by A. R. Ammons
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Section no. in TS2 and in Glare as published
Section no. in TS1
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Part One: Strip
Section 1:
In a note accompanying this section’s reprint in The Best American Poetry 1997, Ammons says,
I decided to write a poem on a strip of tape so narrow that the chief subject of the (whole) poem would be complaining about how the lines could not be accommodated to so narrow a compass. I realize that this is sort of cute—but in pursuit of a foolish end, I hoped to touch on serious matters of the mind and heart, in passing. This poem is the first number in a longer series of about one hundred fifty pages.
Section 3:
Line 184: The word “cattybiarsoned” is a regional word meaning “askew, disordered.” See the note to “A Seventeen Morning &” in The Snow Poems.
Section 4:
Section dated June 23, 1995.
Section 8:
Line 395: The Roman poet Horace says in his Ars Poetica (“The Art of Poetry”) that even the great Homer sometimes “nods” drowsily—i.e., writes passages that fall short of excellence. Alexander Pope later counters in “An Essay on Criticism” that the fault lies not in Homer, but in his readers: “Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.”
Section 9:
The Cornell archive holds a handwritten draft of this section on the back of a bag from Fay’s Drugs.
Section 12:
Line 617: The French phrase tout de suite (pronounced TOO-de-SWEET) means “right away.”
Section 13:
Line 649: The spelling of “flare” here instead of the expected “flair” may be a pun, one suggesting the creative spark between “slush and spirit.”
Section 16:
Lines 797–98: About three-quarters of a mile in diameter, Arizona’s Barringer Crater (often referred to as Meteor Crater) was formed by the impact of a meteorite about 50,000 years ago.
Section 22:
Line 1159: Poet Phyllis Janowitz, a colleague in the Cornell English Department.
Section 26:
Line 1330: TS’s “anyway” is here corrected to “any way,” for clarity’s sake.
Section 30:
Line 1521: Owego, New York, is a village south of Ithaca, not far from the Pennsylvania line. For Brink Road, see Ammons’s note on the title of his previous book of poems.
Line 1523: A comma between “Brink Road” and the opening parenthesis is here deleted. In TS1, Ammons first thought to precede “on the left going / over” with a comma; he then inserted a parenthesis, but then struck that out. He reinserted the parenthesis in TS2 without deleting the comma it replaced.
Section 42:
Line 2189: Highland Road is in Ithaca.
Section 43:
Lines 2215–19: John Ammons puts this episode in the mid 1970s, after the family’s return from Winston-Salem. (They lived there while Ammons taught at Wake Forest in the 1974–75 academic year.) Possibilities for the long poem mentioned include “Summer Place,” which was written in mid-1975, and The Snow Poems, written from late 1975 through early 1976.
Section 47:
Lines 2401–2: The repetition of “the” from the end of one line to the beginning of the next is in both TS1 and TS2. It may be an accident, but it seems just as likely to be a sly joke: surely one would at least stammer briefly after experiencing what the passage describes.
Section 56:
Lines 2720–23: The composition of Glare slightly predates the beginning of major charitable work by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda; see gatesfoundation.org for information about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, formed in 2000.
Early in 2014, Cornell’s Computing and Information Science unit moved into a new building: Bill & Melinda Gates Hall.
Section 64:
Line 3134: “Juste” is here corrected to “justes.”
Part Two: Scat Scan
Section 66:
Lines 3222–23: “Happened / up on” is here corrected to “happened / upon.”
Section 67:
Lines 3262–63: The text here is that of TS1. Ammons revised the passage bafflingly for Glare’s publication: “this conclusion has never // reached my case, nor has it ever it.”
Section 68:
Line 3350: Ammons refers to his living sister Vida Cox.
Section 70:
Line 3433: Ammons refers to the English writer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), whose many achievements include A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
Line 3443: The word “yesterday’s” comes too close to the right margin of TS1 for the s to fit on the tape. Ammons’s handwritten addition of it to the line in TS2 seems to have been misread as placing the s before the apostrophe.
Section 71:
Line 3463: “Peoples’ ” is here corrected to “people’s.”
Line 3491: The words “UP FRONT” are on a second line in Gl as published, but Ammons’s TSS place the entire all-caps conclusion on one line.
Section 73:
Section dated Apr. 23, 1996.
Section 75:
Lines 3675–81: Ammons playfully interprets Robert Frost’s life in terms of Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”
Section 76:
Line 3718: The poet typed to and past the edge of the paper strip. The colon he likely typed is added here in brackets.
Section 77:
Line 3748: As published, Gl had “half assed.” Ammons’s TSS use hyphenated “half-assed,” which is here restored.
Section 78:
Line 3763: The word “charact’ry” (see John Keats’s sonnet “When I Have Fears”) is typed too close to the edge of the tape in TS1 for any punctuation to appear to the right of it, and Ammons added none by hand to TS2. I have added a comma (the likeliest punctuation mark there) in brackets, to clarify the passage.
Line 3795: Published “A.M.” is corrected to Ammons’s TSS’s “a.m.”
Line 3797: Restored is the line’s closing parenthesis, which the poet added by hand to TS1 and retained in TS2, but which was absent from Gl as published.
Section 81:
Lines 3865–66: This is an echo of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” in which the legend
ary Trojan War hero and king of Ithaca declares he will leave the island again to go exploring in his old age: he concludes by resolving “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Section 83:
Lines 3942–45: Archie and Phyllis Ammons adopted their son John.
Section 86:
Line 4048: The title “Love Poem” appeared in all caps in Gl, but has its normal capitalization in TS restored here.
Section 87:
Line 4079: The title “Old Age” appeared in all caps in Gl, but has its normal capitalization in TS restored here.
Section 88:
Lines 4164–65: Compare to the conclusion of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: “But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.”
Section 98:
Line 4483: Ammons’s habitual misspelling “fuchias” is here corrected to “fuchsias.”
Lines 4496–97: As published in Gl, the words “IT REALLY CAN” were centered below line 4496. Here the TS arrangement is restored, with only the word “CAN” in the final line.
Section 101:
Line 4586: Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” observes that “way leads on to way.”
Line 4589: As published in Gl, “BIG PROBLEM” appeared on a separate line. The TS’s arrangement is here restored.
Line 4691: “Other peoples’ ” is here corrected to “other people’s.”
Section 107:
Line 4756: Glenn Altschuler has served as a teacher and an administrator at Cornell since 1981. A professor of American Studies, at the time of the poem’s composition he was also Dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions. In the 2004 Ammons special issue of Epoch (pp. 734–36), he recalls his delight at learning he appeared in the poem.
Line 4760: A comma after “see” is here deleted.
Line 4770: Omitted from publication was a comma Ammons handwrote at line’s end in TS2 (there had been no room for it in TS1). That comma is here restored.
Line 4787: Ammons typed “what-is-to-found,” and the passage appeared thus in Gl. The word “be” is added here in brackets to correct what seems to have been an accidental omission.
Lines 4790–99: The situation here parodies that of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall.” Also, the construction “whose trees these are I wish I knew” echoes “Whose woods these are I think I know” from Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Section 111:
Lines 4882–90: A parody of Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”
Section 112:
Lines 4958–59: In Gl, “SO WELL WATERED” appears as a third all-caps line. Here it is repositioned at the end of line 4958, as it appears in Ammons’s TSS.
Section 115:
Line 5068: “Swath” is here corrected to “swathe.”
Section 117:
Line 5140: In Ammons’s TS this line reads, “to dive the prick into the sodden wetness and.” In a 1997 interview by Mark Dow published at PN Review’s website (pnreview.co.uk), Ammons says he changed the line in response to an objection by his Norton editor, Gerald Howard. Saying, “He’s kind of prudish, I’m afraid, whereas I’m not,” Ammons then immediately admits, “I think it maybe improved the poem, because it would have been too direct, I think, to say it the other way.”
§
FUCKING RIGHT
The chapbook Fucking Right was published in 1999 by Harvard Review as “A Harvard Review Monograph.” The colophon says the edition consisted of 300 copies, but the collection saw little distribution.
“Fucking Right”: First appeared in Harvard Review, no. 14 (Spring 1998).
“Rough Estimate”: In line 3, “somes’ ” is here corrected to “some’s.”
“Old Sweet”: First appeared in Harvard Review, no. 14 (Spring 1998).
“Getting It on Straight”: July 23, 1975.
“Foreshortening”: First appeared in Harvard Review, no. 14 (Spring 1998).
“Outdoor Plumbing”: Feb. 28, 1994.
