by A. R. Ammons
yesterday was Christmas: I got a pair of water-resistant gloves
with a removable woolen lining: I got Phyllis three charms for
the bracelet I bought her in Rome: John got a snowsled, a beautiful
wooden train set, Lincoln logs, toggles, and several things
495operated by non-included batteries: this morning he has no fever:
he’s had tonsillitis this is the fifth day with fevers to 103 and
104: I’ve felt built over a jerking machine, not quite turned on
or off: this morning John put on his new cowboy hat (he’s nearly
four) and I put on his crash helmet, and we searched all the dark
500corners and closets for thieves and robbers: we jailed a couple:
one teddy bear and one stuffed, long-legged leprechaun: everyone
will find here a detail that is a key to a set of memories:
strings of nucleations please me more than representative details:
(not that the detail is representative—only that it is a detail
505of numerical dominance in recurrence):
subatomic particle
atom
molecule
cell
510tissue
organ
organ system
organism
species
515community
living world
or
observation
problem
520hypothesis
experiment
theory
natural law:
the swarm at the
525subatomic level may be so complex and surprising that it puts
quasars, pulsars and other matters to shame: I don’t know:
and “living world” on the other hand may be so scanty in its
information as to be virtually of no account: nevertheless,
a drift is expressed in the progressions up or down—organization,
530the degree of: the control into integration (integrated action)
of the increasingly multiple: the human organism, composed of
billions of cells formed into many specializations and subordinations,
can deliver its total lust to the rarification of sight of the
beloved: for example: and many other high levels of symmetry,
535unification, and concerted thrust: poems, of human make, are
body images, organisms of this human organism: if that isn’t
so I will be terribly disappointed: it sounds as if it ought to
be right: consonants, vowels, idioms, phrases, clauses (tissues),
sentences (organs), verses (organ systems), poems (living worlds):
540I react to such stuff with a burst of assent resembling for all
I can tell valuable feeling: rubbing a girl also, of course,
produces feeling, I would be the last to deny it, but it may be
precisely the organization-principle in girls that one, rubbing,
is pleasured by: if, as I believe, we are not only ourselves—i.e.,
545the history of our organism—but also every process that went into
our making, then, in the light of our present ignorance, we may
safely leave much potentiality to undisclosed possibility: mush,
mush, how friendly: that’s what I think, I’ll tell you in a nut-
shell: and in poems, the insubstantial processes of becoming
550form inscrutable parts of the living thing: and then how the
orders of the poem build up and cooperate into the pure heat of
sight and insight, trembling and terror: it makes me gasp aghast:
no wonder we pedants talk about history, influence, meaning
in poems: that’s peripheral enough to prevent the commission of
555larger error, and safe error is a pedantic preference well-known,
widely footnoted, and amply rewarded: I believe in fun:
“superior amusement” is a little shitty: fun is nice: it’s what
our society is built on: fun in the enterprise: I believe in it:
I have no faith in the scoffers: they are party-poopers who are
560afraid they ought to believe in history or logical positivism and
don’t have any real desire to do so: they are scarcely worth a
haircut: organisms, I can tell you, build up under the thrust to
joy and nothing else can lift them out of the miry circumstance:
and poems are pure joy, however divisionally they sway with grief:
565the way to joy is integration’s delivery of the complete lode:
the flow broken, coinless, I, the third morning of Ithaca’s most
historical snowbind, try to go on, difficult, difficult, the hedges
split open, showing inside the vacancy and naked, bony limbs: snow
up past the garage door handle, new snow still falling, and high
570gusts roaring through the cold: supplies low or gone: and the stores
closed: that last appeals too much in the wrong sort: like any
scholar, I should, at this point to uncripple the condition, quote,
but first, I must, like a scholar, clear the field: I choose Ruskin
to say what thousands have said: “Art is neither to be achieved by
575effort of thinking, nor explained by accuracy of speaking”: well,
still, Ruskin, it cannot be achieved without effort, and one level
of accuracy may be preferred to another: this must be a point of
clustering because I feel a lot of little things jostling
to get in where they can be said: for example, I just walked
580a mile to the store, blowing snow, I was in to my ass practically
getting out to the plowed road: I got hotdogs, bacon, bread (out of
eggs), coffee: and on the way back, the wind in my face and snow
drifted ten feet high along one curve that has an open field behind
it, I passed two straggly young girls laughing, dogs barking after
585them, and one carrying her jacket, big boobs jouncing in her short-
sleeved sweater: I was barking inside myself a little, rosy ideas
in the blinding snowlight: one guy I passed said “beautiful weather”—
the kind of thing one, after four days penned up, is grateful to
say and hear: I quote now to enrich the mix, to improve my stew from
590the refrigerator of timeless ingredients:
“A large number of the inhabitants of a mud flat will
be worms. It is hard to develop enthusiasm for worms, but
it took nature more than a billion years to develop a good
worm—meaning one that has specialized organs for digestion,
595respiration, circulation of the blood and excretion of
wastes. All organisms perform these functions—amoebas,
flagellates, bacteria or even filterable viruses; but the
worms—at least the higher worms—do all these things better.
