The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
Page 81
“Strings”: First appeared in Tar River Poetry, vol. 28, no. 1 (Fall 1988).
“Winding Up”: Sept. 19, 1979.
“Middling Seasons”: Apr. 6, 1979. First appeared in The Yale Review, vol. 80, no. 4 (Oct. 1992).
“Obsession”: Mar. 10, 1984. First appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989).
“Anger Tangle”: Nov. 26, 1972.
“The Deep Slow”: Jan. 19, 1974. First appeared in The Nation, Dec. 18, 1976. It also appeared in Grand Street, vol. 7, no. 4 (Summer 1988); BR acknowledged only the Grand Street appearance.
“Saying Saying Away”: First appeared in Poetry, June 1996.
“Line Drawings”: Dec. 5, 1984.
“Prey”: First appeared in Poetry, Jan. 1996. In Poetry the poem appeared with the dedication “For Louise and Tom”; see the note on “For Louise and Tom Gossett” in Highgate Road.
“The Category of Last Resort”: Apr. 1–2, 1975.
“The Clenched-Jaw School”: First appeared in Poetry, June 1996.
“Ceppagna”: First appeared in The New Yorker, Mar. 21, 1988. Ceppagna (pronounced che-PAN-ya) is an inland Italian village, southeast of Rome and north of Naples.
“Pit Lines”: Sept. 9, 1979. First appeared in St. Andrews Review, no. 34 (Spring–Summer 1988).
“Silvering Shadow”: May 4, 1969. Line 2: Following TS, a period at line’s end is corrected to a comma.
“Abscission”: Nov. 1985. First appeared (as “The Separation”) in St. Andrews Review, no. 34 (Spring–Summer 1988).
“Microinscriptions”: Jan. 18, 1981. First appeared (as “Time’s Times Again”) in Science 84.
“Readings by Ways”: Mar. 28, 1975. First appeared in Partisan Review, vol. 55, no. 4 (Fall 1988). Lines 19–20: The advice to “live unknown” is attributed to “the old philosopher” Epicurus (Greek, 341–270 BC).
“Abandon”: Oct. 3, 1976.
“Local Antiquities”: Sept. 13, 1973. First appeared in Poetry, Apr. 1996.
“Changing Stations”: Nov. 10, 1981. First appeared in The Moosehead Review, no. 6 (1982).
“Collapsed Structures”: First appeared in Poetry, Apr. 1996.
“Flat Rock”: First appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, no. 5 (1996).
“Flurries”: Feb. 22, 1985.
“The Deep End”: Jan. 29, 1986. First appeared in Poetry, Apr. 1996.
“Tenacities”: Apr. 15, 1969.
“Blues in the Valley”: Mar. 13, 1977. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (Spring 1993).
“Packaging”: Jan. 1, 1974.
“Serpent Country”: Aug. 18, 1982. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 33, no. 1 (Autumn–Winter 1983).
“Evasive Actions”: Mar. 14, 1982. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Tenure’s Pleasures”: First appeared in Abraxas, no. 37 (1988). Curiously, Ammons gives a date of “2Feb89” on a TS of the poem while it was still in process: the title of that draft is “The Pleasures of Tenure,” the first letter is lowercase (as is often the case in his early drafts), and there are some handwritten revisions.
“Period”: First appeared in Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry & Prose, no. 20 (Summer 1993).
“The Crystal Tree”: Mar. 14, 1982. First appeared in The Paris Review, no. 127 (Summer 1993).
“A Pretty Looking Sight”: First appeared in Bluefish, vol. 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1983).
“Focus”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (May–June 1979). In line 18, “peoples’ ” is here corrected to “people’s.”
“Painlessness, to Pain, Is Paradise”: Oct. 27, 1985.
“Eternity’s Taciturnity”: Aug. 13, 1993. Line 17: Enkidu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, is a wild man living among animals before he becomes Gilgamesh’s companion. See the notes to O’s “Coming to Sumer” and “Gilgamesh Was Very Lascivious.”
“Boon”: Mar. 20, 1988. First appeared in The New Republic, Aug. 1, 1988.
