by A. R. Ammons
he to be paralyzed in a humiliation of
gratitude: can’t one who has much give much,
if he will: where is one to acquire much,
except by making, keeping, and accruing, even
at a profit from others for services rendered:
if you have something to give, should you give
it to an individual who may be a wastrel or
vagabond, or should you give it to the
community as capitalization for business
activities bringing, maybe, jobs for carpenters,
word processors, software designers, so that
you make money yourself by giving, in a
sense, to all: well, you can see it isn’t
easy, is it: look after yourself, you may be,
if inadvertently, looking after others: at
least, you won’t be one yourself who needs to
be looked after by others: he creates a boon
who removes himself from welfare: as for me,
I am as much an innocent standbyer as bystander
which is to say, I may be participating even
when I am saying nothing, whenever that was:
but, all in all, the world doesn’t make much
sense unless we make a little something up
TO GO WITH IT
Ringadingding
Dress up a charlatan like a lord, and who is
the lord: or don beggar’s rags upon a beggar
and watch the curtseys stumble: if clothes
are the man, it is only so in consideration of
clothes—but since that consideration can
pass for the whole, man and all, it can be all:
the rich dress down and the poor up to achieve
true levels of participation that are truly
lies: well, misstatements of sign: you can,
indeed, not know the true man at all, if the
true man differs from the clothes he wears,
by the clothes he wears: I would have you
stumble there, as before the good writer
poorly dressed: looking good or bad, I pledge
to prefer no charge against myself: when the
police show up, I’ll hire the best lawyer in
town and get off, tried or mistried: I’ll pump
money into my lawyer, and his mouth will fly
with devices, exceptions, exemptions, and sweet
big words: I am not going to let myself lie
around undefended and defenseless: I haven’t
done anything: I’ve done hardly anything now
for years: the sweetest leisure is work of
one’s own choosing: (life is short, even when
it isn’t): I mean, I haven’t done anything the
law doesn’t allow or can’t find: but inside,
where the differences are, everybody is in
court, tongues and heads are flying and chains
are rattling: can, I cry out, we bring some of
these issues to trial: oh, no, when one is
oneself jury, accuser, pleader, judge subduing
the maelstrom lacks separation, the fiddling
aside of the plainly innocent: live for others:
living for others is life for oneself: live
for yourself, you put your self at odds with
all mankind, and you grow sour in your losses
or gains: cut off, you win or lose against
yourself, which is never winning: live for
others, not that they may live for themselves,
but that they, too, may live for others: life
for all can come of this, since giving is the
sweetest given, given back: the world’s twisty
and the straightaway is crooked and the crooked
straightaway. . . .
I Wouldn’t Go So Far As to Say That
The trouble with style is that it cannot look
ragged if clean cut, nor empty if full, nor
colorless if bejeweled: I mean, you would
think that: but so much colorful stuff is
trashy and boring, and serene emptiness is the
highest plane in some spheres, and raggedness
can look like clean displays of ruffles: I am
so impressed with the malleability of things
that I’m ready to let almost anything go: how
do you want the world, well, within reason,
have it any way you please: many can be boring
in their richest effort, but how can I be
plainly, truthfully boring except by being
boring (clever line break): and how can I
burst out into something if I already know the
program: but how can you bear exposure—and
why should you—to so much trot: I don’t
know any reason except to be there when the
deal goes down, when competence stumbles and
reveals its dirty underclothes, or when the
spirit’s whirlwind strikes the windy hills to
raise the dust: but I also wonder how you can
bear to be in the presence of the well-written
all the time: so, some little creep can iron
it out and measure it off, doodle some outlines
and make it look neat: let him: her: what to
do about style is one of my meanest problems:
I wrote some poems really short: I revised a
few till they were just perfectly revised: I
confess now to some interest in good bad
writing: I would just as soon see what I can
do about getting across the river when the
bridge floods out: what do I know: it may not
even rain: or if it rains, the sky may clear
so gloriously gold-fringed that I will weep:
prepared weeping may not achieve its tears,
but tears cannot be prevented when they have
to gather: this is an example: it’s not
revised, it’s bad, it’s wonderful. . . .
