by Harold Bloom
As I read through the two volumes, I recognize most but not all of the poems. It is a kind of happy shock to confront my close friend as a ghostly companion on such a scale. I recall that in 1997 Archie sent me a poem called “Quibbling the Colossal”:
I just had the funniest thought: it’s the
singing of Wales and whales that I like so
much: you know, have you heard those men’s
groups, those coal miners and church people in
Wales singing: to be deeply and sweetly undone,
listen in: and the scrawny rising and
screechings and deep bellowing of whales,
their arias personal (?) and predatory at
love and prey—that makes up mind for us as
we study to make out mind in them: the reason
I can’t attain world view or associational
complexity is that when I read I’m asleep by
the second paragraph: also, my poems come in
dislocated increments, because my spine between
the shoulderblades gets to hurting when I type:
also, my feet swell from sitting still: but
when the world tilts one way it rights another
which is to say that the disjunctiveness of my
recent verse cracks up the dark cloud and
covering shield of influence and lets fresh
light in, more than what little was left, a
sliver along the farthest horizon: room to
breathe and stretch and not give a shit, room
to turn my armies of words around in or camp
out and hide (bivouac): height to reach up
through the smoke and busted mirrors to clear
views of the beginnings high in the oldest
times: but seriously you know, this way of
seeing things is just a way of seeing things:
time is not crept up on by some accumulative
designer but percolates afresh every day like
a hot cup of coffee: and, Harold, if this is
an Evening Land, when within memory was it
otherwise, all of civilized time a second in
the all of time: good lord, we’re all so
recent, we’ve hardly got our ears scrubbed,
hair unmatted, our teeth root-canaled: so,
shine on, shine on, harvest moon: the computers
are clicking, and the greatest dawn ever is
rosy in the skies.
CAST THE OVERCAST
I once wrote about this poem and got it wrong by identifying the colossal with Walt Whitman. Archie insisted that he meant me, an identification I evaded, though Whitman’s first name was not Harold. Setting that aside, I love the stance of “Quibbling the Colossal.” Ammons could be very charming, and here I suppose he was telling me that I had to let the light shine upon me, enabling me to breathe and stretch, a prophet of anxiety who should be more firmly grounded.
I write on Saturday, December 23, 2017, in dismal weather. I have never kept copies of letters I sent to friends, because they were all in longhand. At my age, I will not get up to Cornell to look at my letters in the Ammons Archive, or to Harvard to see my letters to John Ashbery. Indeed, I am too infirm to get over to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to look at my myriad letters to Robert Penn Warren. I have their letters to me up in my attic, but will never have the time and energy to reread them. When Roger Gilbert’s biography of Ammons appears, then I should achieve a better sense of my correspondence with Archie. Since I want to devote the rest of these memorial remarks to his long poem Sphere, I turn again to the volume An Image for Longing. I discussed the dedicatory poem to Sphere above but was a little shy of giving its title: “For Harold Bloom.” It may be Archie’s finest, though there are a score of other candidates. Here are excerpts from a letter he wrote me on January 25, 1974:
Thank you for your sweet words which I needed so much you wouldn’t believe it. Anybody who needs as much as I do ought to be shot. It’s a drain on the national energy level.
I made “I went to summit” your dedication poem so I hope you were telling the truth about liking it because you’re stuck with it.
(Did you ever get the feeling that everything you’re doing is delusional and doesn’t mean a thing? I do.)
Believe it or not, we’ve had a day with sunshine but it’s right back cosy cloudy now.
. . . .
I know you have some serious unvoiced reservations about Sphere but that you like some parts well enough to remain silent about the other parts. I can’t change anything, now (maybe I could if I waited another year)—so it would be all right if you went ahead and told me the worst. I’m afraid it’s a completely mad poem of separation, and I really don’t like to offer bad products to the unsuspecting public that doesn’t have enough sense to know whether something is good for it or not (and I don’t either)—but, still, curiously enough, I never felt so connected to human reality as I have since finishing the poem. I wish I could be confident that the poem would have the same effect with others.
. . . .
I guess we will be [in] Ocean City again this summer. This time you must come down, and I will accept no declining gestures. I will look about and get you a good place. Then I will drive up and get you. Then, in due time, when you have a little sand on your bare feet and a little grit in your teeth, I will drive you back to New Haven. I have decided to give the orders from now on. But you may provide all the commentary you please.
