by A. R. Ammons
“Winter Sanctuaries”: No date of composition, but Ammons recorded a date of revision as January 3, 1979. First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (May–June 1979). The poem appears here as it did in RSP, with “twigends” in line 3 revised to “twig-ends,” and with “where shaken maple seed cling” in line 5 revised to “where maple seeds, shaken, cling.”
“Hollows”: Oct. 1976. As revised for RSP. In WH, the poem appeared as follows, under the title “Planes”:
The whirlwind lifts
sand to
hide holy
spun
emptiness or erect a
tall announcement
where formed
emptiness is to be found
“Volitions”: Oct. 21, 1976. First appeared in Sparrow, no. 1 (Fall 1979).
“Providence”: July 16, 1974. First appeared in Vineland [NJ] Times Journal, July 25, 1974, section 1, p. 6.
“Going Without Saying”: June 25, 1979.
“Devastation”: June 7, 1979.
“Pairing”: Nov. 18, 1972. First appeared in Brim, no. 4 (Fall 1975).
“Rivulose”: June 10, 1978. First published in Science 84 (July–August 1984).
§
LAKE EFFECT COUNTRY
Lake Effect Country was published by W. W. Norton in 1983, and was dedicated to “Edwin G. Wilson, friend’s friend”—a reference to Ed Wilson’s wife, the poet Emily Herring Wilson. The title, which has sometimes been misprinted as “Lake Country Effect,” refers to a phenomenon familiar to residents of Ithaca and elsewhere in western New York: “lake effect” snow, which is produced by cold air moving over the warmer water of the Great Lakes or the Finger Lakes, and which is often intense, bringing significant accumulations.
“The Bright Side”: May 11, 1981.
“Zero and Then Some”: Mar. 22, 1981. LEC credits first publication to The Green River Review.
“Localizing”: Feb. 14, 1981. LEC credits first publication to The Poetry Miscellany.
“Theories of Height”: Feb. 12, 1982.
“The Spiral Rag”: Feb. 10, 1980. First published in The Manhattan Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 1980).
“The Fairly High Assimilation Rag”: Feb. 10, 1980. First published in The Manhattan Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 1980).
“I Could Not Be Here At All”: Nov. 28, 1981. LEC credits first publication to Ubu.
“Written Water”: Nov. 13, 1981. Line 3: Following TS, “stated” is here corrected to “sated.” The English poet John Keats (1795–1821) suggested that his epitaph be “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
“Retiring”: July 1, 1981. LEC credits first publication to The Poetry Miscellany.
“Nature Poetry”: Sept. 20, 1981. First published in Pembroke Magazine, no. 14 (1982).
“Holding Still”: Mar. 31, 1975.
“Windy Morning with a Little Sleet”: Jan. 30, 1982.
“Playback”: Mar. 20, 1981.
“Positive Edges”: July 12, 1981.
“On Being”: Dec. 15, 1981.
“By the Boulder Cluster the Wind”: Mar. 6, 1976. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (Autumn 1977).
“Instancing”: May 26, 1974.
“Apologetics”: Mar. 14, 1975.
“Songlet”: May 29, 1981. LEC credits first publication to The Grapevine. The poem appears here as in RSP, with no hyphen in “preempted” (line 4).
“Is the Only Enough None”: Jan. 7, 1982.
“Giving up Words with Words”: May 1, 1981. Although the title appeared correctly in LEC’s table of contents, above the poem itself the title’s third word was printed as “Word.” The error was corrected for SP86 and is likewise here, following the TS for LEC.
“Settling Up”: July 22, 1975.
“Negative Pluses”: Apr. 2, 1979. First published in The American Scholar, Winter 1979–80.
“Yadkin Picnic”: May 11, 1975. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1982. Thanks to Emily Wilson for identifying Jane and Pat Kelly as Winston-Salem friends of the Ammonses; the Kellys invited them to picnics at their cabin on the Yadkin River, about thirty minutes north of the city.
“Laces”: May 28, 1977. Line 11: Following TS, “elm’s” is restored to “elms.”
“The Only Way Around Is Through”: May 11, 1978.
“Exchangers”: Nov. 18, 1972.
“Lips Twisted with Thirst”: Aug. 18, 1953.
“The Eclipse Goes by Drawing”: Jan. 29, 1953.
“Dusk Water”: July 30, 1979. First appeared as a broadside published by Palaemon Press, 1980.
