yorker, Feb. 15, 1999. Reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove, where it appeared with the following note:
The woman in “Shot Glass” was a made-up person. Most of my poems are made-up. Some sound as if they’re taken from reality, but I really just make them up. What’s the use of being responsible for telling the truth all the time? The truth isn’t always what’s said but the way it’s said. The title of this poem was meant to evoke the atmosphere of a bar scene and the effect on the speaker of a glass of whiskey.
“Embedded Storms”: Jan. 1, 1998. First appeared in The New Yorker, May 10, 1999. In the left margin of a photocopy of his TS of this poem, Ammons wrote, “A cure for environmental anxieties.”
“Periodontal Abscess”: Nov. 16, 1984. First appeared in The Paris Review, no. 154 (Spring 2000). Ammons sent this in response to the editors’ solicitation of work inspired by any of eight titles “drawn from films, classic poems and flights of imagination.” One of those was the title of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” and the poet offered “Periodo
ntal Abscess” in response to that (though he had written the poem a decade and a half earlier).
“Spills”: Spring 1998. First appeared in Metre, nos. 7–8 (Spring–Summer 2000). Ammons typed the poem on a tape, and the end of the word “innocent” comes too close to the tape’s right edge to see what if any punctuation he may have typed after that word; I have inserted a bracketed comma to facilitate comprehension of the passage. Also, in Metre the poem ends with a closing parenthesis with no corresponding opening parenthesis, followed by a colon; the ending printed here reflects revisions Ammons made to TSS now held at Cornell.
“A Regular Mess”: Dec. 21, 1997. First appeared in Metre, nos. 7–8 (Spring–Summer 2000).
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APPENDIX B: POEMS POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED
In addition to the previously unpublished poems in Bosh and Flapdoodle, Ammons wrote many others that did not see print during his lifetime. Over the decade following his death in 2001, colleagues and friends arranged for some of these to be published. Though a few date to earlier periods, most date to the late 1990s, and can thus be regarded as work Ammons would likely have collected had he lived longer.
I have sometimes discovered that the versions used for these posthumous publications did not reflect Ammons’s final word on the poems; in each case, I have adopted here the latest text I could find. I have also corrected simple errors in the poems as published, guided always by Ammons’s own typescripts.
While I was preparing this edition, the editors of Chicago Review brought out a valuable Ammons special double issue (vol. 57, nos. 1–2, Summer–Autumn 2012). The issue included twenty previously unpublished poems from the Cornell archive, dating from the mid-fifties through the mid-eighties. I have excluded those from this edition, after deciding that they belong instead in one representing the range of the unpublished manuscript material as such.
The poems are sequenced chronologically, based on the dates of composition Ammons recorded and other evidence.
“Mule”: June 6, 1960. First appeared (as “The Mule”) in The Mule Poems, a limited-edition chapbook of Ammons’s mule-related poems, edited by Alex Albright. Fountain, NC: R. A. Fountain, 2010. Following TS at Cornell, the “The” in the title is here deleted from the text as it appeared in The Mule Poems, as are two lines Ammons crossed out after line 12.
“For Edwin Wilson”: Nov. 9, 1974. First appeared in Poetry, June 2008. Wilson, like Ammons, grew up in North Carolina, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and went to college at Wake Forest. After earning his PhD from Harvard, he joined the English Department back at Wake Forest, where his courses on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Yeats, and other Romantic poets routinely filled large classrooms. For over two decades he served as the university’s first provost. The husband of Emily Herring Wilson, he is the dedicatee (as Ammons’s “friend’s friend”) of Lake Effect Country.
There are several versions of this poem at Cornell; the latest clear one, a TS with minimal handwritten revision, is the basis for the text here. Differences from the version in Poetry are generally slight, but Ammons significantly revised the final line: in the earlier version (the one in Poetry) it reads, “the host appears, we’ll make the masters here.”
“For Emily Wilson”: Nov. 9, 1974. First appeared in Poetry, June 2008. From TS at Cornell. See the note to “For Emily Wilson from a Newcomer.” The word “ah” appears in line 7 of the version in Poetry, but Ammons later struck it.
“Making Fields”: Oct. 17, 1976. First appeared in Tar River Poetry, vol. 48, no. 1 (Fall 2008). Based on TS at Cornell. The text here includes slight revisions that postdate the version previously published.
“High Heaven”: Probably written between the mid-1970s and 1990. First appeared in The Mule Poems, edited by Alex Albright. Fountain, NC: R. A. Fountain, 2010. From a Cornell TS with handwritten revisions. Following that TS, the word “the” before “distributions” in line 11 is deleted from the text as previously published.
“MotionShape”: Aug. 17, 1993. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The text here is that of a handwritten manuscript in the Cornell archive; the word “poem” did not appear in the final line as printed in Epoch, and that is restored here. The holograph at Cornell, like the text in Epoch, gives the title as one word with the S in “Shape” capitalized. An earlier title was “Reconstruction.”