§
BOSH AND FLAPDOODLE
Bosh and Flapdoodle was published by W. W. Norton in 2005. In a brief preface, John Ammons explains that his father wrote the book’s poems in 1996 and worked on the manuscript until shortly before his death in early 2001. Roger Gilbert has suggested (in his introduction to the 2004 Ammons special issue of Epoch) that the poet’s disappointment at Glare’s sales may have led him to hold off on publishing the collection.
Since Ammons himself did not approve the book’s publication, its representation in this edition calls for some thought. On the one hand, he did see nearly half the book’s sixty-eight poems into print, in such distinguished venues as The American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East, and Slate. On the other hand, of course, that means that a little more than half the book went into print without his final blessing.
One might argue, then, that the manuscript’s poems for which he arranged periodical publication belong in Appendix A, with all the other poems he published in periodicals but did not publish in one of his books; the remaining poems could then go into Appendix B, in recognition of their different status. However, to print the poems thus in different sections would disrupt what is a remarkably coherent manuscript. Also, the final poem’s declaration that “I have done my duty,” its invitation to “come with me, or go off like me, // if only in the deep travels of your soul,” and the suggestion of a final self-assessment (“DRAB POT” reverses to “TOP BARD”) together argue for acknowledging the manuscript’s status as Ammons’s final book.
“A Note of Appreciation” followed the book’s table of contents:
These poems were written in 1996, though my father continued to work on the collection until shortly before he died. No poems have been added or deleted. The order of the poems as well as the title of the book are his. The poems have been left exactly as Ammons wrote them. We have not attempted to change the spelling or sense of his words to conform with standard spelling or usage.
My mother and I are deeply grateful to friends and colleagues of my late father who encouraged us to publish the collection, among them, Mike Abrams, Roald Hoffmann, David Lehman, Ken McClane, Steve Tapscott, our agent Glen Hartley, Norton editor Jill Bialosky and her assistant, Sarah Moriarty, and Emily Wilson for her lively enthusiasm for Ammons’s poetry.
We are especially indebted to Roger Gilbert for his steadfast dedication and help with all aspects of the project, and to Helen Vendler, who so generously read the manuscript, for her guidance and warm response.
—John Ammons
Mill Valley, California
“Fasting”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Reverse Reserve and You Have Reverse”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Surface Effects”: First appeared in Poetry East, no. 4 (Spring 1997).
“Aubade”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). Line 35: Following TS, “on low” is corrected to “onlow.”
“Oil Ode”: First appeared in American Poetry Review, vol. 32, no. 3 (May–June 2003).
“In View of the Fact”: First appeared in Epoch vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). Reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2005, edited by Paul Muldoon.
“Get Over It”: First appeared in Poetry East, no. 4 (Spring 1997).
“Tail Tales”: First appeared in Bosh and Flapdoodle. Alan Brinkley, a historian of twentieth-century America, won the National Book Award for Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982). The reference to “the one on / the New Deal” probably means Brinkley’s The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995). Ammons also refers to the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007) and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006).
“Fuel to the Fire, Ice to the Floe”: First appeared in Poetry East, no. 44 (Spring
1997).
“Suet Pudding, Spotted Dick”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). Line 15: The Old English verb wyrcan means “work,” “make,” “do,” or “carry out.”
“Focal Lengths”: Nov. 11, 1996. First appeared in Poetry East, no. 44 (Spring 1997).
“Sibley Hall”: First appeared in Poetry East, no. 4 (Spring 1997). Hiram Sibley Hall houses Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.
“Good God”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Hooliganism”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998).
“Slacking Off”: One TS of the poem strikes this title and replaces it with handwritten “Agricola, Nauta, Poeta”—Latin for “Farmer, Sailor, Poet.”
“Quibbling the Colossal”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). Ammons addresses his friend the literary and cultural critic Harold Bloom, who responds to this poem in the same issue of Epoch.
“Informing Dynamics”: First appeared in Slate, May 1, 1997.
“Pyroclastic Flows”: First appeared in Orion Magazine, vol. 24, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 2005). A pyroclastic flow is a current of hot gas and rock moving rapidly down the flank of a volcano.
“Squall Lines”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“John Henry”: Line 4 has been unindented, following TS at Cornell.
“Rogue Elephant”: First appeared in The Kenyon Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (Winter 1998).
“Mouvance”: First appeared in The Kenyon Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (Winter 1998). The title is a French word for “movement” or “trend.” In line 29, “growl your away” has been emended to “growl your way,” following TS at Cornell.
“Called Into Play”: First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 50, no. 3 (Autumn 1997).