“Pet Panther”: May 3, 1981.
“Singling & Doubling Together”: Oct. 13, 1973. First appeared (as “Singling and Doubling Together”) in Poetry, Oct. 1982. Although the poem’s title was correct in LEC’s table of contents, above the poem itself the title’s first word was given as “Singing,” without the l. The error was corrected when the poem was reprinted in SP86 and is likewise here, following the TS for LEC.
“Love’s Motions”: Apr. 9, 1977.
“Coming Round”: Aug. 18, 1972.
“We, We Ourselves”: Nov. 1981.
“Measuring Points”: Apr. 12, 1975.
“Section”: Sept. 28, 1974.
“Spring Vacation”: Apr. 9, 1974.
“Meeting Place”: Mar. 7, 1981. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1982.
§
SUMERIAN VISTAS
Sumerian Vistas was published by W. W. Norton in 1987.
“The Ridge Farm”: First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 36, no. 1 (Spring 1983). The sequence consists of excerpts of various unpublished poems held at Cornell. In the acknowledgments to SV, Ammons credits Jerald Bullis with making the selections for the sequence. There is no available author’s TS for the poem; for SV, Norton used tear sheets of the poem’s publication in The Hudson Review.
In SV, the numeral 9 was missing from the beginning of that section; it is restored here. Lines 731–32: Jerald and Fran Bullis, with Phyllis Ammons. Mecklenburg is a hamlet a few miles west of Ithaca. Line 999 (in section 42): The spellings “mucous” (as a noun, instead of “mucus”) and “lange” (instead of “langue”) are documented in the Oxford English Dictionary, and so they stand here: Ammons sometimes preferred earlier spellings. Line 1006: The misprint “relevation” is restored to “revelation,” following the TS of “Minutiae Is,” the unpublished poem from which section 42 is excerpted.
“Questionable Procedures”: Sept. 9, 1979.
“20 January”: First appeared (as “Twenty January”) in The Nation, Dec. 18, 1976.
“Loft”: Aug. 5, 1984. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 34, no. 3 (1985).
“Chiseled Clouds”: Sept. 19–20, 1983. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 34, no. 3 (1985).
“Scaling Desire”: Aug. 11, 1978.
“Tertiaries”: May 18, 1974. First appeared in Bound, no. 2 (Apr. 1987).
“Upper Limits”: Dec. 22, 1984.
“Laboratory Materials”: Aug. 21, 1978.
“A Tendency to Ascendancy”: Dec. 1974.
“Information Density”: Aug. 31, 1979. Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) was an American literary critic and literary theorist; his books include The Philosophy of Literary Form (first published in 1941) and Language as Symbolic Action (1966).
“Stone Keep”: May 9, 1965.
“Autonomy”: Apr. 9, 1981. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Backcasting”: Feb. 20, 1974. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Dominion”: Apr. 20, 1979.
“Hairy Belly”: July 12, 1981. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Entranceways”: Jan. 25, 1983. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Dominant Margins”: Apr. 8, 1985.
“Power Plays”: Apr. 15, 1969.
“Target”: Oct. 7, 1974.
“Postulation”: Aug. 18, 1979.
“Subsidiary Roles”: Nov. 5, 1978.
“Remembering Old Caves”: May 7, 1979. First appeared in Bound, no. 2 (Apr. 1987).
“The Dwelling”: Mar. 21, 1979. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“The Hubbub”: Jan. 17, 1983. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Red Shift”: May 12, 1985. In physics, a redshift is an object’s shift toward the red (i.e., longer wavelength) end of its visible spectrum as the distance between it and the observer increases.
“Saving Spending”: Apr. 3–4, 1982.
“Long Sorrowing”: Apr. 3, 1982. First appeared in The New Yorker, Oct. 20, 1986.
“Eidos”: Mar. 7, 1981. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine no. 18 (1986). The title is a Greek word, pronounced EYE-doss, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “form, type, idea.” It figures importantly in the work of both Plato and Aristotle.
“A Way Away”: Mar. 21, 1984.
“Pots and Pans”: July 11, 1981. First appeared in Raritan, vol. 4, no. 1 (Summer 1984).
“Earliest Recollection”: Feb. 26, 1981.
“Liquidities”: May 27, 1979. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Surgeons”: July 7, 1985.
“Motion’s Holdings”: July 20, 1985.