Thrown for a Loop
There’s so much more belief than truth, and
that is lucky in a way, belief inclining us
more toward what we need than what we’ll get:
but we really do believe what we believe and
we hope it will work out: but put a plug of
gold on the scale opposite a sack full of
painted feathers, truth will that great woven
cluster outweigh: the fulcrum could be called
“getting along”—and that’s where balanced
persons no doubt stand: those who slip down
the arm toward feathers keep an eye back on
truth, I’ll bet, and those heavy with truth,
which is sometimes ruthlessly truth, oh, they
longingly look toward the painted fare: belief
can fulfill dramas of yearning, while truth’s
exactions narrow down the margins: but even
when it’s a tightrope it’s somewhere to walk,
while dramas address theatrical appetites:
that truth and belief are one, cooperating one
with the other, that is simply GRAND, and they
sometimes do, aiming at heaven, cooperate: I
think that this means only that illusion plays
well against reality, though we have so much
trouble telling which is which, truth often
losing the figurements of its setup, and
illusion as often floating off, a grain of
reality its core: there is a sufficient place
in the mind that turns away into the errors
of explanation just to be about: the sitting
center’s butt gets tired, and the feet and
legs can do with a little circulation, like
walking out into the country to chat with the
>
farmers, lend a hand, or help a calf stand up
in its freshest morning: do with the obvious:
little lies behind it. . . .
Wrong Road
So I said to the short-order cook (because I
think he owns the joint) what did Santa bring
you: a fairly aggressive bit of humor, since
I hardly know the man: my wife and I stop
there occasionally on the way to Syracuse
because it is so busy, the eggs are right, and
the waitresses friendly: when he says, Oh,
some of this and that: so I said, a boat:
(checking to see if he was really rich): a
gun, I said—maybe he was just one of the
guys: I have a lot of guns, he said: well,
I don’t think he ever did say what he got,
some clothes, maybe: he was turning too many
eggs, jigging hash browns: on the way to
Syracuse, I finished it in my head: he got
angry: who’s asking, he says: so I try to
bring him down: I’m too old to rise up to
risibility: I said, I’m a little older than
you, so I was wondering, because I was disappointed
in myself when my wife asked me before Xmas
what I wanted for Christmas: I couldn’t think
of anything: what does it mean to want nothing
from Santa: so I just wondered what sort of
thing you might have wanted, or if you had
liked what you got: well (reader) this last
part doesn’t sound as good as the way it came
to me around Lafayette: I have a little tingle
of fear that the next time I stop there, the
guy will say, listen, buddy, I’m old enough
you don’t have to ask me what Santa brought me
and I’ll say, well, it’s Easter now, and I’m
not going to ask about those eggs. . . .
Way Down Upon the Woodsy Roads
Don’t you think poetry should be succinct:
not now: I think it should be discinct: it
should wander off and lose its way back and
then bump into a sign and have to walk home:
who gives a hoot about these big-Mack trucks
of COMPRESSION: what are the most words for
the least: take your cute little compact and
don’t tell me anything about it: just turn me
loose, let me rattle my ole prattle: poetry
springs greatest from deepest depths: well,
let her whistle: how shallow can anything
get: (rhyming on the front end): I do not
believe that setting words to rhyme and meter
turns prose into poetry, and having written
some of the shortest poems, I now like to
write around largely into any precinct (not
succinct) or pavilion (a favorite word) I fall
in with: I have done my duty: I am a happy
man: I am at large: life sho is show biz:
make room for the great presence of nothing:
do you never long to wander off: from the
concentrations: for it is one thing to fail
of them and another never to have intended
them: the love nest, men, becomes a solid
little (mortgaged) colonial: duty becomes your
chief commendation: the animal in you, older
than your kind, longs to undertake the heavy
freedom of going off by himself into the wide
periphery of chance and surprise, pleasure or
terror: oh, come with me, or go off like me,
if only in the deep travels of your soul, and
let your howl hold itself in through all the
forests of the night: it’s the shortest day:
the sun is just now setting behind the branch
of the crabapple tree it always sets behind
this day of the year. . . .
DRAB POT
Also by A. R. Ammons
Ommateum
Expressions of Sea Level
Corsons Inlet
Tape for the Turn of the Year
Northfield Poems
Selected Poems
Uplands
Briefings
Collected Poems: 1951–1971
(winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 1973)
Sphere: The Form of Motion
(winner of the 1973–1974 Bollingen Prize in Poetry)
Diversifications
The Snow Poems
Highgate Roate
The Selected Poems: 1951–1977
Selected Longer Poems
A Coast of Trees
(winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 1981)
Worldly Hopes
Lake Effect Country
The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition
Sumerian Vistas
The Really Short Poems
Garbage
(winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 1993)
Brink Road
Glare
Selected poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East, Slate, and Epoch.
Copyright © 2005 by John R. Ammons
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 2006
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Book design by Blue Shoe Studio
Production manager: Andrew Marasia
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Ammons, A. R., 1926–
Bosh and flapdoodle : poems / A.R. Ammons.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3501.M6B67 2005
811'.54—dc22
2004026050
ISBN 978-0-393-32895-0
9780393357318
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