I never did get to Ocean City, but then I have a lifelong horror of sandy beaches. I am like my late father: put me in the sun for an hour and I become a red lobster. Archie once joked to me that he could call his collected poems The Influence of Anxiety. I had not expressed any reservations to him about Sphere, since it seems to me the strongest of his long poems. But Ammons had a preternatural sensitivity to any critical qualms I might have felt in regard to his work, even when I was not aware of them.
Archie believed, as I do, that Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was the greatest long poem of the last century and a half. Sphere: The Form of a Motion seems to me the most Whitmanian of all Ammons’s poems. It is very much Archie’s “Song of Myself” and moves with Whitmanian gusto. Ammons at the age of forty-eight had the self-confidence to take on the mantle of Whitman with verve and high humor:
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
…I can’t understand my readers:
they complain of my abstractions as if the United States of America
were a form of vanity: they ask why I’m so big on the
one: many problem, they never saw one: my readers: what do they
expect from a man born and raised in a country whose motto is E
pluribus unum: I’m just, like Whitman, trying to keep things
half straight about my country: my readers say, what’s all
this change and continuity: when we have a two-party system,
one party devoted to reform and the other to consolidation:
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and both trying to grab a chunk out of the middle: either we
reconcile opposites or we suspend half the country into
disaffection and alienation: they want to know, what do I
mean quadrants, when we have a Southeast, Northeast, Southwest,
and Northwest and those cut into pairs by the splitting
Mississippi and the Mason-Dixon line: I figure I’m the exact
poet of the concrete par excellence, as Whitman might say:
they ask me, my readers, when I’m going to go politicized or
radicalized or pu
blic when I’ve sat here for years singing
unattended the off-songs of the territories and the midland
coordinates of Cleveland or Cincinnati: when I’ve prized
multeity and difference down to the mold under the leaf
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on the one hand and swept up into the perfect composures of
nothingness on the other: my readers are baffling and
uncommunicative (if actual) and I don’t know what to make of
or for them: I prize them, in a sense, for that: recalcitrance:
and for spreading out into a lot of canyons and high valleys
inaccessible to the common course or superhighway: though I
like superhighways, too, that tireless river system of streaming
unity: my country: my country: can’t cease from its
sizzling rufflings to move into my “motions” and “stayings”:
when I identify my self, my work, and my country, you may
think I’ve finally got the grandeurs: but to test the center
you have to go all the way both ways: from the littlest
to the biggest: I didn’t mean to talk about my poem but
to tell others how to be poets: I’m interested in you, and
I want you to be a poet: I want, like Whitman, to found
a federation of loveship, not of queers but of poets, where
there’s a difference: that is, come on and be a poet, queer
or straight, adman or cowboy, librarian or dope fiend,
housewife or hussy: (I see in one of the monthlies an astronaut
is writing poems—that’s what I mean, guys): now, first of
all, the way to write poems is just to start: it’s like
learning to walk or swim or ride the bicycle, you just go
after it: it is a matter of learning how to move with
balance among forces greater than your own, gravity, water’s
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buoyance, psychic tides: you lean in or with or against the
ongoing so as not to be drowned but to be swept effortlessly
up upon the universal possibilities: you can sit around
and talk about it all day but you will never walk the tightwire
till you start walking: once you walk, you’ll find there’s
no explaining it: do be afraid of falling off because it is
not falling off that’s going to be splendid about you, making
you seem marvelous and unafraid: but don’t be much afraid:
fall off a few times to see it won’t kill you: O compatriotos,
sing your hangups and humiliations loose into song’s
disengagements (which, by the way, connect, you know, when
they come back round the other way): O comrades!…
I remember the British poet-critic Donald Davie with affection and respect. Some of his poems still linger in my memory, and his two marvelous studies of syntax and purity of diction in English poetry taught me a great deal. We were only good acquaintances, yet I recall once trying in vain to convert him to Ammons. I was all the more delighted when Sphere: The Form of a Motion won him over:
I am way behind, getting to A. R. Ammons only now. And I know why; everything I ever heard about him said that he wasn’t my cup of tea. (The Britishness of that idiom is much to the point.) He was, I gathered, a poet who said “Ooh” and “Ah” to the universe, who had oceanic feelings about the multiplicity of things in nature, and the ubiquity of nature’s changes; a poet enamoured of flux, therefore; and so, necessarily, a practitioner of “open form”—which last comes uncomfortably close for my taste to being a contradiction in terms. In short, he was one whom Harold Bloom had applauded as “a major visionary poet”; and if that doesn’t raise my hackles exactly, it certainly gives me goose-pimples.
And everything that I heard is true. Imagine! A poem 1,860 lines long, with only one full stop in it, at the end of the last line; and put before me, who like to think of myself as Doctor Syntax, all for demarcations, a devotee of the sentence! Whatever the opposite of an ideal reader is, I ought to have been that thing so far as this poem is concerned. How could I be anything but exasperated by it, profoundly distrustful, sure I was being bamboozled, sure I was being threatened? And how is it, then, that I was on the contrary enraptured? Have I gone soft in the head? Have I suffered a quasi-religious conversion? Shall I drag myself on penitent knees to the feet of the saintly Bloom? No. I am as suspicious as ever I was of Ammons’s initial assumptions and governing pre-occupations. I still hunger for sentences and full stops, and for a colon that has precise grammatical and rhythmical work to do, instead of being the maid-of-all-work that Ammons makes it into. The cast of his temperament is as alien to me as I thought it would be. And yet I can’t refuse the evidence of my senses and my feelings—there wasn’t one page of his poem that didn’t delight me.
The New York Review of Books, March 6, 1975
Donald Davie’s authentic critical and poetical sensibility overcame his preconceptions in a manner I have tried to emulate as I age into more of an ability to set aside the polemics of a lifetime. Frequently at night, feeling my exhaustions, I recite T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” to myself, alternating it with “La Figlia Che Piange.” At his strongest, Eliot comforts me, though I will never like him. With Ammons, as poet and as person, I was at home from the start. I read and teach Sphere in conjunction with “Song of Myself.” I could not assert that Ammons equals Whitman, but among American poets only Emily Dickinson does.
Archie told me that what I called the anxiety of influence was what he termed hierarchy. The word “hierarchy” to the ancient Greeks meant “the rule of a priest.” We tend by it to mean a group of individuals or entities graded by rank, by authority, or by capacity:
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…the gods have come and gone
(or we have made them come and go) so long among us that
they have communicated something of the sky to us making us
feel that at the division of the roads our true way, too,
is to the sky where with unborn gods we may know no
further death and need no further visitations: what may have
changed is that in the future we can have the force to keep
the changes secular: the one:many problem, set theory, and
symbolic signifier: the pyramid, the pantheon (of gods and
men), the pecking order, baboon troop, old man of the tribe,
the hierarchy of family, hamlet, military, church, corporation,
civil service, of wealth, talent—everywhere the scramble for
place, power, privilege, safety, honor, the representative
notch above the undistinguished numbers: second is as good
as last: pyramidal hierarchies and solitary persons: the
hierarchies having to do with knowledge and law, the solitaries
with magic, conjuration, enchantment: the loser or apostate
turns on the structure and melts it with vision, with
summoning, clean, verbal burning: or the man at the top may
turn the hierarchy down and walk off in a private direction:
meanwhile, back at the hierarchy, the chippers and filers
hone rocks to skid together….
“Hierarchy” is a metaphor for cognitive ordering, for those sharp lines that do not exist in nature. Almost all of Ammons is a conflict between the mind’s assertion that it can take nature up into itself, and the other vision, which knows nature will never be adequate to it. Sphere gathers to a greatness in its final sequence, which again deliberately evokes Whitman concluding his personal epic.
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; but the field, gone through, is open and in the woodburn
the jackpine cone flicks open and ejects seed: ferns rouse
subsoil curls: birds accept the brush margins of feeding
grounds and hawks police the new actions for waywardness:
the gods of care and economy of motion, the grass gods, the
god of the killdeer arrive, and the old god of the forest
begins to take everything away again: from other planets,
as with other planets from here, we rise and set, our presence,
reduced to light, noticeable in the dark when the sun is
away: reduced and distanced into light, our brotherhood
constituted into shining, our landforms, seas, colors
subsumed to bright announcement: we are alone in a sea that
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shows itself nowhere in a falling surf but if it does not
go on forever folds back into a further motion of itself:
the plenitude of nothingness! planets seeds in a coronal
weaving so scant the fabric is the cloth of nakedness:
Pluto our very distant friend skims a gulf so fine and far
millions and thousands of millions of years mean little to—
how far lost we are, if saving is anywhere else: but light,
from any distance or point we’ve met it, shines with a similar
summation, margin affirmational, so we can see edges to the
black roils in the central radiances, galaxies colliding in
million-year meetings, others sprung loose into spiral
unwindings: fire, cold space, black concentration:
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