“Burnout in the Overshoot”: Sept. 10, 1979. First appeared (as “Burn Out in the Overshoot”) in Epoch, vol. 33, no. 3 (Summer–Autumn 1984).
“Telling Moves”: Apr. 30, 1979. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine no. 18 (1986).
“Coming Round”: Oct. 16, 1984. First appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3 (Spring 1985).
“Recoveries”: First appeared in Raritan, vol. 4, no. 1 (Summer 1984).
“Trivial Means”: Apr. 1979. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Tracing Out”: June 1982. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 34, no. 3 (1985).
“Some Any”: May 14, 1975. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Memory”: Feb. 2, 1968.
“Sight Seed”: Apr. 21, 1978. First appeared in Raritan, vol. 4, no. 1 (Summer 1984).
“Citified”: Feb. 24, 1974.
§
PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS FROM THE REALLY SHORT POEMS OF A. R. AMMONS
The Really Short Poems was published by W. W. Norton in 1990, and was dedicated to Ammons’s wife Phyllis; to Ingrid Arneson, a poet and translator who taught in Cornell’s English for Academic Purposes program; to the Nobel Prize-winning Cornell chemistry professor Roald Hoffmann, also a poet; to the poet Phyllis Janowitz, Ammons’s colleague in Cornell’s English Department; to Cynthia Bond, David Burak, Augustus Carleton, and Jean West, all poets who earned the MFA at Cornell; to the poet and translator Stephen Tapscott, who earned a PhD in English from Cornell (and whose first name is here corrected from the misspelling “Steven”); and to John Benedict, Ammons’s longtime editor at Norton who had died earlier in 1990.
In his article on the poet in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Roger Gilbert shares in detail Ammons’s explanation to him of the book’s chiastic structure. In essence, the book weaves together two alphabetized sequences of the poems—alphabetized based not on their titles, but on their first lines. The poet then made adjustments where he was dissatisfied with the results of that technique. Following is the order of the poems as they appeared in the book, with bold type indicating those collected for the first time:
Weathering • Release • After Yesterday • Recovery • Hype • Increment • Sitting Down, Looking Up • Mirrorment • Over and Done With • Attention • Double Exposure • Turning • Weight • Cousins • Trigger • Reflective • Equilibrations • Second Party • Digging Wonder • Tryst • Success Story • Glacials • Stoning Stone • Triplet • Substantial Planes • North Street • Spaceship • Settlement • Spruce Woods • Self • I Went Back • Deaf Zone • Coming To • Natives • Precious Weak Fields • Scarecrow • Lofty • Immediacy • Filling in the Dots • Figuring Belief • Wiring • Crinkling Trails • Transducer • Sizing • Bride • Cracking a Few Hundred Million Years • Oblivion’s Bloom • Soul’s Seas • Correction • Clarifications • Celestial Dealings • Waking • Glass Specialty • Small Song • Pedagogy Agog • Touching • Planet Actions • Holding On • Worky Shallows • Hollows • Still Frame • Timing • This • Spring Tornado • Bottommost • Time Spans • Crow Ride • Roundel • Calling • That Day • Poetry to the Rescue • Soaker • Miss • Merchandise • Ah • Transfer • Fortitude • Pebble’s Story • Providence • Whitelash of Air Rapids • Meeting the Opposition • Late November • Photosynthesis • Leaning Up • Winter Sanctuaries • Anxiety • Twangs & Little Twists • Winter Scene • Bay Bank • Night Post • Late Look • Mediation • Grove’s Way • Nearing Equinox • Circling Splinters • Squall Ball • Rainy Morning • Teleology • Negligence These Days • Down Low • Exotic • Chasm • Theory Center • Around Here • Progress Report • Catch • Night Chill • Salute • Shading Flight In • Snow Roost • Glass Globe • For Doyle Fosso • The Scour • Grisly Grit • Reading • One Thing and Another • Enough • Close Relations • Recording • Spring Clearing • Resurrections • Poem • Juice • Camels • Course Work • Gardening • Quit That • Swoggled • Likely Story • Market Adviser • Stills • Bulletin • The Upshot • Milepost • Coming Right Up • Their Sex Life • Kingpin • Cleavage • Kith • Imaginary Number • Layabout • Resolve • Cold Rheum • The Mark • Immoderation • Blue Skies • Utensil • Reorganization • Preexistence • Undersea • Permanence • Songlet • Coward • Interference • Orchard • Lost and Found • Communication • Modality • Capture • For Louise and Tom Gossett
“Weathering”: No date of composition given, but Ammons gives February 14, 1983, as a date of revision.
