The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
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“Back-Burnerd”: Ammons seems to have typed the title thus (without the e one would expect before the d), then handwritten “ed” to the end (yielding “Back-Burnerded”), and then erased the extra “ed.” As it was in BF, the “Burnerd” spelling is retained here.
“A Few Acres of Shiny Water”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“[They said today would be partly cloudy]”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998).
“Feint Praise”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998).
“Surfacing Surface Effects”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Free One, Get One By”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998).
“Dumb Clucks”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998).
“Sucking Flies”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998).
“Balsam Firs”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Tree Limbs Down”: First appeared in The New Yorker, Mar. 14, 2005. The hyphen between the two first words of the title is removed here, following TS at Cornell.
“Wetter Beather”: First appeared in Bosh and Flapdoodle.
“The Gushworks”: First appeared in Epoch vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Yonderwards”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). Lines 16–17: A reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and his sonnet “Ozymandias.”
“Depressed Areas”: Oct. 16, 1996. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Dishes and Dashes”: First appeared in American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997). For Ammons’s introduction of Silver the mule, see “Silver” in Expressions of Sea Level and the “22 Dec:” section of Tape for the Turn of the Year.
“Auditions”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997). For Silver, see the note to “Dishes and Dashes,” above.
“Between Each Song”: First appeared in American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997). His younger brother Elbert having died at age two, for most of his life Ammons had two siblings, both older: Mona Ammons Smith and Vida Ammons Cox.
“Mina de Oro”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997). The title is Spanish for “gold mine.”
“Widespread Implications”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997).
“Above the Fray Is Only Thin Air”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997).
“Home Fires”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997).
“Pudding Bush Sopping Wet”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997).
“Spew”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997).
“Vomit”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997).
“Thoughts”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997). Alfred Edward (“A. E.”) Housman (1859–1936), poet and classicist, fell in love with a friend and roommate, Moses Jackson (“the / other fellow”), while in college at Oxford. The heterosexual Jackson eventually married the widow Rosa Chambers.
“Spit”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997). “C’est la vie” (say la vee) is French for “That’s life.”
“Lineage”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1997).
“Now Then”: First appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 36, no. 1 (1997). Reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1998, edited by John Hollander, where it appeared with the following note:
I wrote “Now Then” immediately before driving to Michigan for a reading. I type my poems on a roll of paper, and the poem had not been transcribed from the tape, so I unwound it like a scroll lengthwise and orated it. I read it last, and it was best liked. Not because it is my best poem but because it is a talking poem that flits about, not a literary poem that bears rereading, but a poem easy to be with in flight, I suppose.
Line 14: A colon likely typed past the edge of the paper strip is inserted in brackets here.
Line 54: Ammons’s use of “coco rico” to evoke a rooster’s crowing recalls T. S. Eliot’s same choice in The Waste Land.
“Shit Face”: I have added a bracketed colon to the end of line 29 to clarify the line’s relationship to line 30. Ammons typed the poem on a paper tape, and line 29 runs right up to the paper’s right edge; I suspect he typed a colon that missed the paper, but lack the evidence to insert one without qualification.
“Surprising Elements”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Out From Under”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998). Lines 10–12: According to William Seward, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) said, “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
“The Whole Situation”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998).
“Rattling Freight Lines”: Line 12’s “living room” is corrected to “livingroom.”
“Ringadingding”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004).
“Thrown for a Loop”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1998). Reprinted in The American Poetry Review, vol. 32, no. 3 (May–June 2003).
“Wrong Road”: First appeared in The American Poetry Review, vol. 32, no. 3 (May–June 2003).
“Way Down Upon the Woodsy Roads”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004). The final two words, “DRAB POT,” reverse to “TOP BARD.”
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APPENDIX A: POEMS PUBLISHED DURING AMMONS’S LIFETIME BUT UNCOLLECTED
Stuart Wright’s A. R. Ammons: A Bibliography 1954–1979 (Winston Salem, NC: Wake Forest University, 1980) provided essential help in locating early work that Ammons saw into print but never collected in one of his books. Especially helpful in locating later such work were Ellen Daugman, Humanities Reference Librarian at Wake Forest University; Amanda Clay Powers, then Coordinator of Research Services for Mississippi State University Libraries; and Ben Nagel, Library Associate with Mississippi State University Libraries.
“It Is As Far”: First appeared in Epos, vol. 7, no. 4 (Summer 1956). Line 16 alludes to the Christian identification of Jesus as “the Word”: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
“11-25-56”: Presumably drafted Nov. 26, 1956. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 1958). In Book XVIII of Homer’s Iliad, Hephaestus forges Achilles a new shield that includes the moon among its many images; in Book XIX that shield is described as shining like the moon.
“Hymn” (“Make lean the vowels of my lips . . .”): Apr. 29, 1957. First appeared in Partisan Review, vol. 26, no. 3 (Summer 1959).
“Slippery Log Swamp”: Apr. 16, 1961. First appeared in Southern Poetry Today: Impetus Chapbook No. 2, edited by Guy Owen and William E. Taylor. Deland, FL: Owen & Taylor, 1962.
“Canto 46”: June 28, 1959. First appeared in Choice, no. 2 (1962).
“Canto 24”: First appeared in Impetus, no. 7 (Spring 1963).
“View”: First appeared in Epos, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 1963).
“Sung Reassertions”: First appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (Fall 1963), a chapbook in memory of William Carlos Williams, whose Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems had won the Pulitzer Prize earlier that year. Thanks to Matthew Little for identifying part III of Williams’s “Calypsos” (in Pictures from Brueghel) as the likeliest candidate for the poem to which Ammons’s note refers.
“Connection”: Sept. 21, 1963. First appeared in Poetry, Sept. 1964.
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“Community”: First appeared in Epos, vol. 16, no. 2 (Winter 1964–65).
“A Birth of Winter”: First appeared in Niobe, no. 1 (1965).
“Urban Rage”: First appeared in Trojan Horse, no. 6 (Dec. 1965).
“All Set”: First appeared in Stony Brook, nos. 1–2 (Fall 1968).
“Confessional Poem”: May 30, 1968. First appeared in Stony Brook, no. 1–2 (Fall 1968).
“For Andrew Wyeth”: Oct. 5, 1968. First appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 27, 1968. The NYTBR had asked Ammons to send a poem responding to Andrew Wyeth, a 1968 book of Wyeth’s paintings, with text by Richard Meryman, published by Houghton Mifflin. The poem appears next to photographs of three paintings from the book: Soaring (1950), Perpetual Care (1961), and Spring Beauty (1943).
“Dinah”: May 6, 1968. First appeared in The Nation, Jan. 6, 1969.
“Chinaberry”: First appeared in The Quest, no. 3 (Winter–Spring 1969). The poet grew up with two siblings, his older sisters Mona and Vida.
“Diner”: May 6, 1968. First appeared in Choice, no. 6 (1970).
“Address”: Mar. 8, 1970. First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973). As published in Diacritics, line 28 reads, “to complete me, let’s me fail”; the apostrophe has been deleted, following the TS in the notebook at Cornell titled “Chrono IV.”
“Untelling”: Aug. 5, 1970. First appeared in Richard Howard’s review-essay “Auguries of Experience: The Collected Poems 1951–1971 of A. R. Ammons,” in Boundary 2, vol. 1, no. 3 (Spring 1973).
“Between”: May 4, 1969. First appeared in Raven, vol. 2, no. 2 (Summer 1973). As published in Raven, line 9 refers to “prostrate cancer wards.” The TS in Chrono IV has “prostate,” and that spelling is adopted here.
“Mid-Morning”: Feb. 17, 1973. First appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Dec. 1973.
“Necessity”: First appeared in Rune, no. 1 (1974).
“Scientific Breakdown”: First appeared in Rune, no. 1 (1974). There, line 18 ends with a period; here it ends with a comma, following TS at Cornell. Lines 1–5: Aristotle believed that a “Prime Mover” set the universe in motion around a stationary Earth. The “stellar irregularity” Ammons has in mind may be the stellar aberration observed by James Bradley in the early eighteenth century, or it may be the stellar parallax observed by Friedrich Bessel in the early nineteenth. Lines 34–36: The passage alludes to the story of the Fall in Genesis 3; the serpent there is commonly identified as Satan, one of whose nicknames is “Old Scratch.”
“Convergences Downward”: First appeared in The Sewanee Review, vol. 82, no. 4 (Fall 1974).
“Self”: First appeared in The Sewanee Review, vol. 82, no. 4 (Fall 1974).
“Attending”: Oct. 26, 1973. First appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Jan. 1975.
“Interim”: Mar. 1975. First appeared in Epos, vol. 26, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1975).
“David”: Mar. 21, 1975. First appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, vol. 26, no. 1 (Fall 1975), a special issue titled A Chapbook for David Ignatow, edited by David M. Stocking. A poet whose many honors included the Bollingen Prize, Ignatow (1914–1997) was affiliated with the Beloit Poetry Journal for much of the 1950s, first as an associate editor and then as a member of its editorial board.
“Arete”: Oct. 1973. First appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Oct. 1975. The title is a Greek word (pronounced ar-uh-TAY) meaning “excellence”; over time the word has designated different kinds of excellence, including intellectual and moral, and it has also carried the sense of “fulfillment of one’s potential.” Advocates of liberal arts education often cite it as the goal of that curriculum. The text here is based on a TS at Cornell on which Ammons notes the poem’s past publication and makes some handwritten revisions.
“Away”: July 15, 1975. First appeared in The Georgia Review, vol. 30, no. 4 (Winter 1976).
“A Bit of the Bubbly for Ep Fogel”: According to Stuart Wright’s bibliography, this first appeared (as “A Bit of the Bubbly for EP”) in the December 21–27, 1976, issue of an Ithaca newspaper named The Grapevine. The poem is addressed to Ephim “Ep” Fogel (1920–1992), a poet and scholar who was Ammons’s colleague in the Cornell English Department; he was also the department’s chairman from 1966 to 1970. The text here is from an undated typescript that includes Ammons’s handwritten acknowledgment of the poem’s past publication, as well as a few minor handwritten revisions—among them the addition of Fogel’s surname to the title. Line 47 alludes to the saying—widely attributed to Heraclitus—that no one steps in the same river twice.
“An Improvisation for Goldwin Smith”: First appeared in A Shout in the Street, vol. 1, no. 2 (1977). Goldwin Smith Hall houses Cornell’s Department of English and other humanities departments, as well as the administrative office of the College of Arts and Sciences. The building is named for Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), a graduate of Oxford University and a professor of history there who moved to the United States and joined the Cornell faculty.
“For Robert Penn Warren”: July 24, 1976. First appeared in Vanderbilt Poetry Review, vol. 2, nos. 3–4 (1977). By the time of the poem’s composition, Warren (1905–1989) had won two of his three Pulitzer Prizes; a decade later he would become the first Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress to be recognized formally as the nation’s Poet Laureate.
“Man’s Nature”: First appeared in The Yale Review, vol. 66, no. 3 (Mar. 1977).
“The Grave Is”: First appeared in Chicago Review, vol. 28, no. 4 (Spring 1977).
“An Improvisation for Fran Bullis”: First appeared in Praxis, no. 2 (Spring 1977). In line 115, “through underneath” has been corrected to “though underneath,” following TS at Cornell. Also, in line 134, “lookshelves” has been corrected to “bookshelves,” following the same TS. Fran Bullis spent many years at Cornell in Public Affairs, working with the law school, the Johnson Museum of Art, the library system, and the College of Arts and Sciences.
“Delineation”: First appeared in The Gritloaf Anthology, edited by Pete Bonnette and Isabel Zuber. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press, 1978.
“Transcending”: First appeared in Café Solo, no. 10 (Indian Summer [sic] 1977).
“Fire Going”: First appeared on the back cover of Douglas Worth’s 1977 collection of poems, Invisibilities. Cambridge, MA: Apple-wood Press.
“Marble”: July 19, 1974. First appeared in Washington and the Poet, an anthology of poems about Washington, DC, edited by Francis Coleman Rosenberger. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977.
“One Extreme to the Other”: First appeared in City, no. 7 (1978).
“Thoroughfaring”: First appeared (as “Thoroughfares”) in Ubu, no. 2 (1979). The text here is that of a later TS held at Cornell.
“Spring Lines”: First appeared in Truck, no. 21 (1979), a special issue marking the fiftieth birthday of the poet Jonathan Williams (1929–2008).
“Maple”: Nov. 27, 1979. First appeared in Tar River Poetry, vol. 20, no. 1 (Fall 1980).
“Quick Song”: First appeared in No Business Poems, edited by Sherry Beasley. Critz, VA: The Reynolds Homestead, 1980.
“Spiritual Progress”: First appeared in The Yale Review, vol. 71, no. 1 (Autumn 1981).
“The Gathering”: Jan. 16, 1983. Appeared in Epoch, vol. 33, no. 3 (Summer–Autumn 1984). In Epoch, line 54 includes the misspelling “transfering,” which is here corrected to “transferring.”
“Plain Divisions”: Oct. 19, 1976. First appeared in Verse, no. 3 (1985).
“Taking Place”: Jan. 6, 1979. See “Marginals.” First appeared in Verse, no. 4 (1985).
“Breaking for the Broken”: Apr. 9, 1979. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Could Be”: First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Marking Time”: Mar. 2, 1982. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“Noted Imposition”: First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
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�Summer Fashion”: July 19, 1974. First appeared in Pembroke Magazine, no. 18 (1986).
“A Priori”: While the poem is undated, Ammons included it in a letter to Harold Bloom dated August 12, 1972 (see An Image for Longing). First appeared in Cornell’s football game program, The Cornell Crescent, vol. 51, no. 3 (Nov. 8, 1986).
“Reticulum of Indirection”: First appeared in The Cornell Crescent (Cornell’s football game program), vol. 51, no. 3 (Nov. 8, 1986).
“Inclinations”: May 1985. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (Spring 1987). In line 56, “mobiuses” is here corrected to “möbiuses”; also, in line 350 “practised” is here corrected to “practiced.” Line 411: Ammons admired Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems. Lines 415–16: Emily Dickinson’s poem beginning “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” describes that feeling as a “Quartz contentment”; in his poem “Mannahatta,” Walt Whitman remarks on New York’s “countless masts,” and hails it as a “city of spires and masts!” The spelling in TS, “Manahatta,” is here corrected to “Mannahatta.”
“Why Is It Always the Way It Always Is”: May 1985. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1987). In The Hudson Review, line 18 ends with “use to thank God”; that has been emended to “used to thank God,” following TS at Cornell. Also, line 32’s “adding instants” has been emended to “addling instants,” following the same TS.
“Motion Which Disestablishes Organizes Everything”: May 17, 1985. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1987). Reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1988, edited by John Ashbery, as well as in Set in Motion. In all three publications, line 2 includes an error: “penning one” is printed as “penning out.” This edition’s correction of the text is based on the TS of the poem at Cornell.
Ammons wrote a note to accompany the poem’s reprint in BAP:
When poems get too skinny and bony, emaciated nearly into left-hand margin, so highly articulated their syllables crystallize, I go back to long lines to loosen up, to blur the issues of motion into minor forms within larger motions. I believe something like that was taking place some three or four years ago when I wrote this poem and three or four others like it.