by Harold Bloom
write it down that way, not otherwise.
Not twist the words to mean
what we should have said but to mean
—what cannot be escaped: the
mountain riding the afternoon as
it does, the grass matted green,
green underfoot and the air—
rotten wood. Hear! Hear them!
the Undying. The hill slopes away,
then rises in the middleground,
you remember, with a grove of gnarled
maples centering the bare pasture,
sacred, surely—for what reason?
I cannot say. Idyllic!
a shrine cinctured there by
the trees, a certainty of music!
a unison and a dance, joined
at this death’s festival: Something
of a shed snake’s skin, the beginning
goldenrod. Or, best, a white stone,
you have seen it: Mathilda Maria
Fox—and near the ground’s lip,
all but undecipherable, Aet Suae
Anno 9—still there, the grass
dripping of last night’s rain—and
welcome! The thin air, the near,
clear brook water!—and could not,
and died, unable; to escape
what the air and the wet grass—
through which, tomorrow, bejeweled,
the great sun will rise—the
unchanging mountains, forced on them—
and they received, willingly!
Stones, stones of a difference
joining the others, at pace. Hear!
Hear the unison of their voices….
Williams from the start was divided by two prime precursors: John Keats and Walt Whitman. At first he kept his own poems that he derived from each in separate notebooks. As his work evolved, tentative fusions began to insinuate themselves. This long process culminates in “A Unison,” where “Song of Myself” and the two Hyperion fragments cunningly come together. Asked by a child, “What is the grass?” Whitman chants a marvelous fantasia curiously prophetic of Hemingway’s style:
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
“Leaves of Grass,” Section 6
Williams borrows the metaphor, and his “very green” follows Whitman’s suggestion that a “very green” becomes a “very dark” in the shadow of mortality. Keats, though, was even deeper in the consciousness of Williams, and “A Unison” returns us to the Saturnian shrine in the first Hyperion. “Sacred, surely—for what reason?” is perhaps unanswerable to Williams, and yet “a shrine cinctured there by / the trees, a certainty of music!” refers to Keats’s characteristic mode of stationing, a sculpting at once natural and aesthetic. Keats pledges mortals and the dead poets, whereas Whitman insists, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.” But Williams urges us to hear what he hears, the unison of their voices. Are we hearing enough more than the unison of the voices of John Keats and Walt Whitman?
So eloquent is “A Unison” that indeed we hear the true voice of William Carlos Williams himself. Though that voice has been endlessly imitated, its secret remains its own. The exegetes diminish him by their weirdly inflated assertions that his poems create a new reality. It is no service that they forget he is not Shakespeare or Dante. It is enough, and more than enough, to have been an American original. His poem “These” hurts and helps me in this cold spring of 2016, with so many of my friends recently dead or dying:
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,
the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused…
Archie Randolph Ammons, Sphere
IN AUGUST 1968, my wife and I with our sons, six-year-old Daniel and three-year-old David, began to spend our afternoons in Stewart Park, at the foot of Lake Cayuga, in Ithaca, New York. It was there we first met Archie and Phyllis Ammons and their five-year-old son, John. I remember walking over to them to introduce myself and being instantly delighted. My knowledge of the poetry of Archie Randolph Ammons at that time consisted only of a recent reading of Corsons Inlet (1965).
We invited them to come back to the house in Cayuga Heights that we were renting for the year from Norman and Lee Malcolm. Phyllis was open and outgoing from the start, and the three little boys played together amiably then and throughout the year. Archie was very shy and said very little. At thirty-eight, I was rather talkative, and he was a good listener, but I was relieved when, after a few weeks together, he began to speak more freely. During that year, from August to August, I spent several hours in Archie’s company virtually every day. When my wife and I returned to New Haven, our friendship deepened as we exchanged innumerable letters and frequent phone calls.
Archie gave several readings at Yale through the years and then chose to decline Yale’s offer of a professorship as poet in residence in 1973. We remained close through the decades until his death on February 25, 2001. His presence lingers always, and is particularly strong when I reread and teach his poetry.
Like John Ashbery, with whom he shared a mutual admiration, Ammons was astonishingly prolific. I possess so many of his poems by memory that I hesitate where to begin these memorial remarks, but the dedicatory lines to the long poem Sphere have become part of my inmost being:
I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness:
the wind tore about this
way and that in confusion and its speech could not
get through to me nor could I address it:
still I said as if to the alien in myself
I do not speak to the wind now:
for having been brought this far by nature I have been
brought out of nature
and nothing here shows me the image of myself:
for the word tree I have been shown a tree
and for the word rock I have been shown a rock,
for stream, for cloud, for star
this place has provided firm implication and answering
but where here is the image for longing:
so I touched the rocks, their interesting crusts:
I flaked the bark of the stunt-fir:
I looked into space and into the sun
and nothing answered my word longing:
goodbye, I said, goodbye, nature so grand and
reticent, your tongues are healed up into their own
element
and as you have shut up you have shut me out: I am
as foreign here as if I had landed, a visitor:
so I went back down and gathered mud
and with my hands made an image for longing:
I took the image to the summit: first
I set it here, on the top rock, but it completed
nothing: then I set it there among the tiny firs
but it would not fit:
so I returned to the city and built a house to set
the image in
and men came into my house and said
that is an image for longing
and nothing will ever be the same again
My late friend John Hollander, an enthusiast for Ammons, termed this a poem of “restitution.” It is not clear to me which of the meanings of “restitution” John intended. Is it the restoration of something lost? Is it compensation? Or is it a recoil to an originary shape? A university wit and formidable poet, Hollander probably meant all three. With a poem this sublime, even devote
d exegetes must differ. As I read it, nothing is restored or can be. The wind, Virgilian guide to Ammons as Pilgrim of Eternity, no longer addresses him, nor can he speak to it. On the mount of vision, he stands out of nature and cannot find the Whitmanian image of himself. A yearning desire, not for self but for what William Blake called his Emanation, is the longing akin to Yahweh’s Creation of Adam out of the Adamic red clay. I do not read this as parody but as lamentation. Ammons was not a Christian, yet he was Bible-soaked from his North Carolina boyhood on to his death.