“Hype”: June 26, 1988.
“Over and Done With”: First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Cousins”: July 29, 1966.
“Tryst”: Aug. 10, 1966.
“Substantial Planes”: 1985.
“Scarecrow”: Apr. 17, 1986.
“Filling in the Dots”: Jan. 15, 1977.
“Crinkling Trails”: Dec. 22, 1985.
“Cracking a Few Hundred Million Years”: First appeared in The Manhattan Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring 1990).
“Waking”: May 1985.
“Glass Specialty”: Apr. 15, 1989.
“Still Frame”: Oct. 27, 1984.
“Spring Tornado”: Apr. 16, 1968. First appeared in New Letters, vol. 50, nos. 2–3 (Winter–Spring 1984).
“That Day”: Another, probably earlier version, titled “Everything,” appeared posthumously in The Paris Review, no. 165 (Spring 2003):
You came one day and
as usual in such matters
significance filled everything—
your eyes, the things you
knew, the way you turned,
leaned, stood, or sat,
this way or that: when
you left, the area around here rose
a tilted tide, and everything that
offers desolation drained away.
“Everything” was published with a note: “This poem was found after the poet’s death on the back of an envelope from Helen Vendler, November 28, 1981.” That envelope’s whereabouts are now unknown.
“Ah”: First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1987).
“Whitelash of Air Rapids”: Aug. 26, 1982. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 34, no. 3 (1985).
“Leaning Up”: June 7, 1975.
“Night Post”: Apr. 1975. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Late Look”: First appeared in Mississippi Review, vol. 7, no. 3 (Fall 1978).
“Grove’s Way”: Sept. 28, 1977. The poem first appeared in RSP, but also appeared later in Brink Road.
“Negligence These Days”: June
13, 1985.
“Theory Center”: See the note on the “Teeth Out” section of The Snow Poems.
“Grisly Grit”: “year unknown / probably January.”
“Spring Clearing”: Mar. 26, 1981. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Course Work”: “late ’76?” First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Swoggled”: 1986. A joking response to William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us.”
“Market Advisor”: Nov. 10, 1984.
“Milepost”: July 25, 1979. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Their Sex Life”: First appeared in Pembroke Magazine no. 18 (1986). Although Ammons usually does not follow the tradition of capitalizing every line’s first letter, the capitalization at the beginning of line 2 in several TSS suggests the capitalization here is not an accident.
“Layabout”: July 17, 1985.
“Resolve”: 1988. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 38, no. 2 (1989).
“Cold Rheum”: First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Reorganization”: Apr. 20, 1979.
“Permanence”: First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Lost and Found”: Sept. 29, 1962.
“Capture”: Feb. 26, 1974.
§
GARBAGE
Published by W. W. Norton in 1993, Garbage won Ammons his second National Book Award. The book also won the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.
Sections 1–5 first appeared (as “Garbage”) in The American Poetry Review, Mar.–Apr. 1992. They were reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1993, edited by Louise Glück; The Best of The Best American Poetry 1988–1997, edited by Harold Bloom; and also in The Best of The Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, edited by Robert Pinsky.
Section 6 first appeared (as “Radiant Days”) in CrossRoads: A Journal of Southern Culture vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1992). Section 11 first appeared (as “Going Places”) in Pearl, no. 14 (Winter 1993).
For The Best American Poetry 1993, Ammons wrote the following note:
I wrote Garbage in the late spring of 1989. Because of some medical problems that developed soon after the poem was written, I didn’t send it anywhere for a long time. The American Poetry Review very generously accepted it but because of a backlog had to delay publication for a while. By Capote’s view, the poem is typing, not writing. I wrote it for my own distraction, improvisationally: I used a wide roll of adding machine tape and tore off the sections in lengths of a foot or more. The whole poem is over eighty pages long, so I sent only the first five sections to APR. Norton published the whole poem as a book in 1993. I’ve gone over and over my shorter poems to try to get them right, but alternating with work on short poems, I have since the sixties also tried to get some kind of rightness into improvisations. The arrogance implied by getting something right the first time is incredible, but no matter how much an ice-skater practices, when she hits the ice it’s all a one-time event: there are falls, of course, but when it’s right, it seems to have been right itself.