by A. R. Ammons
standing recalcitrant in its own nasty massiveness,
bowing to no one, nonpatronizing and ungrateful:
I don’t know why: maybe I’m just tired of the world’s
20inroads, the small invasions where my little landscapes
are stripped, defoliated, re-arranged:
or tired of being put upon by this and that person’s
demand and need and having to swelter inside
with the moral melting of whether to do this and that
25or not: this morning, I got a letter from this
Arkansas lady who runs a bookstore she says isn’t
doing too well, and she wants me to sign a stack of
bookplates to help my books move: I already last
year signed a bunch of my poems she had typed up on
30separate cards: I haven’t forgotten I did that and
here she is back again: am I being played for a sucker:
if I’m being played for a sucker, which is the thing
to do, blink and be generous and help her even if she’s
prevailing upon me or set the stage that I’m on
35to her and throw everything in the trash: it’s
not doing the thing, it’s being put on the spot and
having (being made) to make a choice: that energy
of decision is costly: you can’t just make one
decision and follow through, every decision is
40different: it isn’t easy, what would you do: then
there are the recommendations, ooh, la, la, the letters
of recommendation! no postage, no envelopes, no forms
_________
filled out—just the command, send a letter of
recommendation to so and so: or send a dozen: still
45no stamps, no envelopes, no forms filled out: you
get the picture: so thinking of an imagined land, I
thought of a big gritty poem that would just stand
there and spit, accommodating itself to nothing and
too disfigured to be approached, no one
50able to imagine what line to take: and not necessarily
being interesting enough to invite anybody to read it:
nothing turns people off like complaining, they get
enough of it doing their own, so why not have a
complaining poem: that could core your reality and
55stack up the peelings: Gary and I just went over
to check out Corsons Inlet: there were a lot of bugs:
(fellow said they said on the radio Fargo, North
Dakota (I thought that was in Nebraska) had a foot
of rain and the Red River, can you imagine, flooded):
60this is not going to be another one of those free
association poems: this one is going to be all about
complaining, so there’s no point in getting limbered
up for heavy swerves, this is going to run right down
the centrality, clickety-clack: at Corsons Inlet they
65had the Least, Arctic, and Common Tern, but the Least
were raising the most babies and the most hell: they
made a community project of hovering, circling around,
diving, and screeching: but we found the young about
hiding in the stalks of compass grass and right out
_________
70on the clam-shell white sand were indentations,
nests, one or two eggs in each: we walked
crisply on the clam shells so as not to step on the
eggs: then we stopped at a place for a dollar’s worth
of ice tea, two fifty-cent sizes: it sure was hot out
75there on the sea plains but the ocean has added another
seventy-five yards to the headland: (the same land it’s
been subtracting from the north end of the island where
bulwarks and jettys are doing very little
to retain the retaining walls:) how does the ocean
80get into these persistent notions: it’s hard not to get
interested in something: there seemed sheer strength
in the numbers of blackflies waving over and sucking on
the inlet strand, multitudes, you kick them up before
you like sand or, more persistingly, like fog: you know
85they all have to be doing the same thing approximately
because there’re too many of them to be doing different
things: just like the sand-ripples on the headland, how
could you design something that all looks alike but every
one is different: a studious drawingboard: same with
90the lacework castings of the sandworms, a filigree
incalculable, though pretty much the same: so it’s all
there, who wants to be stunned by it over and over:
desire is incredible anywhere and I have a lot myself:
insatiable because unsatisfied: yep: burning all the
95time doing time in the dungeon: if it got loose it would fire
off an acre of trees: this is my worst complaint, that
_________
desire often has to be held back and stanched: but
holding back gives you plenty of energy to complain with:
look for a long piece: a windstorm just struck up
100a sandstorm here, the winds going quite precisely from
easy-going to whistling, a sharp change, hard enough
to walk off with a tin shack: and the storm so
fast, it seems to have no lightning in it—and
no rain, a blower, mixing too many levels perhaps
105for charges to build up: but somewhere back there in
the west is a nucleus, storm center or cell,