“Walking About in the Evening”: Aug. 1979. First appeared (as “Walking Around in the Evening”) in The Cornell Review, no. 7 (Fall 1979). Reprinted (again as “Walking Around in the Evening”) in The Walking Magazine, Feb.–Mar. 1988, where the poem was mistakenly described as appearing in print for the first time. BR acknowledged only the Cornell Review appearance. In line 11 “millenia” is here corrected to “millennia.”
“Museums”: First appeared in Partisan Review, vol. 58, no. 1 (Winter 1991).
“Second-Rate Perfection”: July 1, 1981. First appeared in Banyan, vol. 1 (1990). In BR, magazine publication was mistakenly credited to The Hudson Review.
“The Planet That Was There”: Nov. 28, 1993. The title recalls “The Planet on the Table,” a late poem by Wallace Stevens (1879–1955).
“Safe”: Oct. 31, 1965.
“Reading Ta’o Chien”: May 7, 1979. First appeared in The Southern Review, vol. 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1994). The recluse Ta’o Chien (365–427), whose name is also transliterated as Tao Qian, ranks among China’s greatest poets. He is sometimes referred to as Tao Yuanming.
“An Improvisation for Soot and Suet”: First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1991.
“Reckless Endangerment”: Oct. 28, 1984.
“Swimming Night”: Dec. 3, 1984.
“Ontology Precedes Teleology”: Mar. 28, 1985. First appeared in Skylark, no. 17 (1988–89).
“Disclaimer”: June 29, 1993.
“Spike-Tooth Harrows”: First appeared in The Yale Review, vol. 80, no. 4 (Oct. 1992).
“Picking Where Out of When”: June 2, 1979.
“Odysseus for Eva Maria Rodtwitt”: Dec. 4, 1974. Rodtwitt, long a lecturer in French at Wake Forest, was there when Ammons served as a visiting professor during the 1974–75 school year. The title appears here as it does in BR and in TS—with the prepositional phrase included as part of the title, rather than as a separate dedication.
“High Desiring”: First appeared (as “The High Desiring”) in The Grapevine’s Finger Lakes Magazine, Winter 1986–87.
“The Damned”: First appeared in The Yale Review, vol. 77, no. 3 (Spring 1988). Reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1990, edited by Jorie Graham.
Ammons wrote a long comment to accompany the poem’s BAP appearance. The following excerpt is the portion dealing specifically with the poem:
In “The Damned,” based, I imagine, on some photo of the Himalayan peaks, I found engaged my worry about what might be called “innocent guilt,” something akin to but probably not the same thread as original sin. In the hierarchy of peaks the sainted summits, let’s say, are not in spite of their height and purity innocent of the damnation of the lesser peaks, those that lack the majesty of thin air. We, as people, cannot be disentangled from the network of humanity, even though we have not intended to rise at the expense of others, and we are not free of an obligation to others, even if others are incapable of adding anything to us: I won’t play out the disposition of the whole poem into exposition, except to note my dissatisfaction with the last line, which seems to me vulgar in its strong play. A quieter line is needed. And to say that the lower summits may have compensations of their own powerful enough to cast the highest summits as the damned.
In The Yale Review and BAP, “The Damned” ended with “the fellow” experiencing “longing / for the valleys roaring in his guts.” For BR, Ammons revised that to “longing / for the valleys luxuriant in his depths.”
“What Was That Again”: First appeared in The Ohio Review, no. 41 (1988).
“Prisons There and Not”: May 19, 1985. First appeared in Tar River Poetry, vol. 33, no. 1 (Fall 1993).
“Moving Figures”: Oct. 12, 1982. First appeared in Tar River Poetry, vol. 33, no. 1 (Fall 1993).
“All’s All”: Nov. 4, 1985. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1988.
“Hard and Fast”: Oct. 21, 1976. First appeared (as “Coming Clearing”) in Poetry, Oct. 1988.
“So Long, Descartes”: Nov. 26, 1986. Ammons celebrates an understand
ing of reality as being fluid and dynamic, with the spiritual and the material united. He suggests that such a view prevailed before the work of the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), and that recent developments have enabled the restoration of a pre-Cartesian worldview.
“Marginals”: Jan. 6, 1979. First appeared (as “Taking Place”) in Verse, no. 4 (1985).
“Day Ghosts”: Mar. 14, 1982. First appeared in The New Yorker, Apr. 15, 1985. There the final quatrain reads as follows:
and the eyes of jonquils
hold on to their morning
tears and demure snowdrops
try not to look so bright.
For BR, in addition to adding an “a” before “windy Sunday” in line 5, Ammons revised the final quatrain thus:
and the eyes of jonquils as if
hold on to their morning
tears and snowdrops, head down,
try not to look so bright.
He seems to have intended that “as if” to mean “seem to,” but the result is stymieing: the clause becomes, “the eyes of jonquils as if / hold on to their morning / tears.” For this edition, there seem to be three options: to print the text as he last revised it, despite a violation of normal syntax so jarring as to ruin the poem; to adopt the New Yorker text, ignoring all the poet’s later revisions; or to adopt all the post-New Yorker revisions except for that “as if.” I have chosen the third option, but the above discussion gives readers the information they need to reconstruct the other two.
“Next to Nothing”: May 16, 1985.
“For My Beloved Son”: First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (Spring 1993).
“Same Old Story”: Feb. 16, 1978.
“Appendix”: The poem appears here as it does both in Ammons’s TS and in BR. The sentence structure goes awry after line 7: the word “but” should be followed by “of what he.” Normally very careful with syntax, Ammons may have liked a tangle in a poem about an expert untangler, the escape artist Harry Houdini (1874–1926), meeting his end. Houdini died of peritonitis and a ruptured appendix.
“Stand-In”: First appeared as a broadside by James Tyler’s Larch Tree Press, Apr. 1994.
“Rarities”: Mar. 6, 1977. First appeared as a broadside by James Tyler’s Larch Tree Press, Apr. 1994.
“Old Geezer”: Sept. 30, 1985.
“Financial Services”: Mar. 11, 1978.
“Rolling Reality”: Jan. 1, 1974. Line 7: Following TS, “knowledlge” is here corrected to “knowledge.”
“Thresher”: Dec. 26, 1977.
“Putting on Airs”: Apr. 9, 1988. First appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, June 19, 1992. (BR mistakenly credits The New Republic.) Line 14: The ancient Greek city Halicarnassus was located on the west coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey.
“Superstars”: Jan. 12, 1975. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Standing on the Corner Watching All the Wheels Go By”: May 23, 1993.
“Home Place”: Sept. 10, 1972. The dedicatee is probably George P. Elliott (1918–1980), who taught in Cornell’s English Department before Ammons’s arrival, and with whom Ammons corresponded. A George P. Elliott Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose appeared in 1992.
“Nitty Gritty”: Apr. 12, 1975.
“Enfield Falls”: Dec. 7, 1988. First appeared in The Gettysburg Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (Spring 1989). Enfield Falls, also called Lower Falls, is at the foot of Enfield Glen in Robert H. Treman State Park, near Ithaca.
“The Many Ways Not Supreme”: First appeared in Chelsea, no. 55 (1993).
“Death and Silhouettes”: First appeared in The Paris Review, no. 127 (Summer 1993).
“Fall’s End”: First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1987).
“A Part for the Whole”: First appeared in Southwest Review, vol. 74, no. 1 (Winter 1989).
“Lofty Calling”: Oct. 27, 1974. First appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989). A specialist in Chaucer, Robert Shorter taught in Wake Forest’s English Department from 1958 to 1999.
“Weightlessness”: First appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989).
“Rosy Transients”: Jan 8, 1982. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“The Incomplete Life”: First appeared in The Ohio Review, no. 41 (1988).
“Chosen Roads”: First appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1992.
“Summer Place”: Undated, but internal evidence (see note to line 319) suggests the poem was written in 1975. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer 1977). In line 846, a period after “one” has been deleted, following TS.
Lines 174–76: The references are to the celebrated American poets James Merrill (1926–1995), John Ashbery (b. 1927), and W. S. Merwin (b. 1927).
Lines 206–10: The reference is to another trio of eminent American poets of Ammons’s generation: Galway Kinnell (1927–2014), Richard Howard (b. 1929), and John Hollander (1929–2013).
Lines 222–27: The two poets Ammons mentions here, like those referred to earlier, are Americans of his generation who by the early 1970s had been widely acclaimed as major poets. Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), like Ammons, was long published by W. W. Norton. His friendship and correspondence with British-born Denise Levertov (1923–1997) is documented and intelligently considered by Kevin McGuirk in An Image for Longing.
Lines 240–41: Ammons means July 4, Independence Day. The Firth of Forth is the estuary of the River Forth in Scotland.
Line 319: The reference to 199 years of independence suggests the poem was written in 1975, the year before the U.S. Bicentennial.
Lines 370–71: The car and truck manufacturer General Motors flourished throughout Ammons’s lifetime. A few months before “Summer Place” was published in The Hudson Review, Anaconda Copper Mining Company was bought by Atlantic Richfield Company; it ceased production in the early 1980s. Kennecott (now Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation) has continued to be a major copper mining business.
Line 459: By the mid-1970s, Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) had been widely regarded as an important poet for twenty years, and the younger Diane Wakoski (b. 1937) was beginning to make her name.
Lines 466–67: The Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) married the much younger Georgie Hyde-Lees (1892–1968), whom he called “George.”
Lines 564–67: Late in life, the American poet Wallace Stevens went to great lengths to learn about his family history.
Line 573: Amenhotep was the name of four kings of ancient Egypt; a major official under Amenhotep III also bore the name.
Line 578: After the death of the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), Yeats told his sister, “I am King of the Cats.”
Line 660: “Au contraire” (pronounced oh kohntrayr) is French for “on the contrary.”
Line 664: The reference is to the Palace of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris.
Lines 666–67: In the mid-1970s, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was predominantly a working-class neighborhood.
Line 716: Dean Martin (1917–1995) was a popular singer, actor, and TV variety show host.
Line 840: “Steets” is here corrected to “streets,” following TS.
Line 870–73: While Ammons held a visiting appointment at Wake Forest in 1974–75, the Ammons family lived on Royall Drive, near the edge of campus. Their Ithaca home was on Hanshaw Road.
Lines 976ff.: Ammons’s father spent time in just such conditions, as diabetes had led to the amputation of both legs: one in 1962 and the other in 1966, shortly before he died. See part 15 of Garbage for the poet’s recollection of seeing his father in the hospital.
Line 1037: Ammons refers to Pauline Phillips’ widely syndicated advice column, “Dear Abby.” (Phillips’ pseudonym was Abigail Van Buren.)
Line 1078: The animated prehistoric comedy The Flintstones originally aired in prime time on ABC from 1960 to 1966.
; §
GLARE
Glare was published by W. W. Norton in 1997.
Section 1 appeared (as “From Strip”) in The Paris Review, no. 139 (Summer 1996). Reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1997, edited by James Tate, and again in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997, edited by Harold Bloom. Sections 66–72 appeared (as “Scat Scan”) in Epoch, vol. 46, no. 1 (1997).
The Cornell archive holds the book’s original TS, which, like that of Garbage, is typed on adding-machine tape; that TS is here designated TS1. Cornell also holds a photocopy with handwritten revisions, and that is here designated TS2.
Only two sections of Glare are dated. Section 4 is dated June 23, 1995, and section 73 is dated April 23, 1996.
As Roger Gilbert explains in his essay “Möbius Meets Satchmo: Mixed Metaphor as Form and Vision in Glare” (in Steven P. Schneider’s Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A. R. Ammons’s Long Poems), while the sections of Scat Scan appear in their order of composition, those of Strip do not. Gilbert suggests that Ammons’s renumbering of them is analogous to the looping, folded-over surface of a Möbius strip.
Section no. in TS2 and in Glare as published
Section no. in TS1
1
66
2
missing
3
65
4
2
5
64
6
3
7
63
8
4
9
14, then 21
10
62
11
5
12
61
13
6
14
60
15
7
16
59
17
8
18
58
19
9