They also developed segmentation or reduplication of parts,
600permitting increase in size with completely coordinated
function. Contemporary architects call this modular
construction. It is found in man in the spinal column,
in the segmental arrangement of spinal nerves, and in
some other features that are especially prominent during
605embryonic development.”
The Sea by Robert C. Miller. Random House. New York,
1966. p. 165.
“We may sum up. Carbohydrates, fats, proteins, nucleic
acids, and their various derivatives, together with water
610and other inorganic materials, plus numerous additional
compounds found specifically in particular types of living
matter—these are the molecular bricks out of which living
/>
matter is made. To be sure, a mere random pile of such
bricks does not make a living structure, any more than a
615mere pile of real bricks makes a house. First and foremost,
if the whole is to be living, the molecular components must
be organized into a specific variety of larger microscopic
bodies; and these in turn, into actual, appropriately
structured cells.”
620The Science of Botany by Paul B. Weisz and Melvin S. Fuller.
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1962. p. 48.
poems are verbal
symbols for these organizations: they imprint upon the mind
examples of integration in which the energy flows with maximum
625effect and economy between the high levels of oneness and the
numerous subordinations and divisions of diversity: it is simply
good to have the mind exposed to and reflected by such examples:
it firms the mind, organizes its energy, and lets the controlled
flows occur: that is simple good in itself: I can’t stress that
630enough: it is not good for something else—although of course
it is good for infinite things else: so my point is that the poem
is the symbolical representation of the ideal organization, whether
the cell, the body politic, the business, the religious
group, the university, computer, or whatever: I used to wonder
635why, when they are so little met and understood, poems are taught
in schools: they are taught because they are convenient examples
of the supreme functioning of one and many in an organization of
cooperation and subordination: young minds, if they are to “take
their place in society” need to learn patience—that oneness is
640not useful when easily derived, that manyness is not truthful when
thinly selective—assent, that the part can, while insisting on
its own identity, contribute to the whole, that the whole can
sustain and give meaning to the part: and when these things
are beautifully—that is, well—done, pleasure is a bonus
645truth-functioning allows: that is why art is valuable: it is
extremely valuable: also, in its changing, it pictures how
organizations can change, incorporate innovation, deal with accidence
and surprise, and maintain their purpose—increasing the means and
assuring the probability of survival: the point of change, though,
650brings me to a consideration of the adequacy of the transcendental
vegetative analogy: the analogy is so appealing, so swept with
conviction, that I hardly ever have the strength to question it:
I’ve often said that a poem in becoming generates the laws of its
own becoming: that certainly sounds like a tree, growing up with
655no purpose but to become itself (regardless of the fact that many
are constantly trying to turn it into lumber): but actually, a tree
is a print-out: the tree becomes exactly what the locked genetic
code has pre-ordained—allowing, of course, for variables of weather,
soil, etc.: so that the idea that some organic becoming is
660realizing itself in the vegetative kingdom is only partially
adequate: real change occurs along the chromosomes, a risky business
apparently based on accidence, chance, unforeseeable distortion:
the proportion of harmful to potentially favorable mutations is
something like 50,000 to 1: how marvelous that the possibility of
665favorable change is a flimsy margin in overwhelming, statistically,
destruction and ruin: that is the way nature pours it on: once it
has arrived at a favorable organization—a white oak, for example—
it does not allow haphazard change to riddle it—no, it protects the
species by the death of thousands of its individuals: but lets the
670species buy by the hazard of its individuals the capacity to adjust,
should adjustment be indicated or allowed: that is terrifying and