for all this commotion: I hope there will be some rain
to lay the dust: but how nice to be cooled off: ninety
degree days are not as nice as less than ninety degree
110days: nice to see trash rise, swirl, slam against
houses and linepoles: beach chairs bloom woven
bottoms and kilter off like the awkwardest bird
across the beach: sand in flumes spills like water
down into the surf, frying in a frying: I’m in this
115place and everybody is having this banquet, except me,
I have this dry crust I’m nibbling on: so I say, how
come I’m not having a banquet like the rest of you guys, don’t
I have as much right as anybody: the banqueters say,
hunger will sharpen your perceptions and your perceptions
120will be useful to us should we ever get hungry:
oh, flubbery flubs, I say, neologizing: I don’t care a hang
about your perceptions or mine either, I’m hungry: if
I can’t have any of what you’re having, give me
_________
something else: you would be surprised at the fat indifference
125of people at a time like that: call them a bunch of
hogs and go off and eat the wind, what else: and suckle
the rain and pretty soon you’re a nature poet, everybody
saying, lands, something nice to go with dinner, they say he
enjoys plants and feeds ants, a luminous starvation:
130I have this theory about when people want you to assume
the position of maximum receptivity or penitence they
don’t tell you to sit down but to get down on your knees:
that, in relation to the person who just told you to
get down on your knees, leaves you looking into the
135genital area, a dark, winding, if absorbing, subject:
in that position you can receive the rod of knowledge
head-on, or if you don’t receive it, you can get the
image what you could receive if you don’t do right:
almost anybody would rath
er do right, specially if the
140commander is a beast: where this puts some men and women, who
might get a small thrill from the warning and who might
not decide to do right, I don’t quite know if I haven’t
already said it: but it appears that the sexes are
different, if equal: hustler or hooker, different
145postures suggest different approaches: any way to make a
buck, if you consider that one amoeba eats
indigestible sand which it pushes out to the periphery
of its protoplasm to form a casing, a little house
not all flesh: a nature poet would be the first to
150tell you that any way to get by is worth exploring:
_________
of course, I don’t mean to say anything mean about
ants or other clever insects, builders, twirlers,
weavers, stickers, and domicile developers: ever
since, which was some time ago in reading Wheeler,
155I heard about the ant that attaches itself to the
chamber wall and allows itself to be fed till it’s a
honey storage tank, well, I’ve been touched: it
reminds me of myself in reverse: I’ve been storing
up honey in civilization but though much emptied out,
160I don’t get any emptier than I’ve always been: I was
born on a farm and had to work and never got much
book learning or much interest in it but I don’t mind it in
others, really, provided it doesn’t swell to cause
nonconversational flotation: I object to much bobbing
165while I’m talking: I prefer people who simmer down
and change the subject often, without flightiness: I
don’t like people who flit from branch to branch of
the learning tree so fast I can’t spot their majors
from their minors: but then I don’t like people who
170take off to say something and then just quit midway:
it’s like leaving a bird permanently between bushes:
I can tell you right now I don’t know how to write
verse, not even poetry: if I did I wouldn’t be here,
so to speak: I’d be off on a Greek island with Merrill
175or in the radiantly inaccessible regions with Ashbery
or vanishing into the clearest plenitudes with Merwin
or reading from my works to the Poetry Society of
_________
America or South Orangeburg or I’d be mumbling among
the members of the Academy of This or That instead of
180just sweating it out as America’s Least Likely Issue:
that is, don’t send me your poems, please, for comment
and/or criticism: I don’t know what to say: not only
don’t I know what you should write, or how, I don’t
know what or how I should write: if I did I: I’ll
185tell you what I do do, though: if I think of something
I give it a whirl: if it comes off, well, it’s
merciful: if it doesn’t, I still can’t throw it away,
but I keep it around hoping it will flare out or up eventually:
join or form and join a local group where you can share
190your poems, see what others are doing: every now
and then read a good poem, if you can find one you didn’t write
yourself: I’m interested in you: but I can’t, since
there’s one of me and fourteen billion of you, answer
all the letters and provide hopeful hints: I say