There is no abode for the image of longing. Summit, tiny firs, the house or temple built in the city: nothing coheres. We read Ammons and confront only the shadow of yearning. I hear a kind of palinode when the poet ends with “and nothing will ever be the same again.” A double alienation is the burden. We have been brought out of nature, yet only into an image. We desire firm implication and answering and cannot receive them in this place that is not our own.
Archie resisted his own transcendental impulses. He wanted to be steady in the everyday world. As a reader, I always wanted him to cut loose and give us the voice that was great within him. I see now this was bad advice. His true subject was poetic disincarnation, and his might addressed the alien in himself. Even his earliest poems listen to the wind, the ancient praxis of poets innumerable.
When I teach Ammons, I like to start with “Gravelly Run”:
I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:
the swamp’s slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:
holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars’ gothic-clustered
spires could make
green religion in winter bones:
so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass
jail seals each thing in its entity:
no use to make any philosophies here:
I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
At lunch one day with my friend Harry Ford, who died in 1999, I showed him this poem. Harry was a superb book designer and editor of poets as eminent as James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, Anthony Hecht, and Edgar Bowers. He winced as he read “Gravelly Run” and said, “Harold, every time I try to read Archie Ammons, I have the sensation that I am watching a sweater unravel.” Eventually, I repeated this to Archie, who was not altogether amused. But I see what Harry, an exquisite formalist, was trying to protest. “Gravelly Run” is an astonishingly original poem. Walt Whitman almost always hovers in Ammons, but here he is exorcised. The cadences of “Gravelly Run” are ineluctable, as befits a poem essaying the impossible enterprise of knowing the self as it is known by the outer spaces and a natural particular. Ammons is true to what I have come to call the American Religion. The innermost self was unborn and so cannot know death. Should the self surrender, there are no forms to welcome it. From the time I first read it, “Gravelly Run” seemed uncanny in its music. It will not yield even to an Emersonian exegesis.
An even more powerful poem, “Guide” at first might seem capable of paraphrase, yet that is illusory. All of Ammons exalts the form of a motion and evades origin as best it can:
You cannot come to unity and remain material:
in that perception is no perceiver:
when you arrive
you have gone too far:
at the Source you are in the mouth of Death:
you cannot
turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
no precipitations of forms
to use like tongs against the formless:
no freedom to choose:
to be
you have to stop not-being and break
off from is to flowing and
this is the sin you weep and praise:
origin is your original sin:
the return you long for will ease your guilt
and you will have your longing:
the wind that is my guide said this: it
should know having
given up everything to eternal being but
direction:
how I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes
from one foot to the other:
wisdom wisdom:
to be glad and sad at once is also unity
and death:
wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
tree on a particular day:
unity cannot do anything in particular:
are these the thoughts you want me to think I said but
the wind was gone and there was no more knowledge then.
We long to return from the family romance of our origin, yet even a major poet will not possess this longing. Hesitant to surrender to eternal being, Ammons heartens me with his wistful quest for wisdom. I wrote a book called Where Shall Wisdom Be Found and used “Guide” as my epigraph. If wisdom blooms on a particular tree on a particular day, it may be only an unwisdom. Thirsting after some knowledge, Ammons receives none. The wind goes, and as a guide emulates Robert Frost in “Directive”:
…if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost…
Frost is ironic; Ammons is not.
* * *
—
In so vast a panoply of poems, my mind turns back to a few that had some part in shaping my own being. “The City Limits” is one of them:
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
The word “consider” stems from the Latin consideráre, which means literally to examine or contemplate th
e stars. The verb has a wide range, but here means to take something into account when making a judgment. “When you consider” is repeated five times as a prolepsis foreboding radiance. The coming of this light is generous and profuse. A secular grace descends without our deserving. I never get out of my heart the astonishing:
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony…
I hunch over awkwardly, lest I make an awful noise against the light, and accept that I cannot lie low in the light as in a high testimony. Our swervings sustain and engender the radiance, and the storms of generosity fall down upon the lowest edge of being. I hear Walt Whitman in the redemption of the minimal particulars:
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take…
The man is Archie Ammons, whose heart moves roomier as he stands and looks about. Archie and I talked about the title Leaves of Grass, which is multiform and turns upon that curious “of.” Walt would have agreed that the leaf does not increase itself above the grass. Ammons, master of anxiety’s prosody, transmutes his fear of mortality to praise. Of what? There I touch my limits, which indeed are the city limits. Archie the countryman is a pragmatic Emersonian and knows a new calm.
* * *
—
Today is Friday, December 22, 2017. I wrote those previous paragraphs on Ammons some four years ago. In 2013, I received a book called An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A. R. Ammons, 1951–1974, edited by Kevin McGuirk. Though Archie had died in February 2001 at the age of seventy-five, I was still grieving and was rather numb as I read through his letters and journals, many of them addressed to me, though not always sent. Four years later, my grief is still intense, but now almost all of my friends among the poets and critics of my generation have departed. Mourning for so many men and women does not diffuse an individual grief yet makes it seem less urgent.
Yesterday evening, I was happy to receive The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, edited by Robert M. West and with an introduction by my old friend Helen Vendler. Archie was prolific, and the two volumes contain nearly two thousand pages of poetry. I can think only of Victor Hugo as having composed so enormous a quantity of enduring verse.