pleasing: a genetic cull myself, I have the right to both
emotions: along the periphery of integrations, then, is an exposure
to demons, thralls, witcheries, the maelstrom black of
675possibility, costly, chancy, lethal, open: so I am not so much
arguing with the organic school as shifting true organismus from
the already organized to the bleak periphery of possibility,
an area transcendental only by its bottomless entropy: a word on the
art/nature thing: art is the conscious preparation for the unconscious
680event: to the extent that it is possible—a fining up of the attention
and filling out of the means: art is the craft and lore of preparing
the soil for seed: no enmity: complementary: is any yeoman
dumb enough to think that by much cultivation of the fields wheat
will sprout: or that saying words over the barren, the seedless,
will make potatoes: son of a gun’s been keeping a bag of seed-wheat
in the barn all winter, has sorted out good potatoes and knows how
to cut their eyes out: it’s hard to say whether the distinguishers
or the resemblancers are sillier: they work with noumena every
day, but speak of the invisible to them and they laugh with
690silver modernity: well, as I said, we are more certain that we
are about than what we are about: here is something I have always
wanted to quote:
“Around the mouths of rivers, where the fresh waters
of the land meet the salt waters of the sea, live some of
695the world’s densest populations. This food-rich borderland
harbors immense numbers and varieties of living creatures—
protozoans, worms, snails, shrimp, clams, oysters and on up
through the vertebrate fishes. Life in an estuary may be
rich, but it is also almost inconceivably dangerous. The
700temperature of its shallow waters runs the scale from
freezing to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Twice each day
the ebb and flow of the tides drastically alter the conditions
of life, sometimes stranding whole populations to die a
high-and-dry or freezing death. Winds, floods, and tidal
705currents often bury the stationary bottom animals under
suffocating slides of sand or silt. But the greatest
hazard of all is alien water—water that is too fresh or
too salty. Aquatic animals are sensitive to the salt
content of their water environment. A sudden rain-fed
710flood of fresh water from a river mouth can be catastrophic
to populations dwelling in the estuary.”
“The Life of an Estuary” by Robert M. Ingle. Scientific
American, May 1954.
isn’t that beautiful: it has bearing in many
715ways on my argument: it provided me years ago with ideas on
risks and possibilities: well, my essay is finished: I thank it
with all my heart for helping me to get through this snowstorm:
having a project is useful especially during natural suspensions.
1969 (1970)
Plunder
I have appropriated the windy twittering of aspen leaves
into language, stealing something from reality like a
silverness: drop-scapes of ice from peak sheers:
much of the rise in brooks over slow-rolled glacial stones:
5the loop of reeds over the shallow’s edge when birds
feed on the rafts of algae: I have
taken right out of the
air the clear streaks of bird music and held them in my
head like shifts of sculpture glint: I have sent language
through the mud roils of a raccoon’s paws like a net,
10netting the roils: made my own uses of a downwind’s
urgency on a downward stream: held with a large scape
of numbness the black distance upstream to the mountains
flashing and bursting: meanwhile, everything else, frog,
fish, bear, gnat has turned in its provinces and made off
15with its uses: my mind’s indicted by all I’ve taken.
1970
Triphammer Bridge
I wonder what to mean by sanctuary, if a real or
apprehended place, as of a bell rung in a gold
surround, or as of silver roads along the beaches
of clouds seas don’t break or black mountains
5overspill; jail: ice here’s shapelier than anything,
on the eaves massive, jawed along gorge ledges, solid
in the plastic blue boat fall left water in: if I
think the bitterest thing I can think of that seems like
reality, slickened back, hard, shocked by rip-high wind:
10sanctuary, sanctuary, I say it over and over and the
word’s sound is the one place to dwell: that’s it, just
the sound, and the imagination of the sound—a place.
1970 (1971)
Lollapalooza: 22 February
Lord, have mercy! what a day: what a merciful day:
went to fifty: I listened all day to garage-music: