by A. R. Ammons
In his childhood house, the poet said, there were only three books: the family Bible and two others. And there were as well (who knows how) eleven pages of Robinson Crusoe, which, along with sermons and hymns, helped form his literary imagination. In the eighth grade, Ammons’s teacher, Ruth Baldwin, recognized his verbal gift and highly praised his first composition; he wrote to her in gratitude until her death. He began to read voraciously, and read copiously throughout his life in various fields—the sciences, anthropology, ancient history, and of course poetry. After high school, he worked in a shipyard in Wilmington; when the war began, he enlisted in the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army. (He did not see combat, but as his ship sailed into the harbor at Tokyo, a mine exploded near it.)
His ship was the USS Gunason, a destroyer escort in the Pacific theater. Archie began to keep a journal, to amass vocabulary lists, and to study the materials available from the Navy for courses in speech and composition. (After being trained as a sonar man, he became a yeoman, was assigned to a clerical job, and had his first access to a typewriter, a machine later indispensable to some of his poetic effects.) During night watches, he wrote his first groups of poems, inept pieces in standard rhyme and meter, varying from the sentimental to the comic. More essential to him than these early attempts at verse was his awed realization of the dynamics of sea and land: these earthly phenomena replaced the biblical account of creation and separated Ammons forever from denominational Christianity:
The whole world changed as a result of an interior illumination: the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of actions—runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves—motions and bodies. . . . I was de-denominated.2
The multiple separate actions absorbed into ocean swells and affecting the bordering shore tutored the young sailor in the vexed relation between multiplicity and unity, an absorbing lifelong theme.
After the war, the G.I. Bill enabled Ammons to enroll in Wake Forest University, taking premedical and English courses, and graduating with a BSc in General Sciences. After his graduation, he married his young Spanish teacher, Phyllis Plumbo; we know from his letters to her before their marriage the agony he felt in trying to arrange his adult life so as to support a family and still write. The young couple went to Cape Hatteras, where for a year Ammons taught and acted as principal in an elementary school. Finally deciding to risk the uncertainty of a poet’s life, he enrolled in an MA program (which he left unfinished when his father fell ill) at the University of California at Berkeley. There, for the first time, he received ongoing encouragement from the poet Josephine Miles, to whom he showed his work (although he silently chafed under the friction of their incompatible poetic tastes). After he left Berkeley, his wife’s father offered him a job as a salesman in his New Jersey scientific glassware business: in a very dignified letter Archie explained that he could not betray his own nature by taking a position that would threaten his resolve to write poetry. However, not long after, realizing that he and Phyllis could not live on his writing, he accepted the job, and for the next nine years, somewhat to his surprise, was by his own account a successful sales manager, rising to be Executive Vice-President. He seems not to have been beset in that role by the anxiety always attending his self-presentation as a poet.
Even while holding the job, Ammons continued to compose poems and send them out to literary journals. The poems were almost uniformly rejected (except by the Beloit Poetry Journal and The Hudson Review), and he became so discouraged that in 1955, at the age of twenty-nine, he self-published with Dorrance (a vanity press in Philadelphia) a small book called Ommateum, the word for the compound eye of an insect. Motivated by a profound distrust of ideological prescriptiveness, whether religious or political, he explained his perspectivism in a letter to The Hudson Review:
[In] the complex eye of the insect, each facet . . . perceives a single ray of light, the whole number of facets calling up the image of reality. Each of the poems is to be a facet, of course, and the whole collection to call up the stippled outlines of the image of truth, truth, from the human point of view, as a growing thing, filling out. (Image, 59)
Ommateum did not sell (the royalty for the first year was, he told me, four four-cent stamps), and Ammons humbly decided that he needed further instruction in how to write. The Chicago poet John Logan was offering a correspondence course in poetic composition, and in 1956, from New Jersey, Ammons sent him Ommateum: in this lucky moment of his life as an author, he found an enthusiastic reader who understood his achievement. Logan wrote, “I have read your book several times and I find it completely beautiful” (Image, 103). Subsequently, through the sponsorship of the poet Milton Kessler (met at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1961), Ammons’s second book, Expressions of Sea Level (1964), was published by the Ohio State University Press; on the basis of its success he was appointed to the faculty at Cornell University and moved to Ithaca, in upstate New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. After the move to Cornell, books came in a cascade: in 1965, both Corsons Inlet and Tape for the Turn of the Year, and in 1966, Northfield Poems (all published by Cornell). His publisher then became W. W. Norton, with Uplands in 1970, Briefings in 1971, and in 1972 the premature Collected Poems 1951–1971. Volumes subsequently came out from Norton at frequent intervals until Ammons’s death (and even after his death, in the case of Bosh and Flapdoodle). Although the poems won increasing recognition—a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, the National Book Award in 1973 for the Collected Poems, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and a second National Book Award in 1993 for Garbage—Ammons never again issued a Collected Poems. This edition of the poetry offers the first complete record of Ammons as a poet of singular originality and insight.
In a 1960 journal entry, Ammons reported the crucial change in his idea of poetry, tracking his evolution from an overintellectual poet to one who had come to respect feeling. This passage marks the watershed in the poet’s poetry between an “objective,” abstract, scientific language of thought and a broader language in which feeling—the larger entity summoned by experience—incorporates the intellect:
I wish I could put into words the coming-round I have experienced (intellectually) the last few years. I once despised feeling as worthless, evanescent, of no “eternal significance.” I thought only of the “permanent” outside, the revolving galaxies, the endless space, and man on his tiny speck seemed meaningless. Can I now make the shift to humanity? Can I feel again? Can my blood stir at last? I now see feeling as incorporating the intellect—I once thought them separate. Intellect is the slow analytic way—the unexperienced way to action: feeling is the immediate synthesis of all experience, intellect as well as emotion. (Image, 165)
“Can I now make the shift to humanity?” the poet asks himself. A decade later, in a 1971 letter to Harold Bloom, he put his creed somewhat differently. When he gave up the neo-Platonic philosophical One—a “saving absolute”—in favor of the Many—the vicissitudes of human life—existence took on luster, presence, significance:
I ran my motor fast much of my life seeking the saving absolute. There is no such item to be found. I had known these thoughts for a long time, and they meant very little, until I experienced them. I remember the hour I experienced them. Nothing changed, and yet everything changed. Grief, fear, love, life, death, everything goes on just as before, but now everything seems lifted, just a bit, into its own being. (Image, 375)
As we pursue Ammons’s poetry from its early scientific phase to its most explicitly human phase in Bosh and Flapdoodle, we cannot represent either end of the continuum as sovereign, nor could Ammons himself. The most solid proof of his vacillation between the One and the Many is his vacillation between short poems and long ones. He could publish a volume (Briefings) full of short poems; or he could publish a volume (Garbage) consisting of one book-length meditation. The worry he felt about th
e long poems—into which he deliberately inserted as much manyness as possible—arose from the doubt that he could carry off such a degree of arbitrariness and multiplicity and still call the result a poem. His fretfulness about the short poems arose from the contrary doubt that they could represent the grand inclusivity of thought and language to which he aspired. And—for Ammons was musical, played the piano, and had a fine singing voice—he worried about what sort of music the lines would convey. That restlessness drove his perennial reinvention of style.
Ammons’s first two books were uncertain ones. Ommateum (1955) indeed found a style, philosophical but colloquial, which allowed appealing dialogues with items in nature—the indispensable sun, the poetic moon:
I went out to the sun
where it burned over a desert willow
and getting under the shade of the willow
I said
It’s very hot in this country
The sun said nothing so I said
The moon has been talking about you
and he said
Well what is it this time
She says it’s her own light
He threw his flames out so far
they almost scorched the top of the willow
Well I said of course I don’t know
(1, 6–7)
Comic diffidence before supreme items of nature remained a part of Ammons’s psyche, as did the Emersonian truculence of the moon, here rebelliously (however incorrectly) declaring her light to be her own, not borrowed from the sun. Poetry—immemorially connected to the moon—existed side by side with solar nature, and claimed its own inspiration.
Ammons never forsook the delights of the colloquial; his last book, like his first, makes ordinary speech a fundamental principle of style. Nonetheless, he was—as he must have known—the first American poet to whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural. He had been saturated in it as an undergraduate at Wake Forest, and it had for him a moral intimation as well as an intellectual one: it spoke provable truth, and so became an object of alliance in his disaffection with Christianity. His second book, Expressions of Sea Level, contained some rather unintegrated science-speak:
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,
the gastric transformations, seed
dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge
(1, 56)
Yet in both Ommateum and Expressions of Sea Level, there were, besides scientific declarations, poems of tender pathos, among them “Nelly Myers,” commemorating a mentally disabled woman who lived with the Ammonses, and “Hardweed Path Going,” an achingly sorrowful poem commemorating the young Archie’s pet hog, Sparkle, slaughtered by his father. “She’s nothing but a hog, boy,” says the father, holding the axe, but to the boy she is a friend, her execution horrifying:
Bleed out, Sparkle, the moon-chilled bleaches
of your body hanging upside-down
hardening through the mind and night of the first freeze.
(1, 67)
It was in his third book, Corsons Inlet, that Ammons developed the two central tenets of his poetics: that life is motion, and that there can be no finality, no absolute vision. (In this, he resembles Wallace Stevens, one of whose poems is entitled “Life is Motion.”) Walking the Jersey shore, Ammons realizes that he is not satisfied with “narrow orders, limited tightness,” but hopes to describe the “widening scope” of perception, rejoicing in his new freedom:
enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
(1, 95)
Various structural experiments occur on the page, as the poet prolongs a single sentence into an entire poem (“Prodigal,” “The Misfit”) or, as in “Configurations,” turns to writing in columns down rather than in links across:
when
I
ambringing
singingthosehome
,twoagain
summerbirds
comes
back
(1, 110)
Such an arrangement provokes a reader’s question: Does this patterned sentence truly differ from its prose replication—“When I am singing, summer comes back bringing those two birds home again”—and if so, how and why? The erratic comma, the lowercase spelling, and the absence of end-punctuation speak of E. E. Cummings; the careful downward progress of the words resembles the tentative cat steps in Williams’s “Poem.” Such lines directly contest the Whitmanesque long lines to which Ammons was so attracted. And although both choices of line—short and long—offer freedom from ordinary lineation, still Ammons is not truly free. He has not yet learned that his poetics will not permit poems to end with conventional summings-up: he is still relying on such assertive conclusions as “I faced // piecemeal the sordid / reacceptance of my world” (1, 138). Such a conclusive termination is incompatible with the ever-anticipated “new walk” promised tomorrow. And although the poet celebrates the casual tone of the placid “new walk,” he has yet to accept, intellectually, that violence will perpetually break out as one of the indispensable and inevitable ingredients of his lyric world, confronting the pastoral of the seashore with a furious wind: “Song is a violence / of icicles and / windy trees: . . . violence / brocades // the rocks . . . a / violence to make / that can destroy” (1, 119). Acknowledging hostility in himself, and seeing an equivalent violence in nature, Ammons is preparing for the emotional explosions in his later poems.
In 1965, Ammons publishes the first of his winter diaries, Tape for the Turn of the Year. Convinced that a poem aspiring to true manyness must be cut off, in both breadth and length, at a perfectly arbitrary place, he shapes his journal-poem to the narrow breadth and unforeseeable length of an adding-machine tape fed into his typewriter, his truncated lines confined between the left and right edges of the tape. A portion of Ammons’s winter improvisation, at its most extreme, becomes a concrete poem:
clusters!
organizations!
shapes!
)/(/(/)/)/(/(/)/)/(
designs!
(1, 191)
Since Ammons saw forms visually, as shapes, we can take it that these instances represent, first, a single module () repeated in diamond shape (succeeded by an excited interpretation declaring such assembled forms “clusters!”); there follows a rectangular form composed of identical repetitions of the same module (preceded by a new triumphant announcement, “organizations!”). Then there arrives a more complicated and varying pattern of four ingredients—(concave parenthesis, convex parenthesis, virgule, and underline) upon which the poet bursts out in sheer pleasure, declaring them “designs!” (a word implying a mind behind such configurations, as the words “clusters” and “organizations,” which arise in nature, do not). We deduce from this visual example that this is the way Ammons views the accreting form of his poems: first an intelligible module in a recognizable shape; then a repetition of the same module in a new shape; then a more complex set of new modules, unintelligible at first glance but interpretable as a whimsical and intended design. Substituting for such abstract module-arrangements traditional poetic shapes (alliteration, anaphora, quatrain, paradox), we can see sentences embodying them as they construct themselves in Tape for the Turn of the Year.
Sitting down once again at the turn of the year in 1970–71, Ammons opens a new winter diary, Hibernaculum, with a Keatsian landscape (“I see a sleet-filled sky’s dry freeze”), and later, parodying Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” the hibernating poet (now in his mid-forties, married and with a son) narrates his “studies” of a comically comprehensive world always assembling itself into design:
54
much have I studied, trashcanology, cheesespreado
logy,
laboratorydoorology, and become much enlightened and
dismayed: have, sad to some, come to care as much for
a fluted trashcan as a fluted Roman column: flutes are
flutes and the matter is a mere substance design takes
its shape in: take any subject, everything gathers up
around it:
(1, 618)
Although Hibernaculum exhibits Ammons’s preferred end-punctuation, the colon (representing the unbroken continuity of sentence-thoughts in a stream of consciousness), the poem still appears relatively conventional, with 112 stanzas, each containing nine broad lines laid out as three tercets, with the stanza breaks completely arbitrary. Without an artificial container—the unchanging nine-line tercet-stanzas of Hibernaculum—Ammons fears that shapelessness will overtake his poetic diaries. Toward the end of Hibernaculum, he mocks his own irrepressible inclusiveness that can’t decide what to leave out:
if there is to be
no principle of inclusion, then, at least, there ought
108
to be a principle of exclusion, for to go with a maw at
the world as if to chew it up and spit
it out again as one’s own is to trifle with terrible