195there’s only one of me because though every letter
begins “I know you must hear from a lot of people but”
what every letter means is forget about those other
people and give me your undaunted attention: this that
I’m complaining about is not metaphysical: don’t look
200to hear from me: I don’t have the secretary, the
postage, or the know-how to come back at you: believe
me: why is it that doctors expect to be paid for their
time and lawyers and bowling coaches for their
time but nobody expects to pay a poet: I guess poets
_________
205are supposed to be so used to poverty they don’t need
any money: I suggest you send your poems to Galway
Kinnell who knows a lot about the art of poetry or to
Richard Howard who can afford the postage: don’t send
to John Hollander who knows so much about the art of
210poetry you wouldn’t understand a thing he said:
what gets you around here are the raunchy, skinny
bellies of coeds with the pear-like rump rondure
sloping the dinky-little bicycle seats: wouldn’t
it be fun to be leather: such starvation, what
215gauntness of sinew and vein, what personal hairpullings
and twistings with the sheets, what hold-overs and
backorders, what lineations described with delight’s
elaboration, what fingers in the mind twiddling, flicking,
what sudden bombastic progressions and reversals, what
220braidings and upbraidings of the rope of the self, what
profiles, weights, curvings inward and outward, what a
time I’m going to have with women’s movements, Adrienne
is going to give me the sullen, if understanding and
patient, eye and then burst into an oratorio of
225verse-like abuse! Denise is off there by herself, now:
she won, her victory our embarrassment: how I wish I
would hear from her! what old-style men wanted of women
was to get them down, fill them up, and go play golf,
leaving the ladies to simmer in fruitfulness, wondering
230what hit them, drenching and draining: new-style men
have to remember that ladies like to play golf, too:
_________
a quaint plainness with full-scale cool reservation and
qualification qualifying qualification, rhythm undecided,
and explosive small gesturing: somewhere in there is
235the truly heroic scale, the mind at a sufficient standstill,
the underview amounting to a wide cancellation like
space: oh, if only one could get to it, without
meanwhile raising a bristle! how delightful to be so
accomplished you’re completely unread! practically too
240much to imagine with coolness: well, it’s the 4th or
firth of forth and last night’s storm cleared the air
which, however, filled the highways this morning, every
other Philadelphian coming down to regard the waves
and the other Philadelphians: what a herculean act of the
245imagination to imagine Philadelphia imagining itself in America!
you could draw a sharp line around Philadelphia, take it out,
and no one, not even non-Philadelphian, would notice:
I guess it’s because so much of our heritage is buried
there: a prayer for flatness: what do
250you do with flatness: you can’t pray for it, prayer
too much into high rise: you could say, today I’m to be
flattened out on the floor of the self’s sills:
sublime (or counter sublime) as I am, I walk back from
the beach by all the bathing beauties and bathing boys,
255and by the older folks in good houses, and I feel like
a bit of country trash, a splint of nothing washed up on
the planks of time, and I feel impressed that all those
people have made something important of themselves with
_________
less cloth, probably, than I hav
e: I hand it to them
260(the importance, but I would also hand them the cloth)
and think, how nice for you, you’ve found a suitable,
dense smallness of the exact gravity and grist of your
body, and there you are, unfloatingly answering the
universe, that is, being integral with it and paying it
265no mind: I found a dime on the way back: that’s the
interest on two dollars for a whole year or maybe the
interest on a million dollars for a second: the faucets
here have water misty with microwaterbubbles, milky
in look: I fill a glass and, though trash, go ga-ga,
270marveling, something I do circumspectedly and limitedly
these days: the bottom starts to clear as the bubbles
rise and pretty soon you start to hear a fizz, specks
of peppery water flying off the surface: and when the
fizz is wildest, a motion counterclockwise commences,
275as if the motion in the airiness could take hold or
express itself better: then I observe that the bubbles
don’t break in a continuous fizz but rapidly flash in
patches big as your index fingerprint: when nearly all
the bubbles are gone, the motion ends and fringe reefs,
280as around atolls, stand like a long foam: I figure with
precise instruments, I could discover a lot, quite