“Woman”: Probably written between 1980 and 2000. Previously titled “Privacy.” First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). Based on TS with handwritten revisions at Cornell.
“Red Edges”: 1997. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The text here includes several emendations Ammons made to a TS at Cornell. Line 53: The Spanish expression “al mal tiempo, buena cara” (pronounced al mal TYEM-po BWEHna KAHra)— literally, “to the bad weather, good face”—is a call for good cheer in the face of adversity.
“Core Sample”: June 1997. First appeared in The American Poetry Review, May–June 2003. The text there (and here) is the same as the original TS, which is a long, narrow tape—his “skinniest” tape poem, as he explains in lines 23–33—held at Cornell.
“Late Scene”: July 30, 1997. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The basis for the text here is the same computer-printed TS at Cornell, but with several handwritten revisions.
“Speaking”: Aug. 13, 1997. First appeared in The New Yorker, Oct. 1, 2001, but with line 6 ending with “lone, ever” instead of “love, even.” Cornell holds two handwritten drafts; in what seems to be the first, the words are either “lone, even” or “love, even,” and in the second the words “love, even” are quite clear. There are several copies of a computer-printed TS probably produced by an assistant, and that TS reads “lone, ever.” Ammons made various handwritten revisions to different photocopies of that same TS, including one correction of “lone” to “love”—but the sequence of the photocopies is impossible to determine, and it seems unsafe to assume that text left uncorrected on them had the poet’s considered approval. The version of the poem offered here is the same as that published by David Lehman in SP06: that is, it is the text as published in The New Yorker but with line 6’s “lone, ever” emended to reflect the second holograph’s clear “love, even.”
“Good as Done”: Sept. 14, 1997. First appeared (with the title “As Good as Done”) in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The text here reflects that of a TS at Cornell largely identical to the Epoch version, but with extensive handwritten revisions, one of which is the deletion of “As” from the title. Line 17: The “New York School” are poets of Ammons’s generation whose early work seemed analogous to abstract expressionist painting; among the best-known are Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery. See also “Ping Jockeys.”
“Contested Ground”: Oct. 5, 1997. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The text here is that of a TS with handwritten revisions at Cornell, slightly different from the text in Epoch.
“Right Call”: Oct. 5, 1997. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The text is that of a TS with handwritten revisions at Cornell.
“Religious Feeling”: “Thanksgiving 1997.” First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The text here is primarily that of the Cornell TS used for the Epoch publication, but with several handwritten revisions. In TS, line 246 ends with “wity,” but this is clearly a typo for “with.” The final section originally ended with a question mark, but Ammons struck it out.
“Spot Check” (“We old people sit . . .”): Dec. 31, 1997. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). In line 28, “misty” is emended to “mighty,” following TS at Cornell.
“The Skimpy Side of Nothing”: Mar. 7, 1998. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The comma at the end of line 25 is here deleted, following TS at Cornell.
“Other News”: Mar. 14, 1998. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The text here is that of a TS at Cornell identical to the Epoch text but revising “we” in line 42 to “
let’s.”
“Rap Sheet”: Mar. 21, 1998. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The text here is that of a TS with handwritten revisions at Cornell, differing slightly from the Epoch text.
“Frumpy Cronies”: Mar. 22, 1998. First appeared in The American Poetry Review, May–June 2003. In line 22, “taking part” is emended to “taking the part,” based on TS with handwritten revisions at Cornell. Lisa M. Steinman is Kenan Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College; her books include Absence & Presence (poems) and Masters of Repetition: Poetry, Culture, and Work in Thomson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Emerson.
“Shuffled Marbles”: Mar. 23, 1998. A version titled “Rolled Marbles” first appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004); one titled “Shuffled Marbles” first appeared in the Selected Poems edited by David Lehman and published by Library of America (LOA) in 2006, and soon afterward in the May–June 2006 issue of The American Poetry Review. The Cornell archive includes various versions, the relationships among which are uncertain. The text offered here is that of a computer-printed TS with text identical to that appearing in the LOA Selected Poems and The American Poetry Review, but with handwritten revisions.
“Don’t Rush on My Account”: Mar. 29–30, 1998. First appeared in The American Poetry Review, May–June 2003. The text is that of TS at Cornell.
“Run Ragged”: Mar. 31, 1998. First appeared in The American Poetry Review, May–June 2003. The text here is that of TS at Cornell with handwritten revisions, and differs slightly from the APR version. A bracketed colon is inserted at the end of line 20, since Ammons clearly intends a pause there but typed past the right edge of the paper.
“Quanta”: Apr. 1, 1998. From a TS with handwritten revisions at Cornell; below the poem Ammons has written by hand, “for Helen Vendler with quanta of admiration & love from Archie 7 April 98.” An untitled, apparently earlier version with a different conclusion appeared in the LOA Selected Poems and the May–June 2006 issue of The American Poetry Review:
