The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1
Page 79
thing
to know another
thing.
1975 (1975)
Self
I wake up from
a nap
and sense a
well in myself:
5I have
dropped into
the well:
the ripples
have just
10vanished
(1974)
For Doyle Fosso
I walked at night and
became alarmed
at the high lights and amplitude
but passed a brook
5the sound of whose
breaking water
took my whole attention.
1974
Generation Gap
limber body
stiff dick
stiff body
limber dick
1968
Natives
Logos is an engine
myth fuels,
civilization
a pattern,
5scalelike crust
on a hill
but the hill’s swell
derives from
gravity’s
10deep fluids
centering elsewhere
otherwise
Catch
Near dusk: approaching
my house, I see
over the roof
the quartermoon
5and, aiming, walk it
down my chimney flue.
(1977)
Lofty
No use to make any more
angels for the air,
the medium and residence of such:
gas is no state
5to differentiate:
come down here to
bird and weed, stump
and addled fear and swirl up
unity’s angelic spire,
10rot lit in rising fire.
1964 (1965)
Famine
Starving is so funny:
the cow, can
you imagine, the last shuck
gone, moos lean: the
5mule shrinks up and
walks small:
isn’t that funny: the
chickens are slices
of feathers on
10razor sandwiches: can
you imagine: children’s
hands become
knucklebone games:
the wind shakes
15humping to harvest.
Imaginary Number
The difference between
me &
nothing is
zero.
1977
Fortitude
We should think
we can get
by with a
setback or two:
5the lawn makes
a life of
starting over and
swirly bugs
in dusk air,
10prey, get where
they’re going
changing course.
Ghosts
When first snow
hits
the woods-edge
bushes, it’s as
5if the leaves,
recently lent
the ground, were
returning from
the sky to
10catch
the branches and
hold on again.
Soaker
You can appreciate
this kind of rain,
thunderless,
small-gauged
5after a dry spell,
the wind quiet,
multitudes of leaves
as if yelling
the smallest thanks.
NOTES
A Note on the Text
For most of the early poems, the copy-text is the text published in the fourth and final hardcover printing of Collected Poems 1951–1971, with emendations listed here in the notes. For each of the ten early poems omitted from CP51–71, the copy-text is the text in the first printing of the book where the poem first appeared, with emendations listed here. For each poem first collected in a book published after CP51–71, the copy-text is the text in that later book's first printing, with emendations listed here.
Poems reprinted in CP51–71, The Selected Poems (the 1977 edition and/or the 1986 expanded edition), the Selected Longer Poems (1980), and The Really Short Poems (1990) appear here in their original sequences in their original books. However, they include all revisions Ammons made before reprinting them in those retrospectives. Generally such revisions were small, but there are a few exceptions, some of which involve changing a poem’s title.
Annotations and Emendations
The following notes give some basic information that may be of interest to scholars and general readers. If Ammons recorded a date of first composition for a poem, that date—as specifically as he recorded it—appears here immediately after the poem’s title. If a poem appeared in a periodical or other venue before its collection in one of his books, that publication information appears next; for much of that publication information, I am greatly indebted to Stuart Wright for his excellent A. R. Ammons: A Bibliography 1954–1979 (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University, 1980). Afterward come emendations, as well as other notes about the text, including brief explanations of names and non-English words and phrases. I have assumed this edition’s readers will not consist entirely of specialists in poetry or American literature, but I have also assumed that all will have access to a standard dictionary. Absent from the notes are poems with no recorded date of composition, no publication prior to collection in one of the poet’s books, no need of emendation, and no details that—left unannotated—seem likely to impede a general reader’s understanding.
Given Ammons’s linguistic playfulness and fondness for earlier spellings, an editor should not assume that irregularities are errors. For instance, though recent American dictionaries define “mucus” as a noun and “mucous” as an adjective, in the poems collected here Ammons uses the latter spelling three times (and never the former) for the noun; since his spelling is consistent, and since the Oxford English Dictionary does document that spelling’s use for the noun in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century sources, it stands here. Another example is “arrrive,” which concludes “The Wind Picks Up Slick” in The Snow Poems. One might assume that the third r is an accident; however, it does appear in Ammons’s typescript, and when he reviewed the proofs for the book and found that the word had been corrected to “arrive,” he circled it and insisted, “3 r’s in arrrive.” He used that spelling only that once, correctly spelling the word and its variants fifty-one times elsewhere in the poems. Whatever the purpose of the irregular spelling in that instance (I offer one idea in the notes), it should and does stand here.
Some irregularities in the books have been simple mistakes. Typically they have been spelling or punctuation errors introduced at some stage of production, and fixing them has usually been a straightforward matter of consulting Ammons’s typescripts for the correct text. In a few instances I have made other kinds of emendations. For example, the poet sometimes formed a plural of a nonpossessive noun by adding an apostrophe before the s, and that construction occasionally made its way into print; in this edition those apostrophes are deleted.
Unless a note indicates otherwise, all references to “typescripts,” abbreviated “TS” in the singular and “TSS” in the plural, are to typescripts Ammons produced himself on a typewriter.
Ammons’s book titles are abbreviated in the notes as follows:
O
Ommateum with Doxology (1955)
ESL
Expressions of Sea Level (1964)
CI
Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems (1965)
TTY
Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965)
NP
Northfield Poems (1966)
SP68
Selected Poems (1968)
U
>
Uplands: New Poems (1970)
B
Briefings: Poems Small and Easy (1971)
CP51–71
Collected Poems 1951–1971 (1972)
S
Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974)
D
Diversifications: Poems (1975)
SnP
The Snow Poems (1977)
HR
Highgate Road (1977)
SP77
The Selected Poems 1951–1977 (1977)
CT
A Coast of Trees: Poems (1981)
WH
Worldly Hopes: Poems (1982)
LEC
Lake Effect Country: Poems (1983)
SP86
The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (1986)
SV
Sumerian Vistas: Poems (1987)
RSP
The Really Short Poems (1990)
Ga
Garbage (1993)
BR
Brink Road: Poems (1996)
Gl
Glare (1997)
BF
Bosh and Flapdoodle: Poems (2005)
“Finishing Up”: Oct. 1985. TS held at Cornell. Previously unpublished. This is an alternative, perhaps early version of “Painlessness, to Pain, Is Paradise,” which first appeared in Brink Road (1996) and is therefore collected in Volume II of this edition.
OMMATEUM WITH DOXOLOGY
Ammons’s first book was published by Dorrance & Co in 1955. Its dedicatee, the poet Josephine Miles (1911-1985), taught at the University of California at Berkeley and was an important early supporter of Ammons’s poetry. Concerned that publication with Dorrance, a vanity press, might jeopardize his credibility as a poet, he asked Miles if he should proceed; she advised him to do so. For details, see Zofia Burr’s “Josephine Miles and A. R. Ammons: The Early Correspondence,” in Epoch, vol. 52, no. 3 (2004); see also Roger Gilbert’s preface to W. W. Norton’s 2006 republication of the book.
An ommateum is a compound eye, as of an insect. The book included Ammons’s foreword, which highlights the idea of multifaceted perception:
These poems are, for the most part, dramatic presentations of thought and emotion, as in themes of the fear of the loss of identity, the appreciation of transient natural beauty, the conflict between the individual and the group, the chaotic particle in the classical field, the creation of false gods to serve real human needs. While maintaining a perspective from the hub, the poet ventures out in each poem to explore one of the numberless radii of experience. The poems suggest a many-sided view of reality; an adoption of tentative, provisional attitudes, replacing the partial, unified, prejudicial, and rigid; a belief that forms of thought, like physical forms, are, in so far as they resist it, susceptible to change, increasingly costly and violent.
In manner the poems are terse and evocative. They suggest and imply and rather grow in the reader’s mind than exhaust themselves in completed, external form. The imagery is generally functional beyond pictoral [sic] evocation of mood, as plateau, for example, may suggest a flat, human existence, devoid of the drama of rising and falling.
These poems, then, mean to enrich the experience of being; of being anterior to action, that shapes action; of being anterior to wider, richer being.
Except for “Doxology” (which, as the book’s title suggests, is a work to be distinguished from the rest of the collection), the poems were designated by number, 1–30, with no titles; when Ammons reprinted most of them in Collected Poems 1951–1971 and in the three Selected Poems he himself assembled, he titled the poems with their first lines, or with truncations of their first lines. He explains his thoughts on his poems’ titles (these and others) in an August 4, 1979, note to Stuart Wright which he inscribed in a copy of the book now in the Overcash Literary Collection at East Carolina University:
At first, titles seemed to me unnecessary members to the integrity of the poem, but Lillith Loraine when she accepted my early poems for Flame and Different, I think, asked for titles. I gave in—trying later either to come up with a truly transforming title, as with Hymn, or to make the title instantly & merely a tag.
When I put together the Selected in 1967 [the 1968 Selected Poems, his first], I considered making the titles consistent throughout, so went back to the Ommateum poems. I found that the titles I would come up with sounded “poetic” and out of character with the poems. So, finally, I made the titles just tags of the first lines.
The titles of the Ommateum poems in this edition are the “tags” Ammons used in CP51–71 and in his SPs. Two of the poems, those beginning with “Behind the I” and “I should have stayed longer idle,” were never reprinted after O and so never appeared with titles; in lieu of titles, their first lines appear here in brackets.
“So I Said I Am Ezra”: 1951. In a May 20, 1955, letter to Josephine Miles, Ammons writes, “The name Ezra is one of those private associations which poets would be much kinder to leave out. I take it from the name of a classmate in elementary school. His name was Ezra Smith, like me a country boy in a wooden school. I think he was killed in the war. But, to me, anybody with the name Ezra would never do anything but wander. I think of the character as wiry, evaporated, leathern, a desert creature, much soul and bone, little flesh. Too, the word itself is just a little twisted, restless, but soft and mystical to the ear. After having used the name for a while, I went to the Book of Ezra to see if I could find interesting parallels but found none useful. In 1951 I knew only the name of [Ezra] Pound and was saddened that his name might interfere with me.”
“The Sap Is Gone Out of the Trees”: 1951.
“In Strasbourg in 1349”: 1951. In a September 26, 1956, letter to the poet John Logan, Ammons said that the source of this poem and “At Dawn in 1098” was The Portable Medieval Reader (Viking Press, 1949).
“I Broke a Sheaf of Light”: 1951.
“Some Months Ago”: 1951.
“I Went Out to the Sun”: 1951. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 1954).
“At Dawn in 1098”: 1951. See note to “In Strasbourg in 1349,” above.
“The Whaleboat Struck”: 1951. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 1954). In a September 26, 1956, letter to John Logan, Ammons said that the source of this poem was the narrative of Miles Phillips in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589–1600), by Richard Hakluyt.
“Turning a Moment to Say So Long”: 1951.
“Turning”: 1951.
“Dying in a Mirthful Place”: 1952.
“When Rahman Rides”: 1952.
“With Ropes of Hemp”: 1952.
“Coming to Sumer”: Sumer, one of the world’s oldest civilizations (fourth–second millennium BC), located in southern Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq. In a September 26, 1956, letter to John Logan, Ammons said that the sources of this poem and “Gilgamesh Was Very Lascivious” were Sir Leonard Wooley’s Ur of the Chaldees (first published in 1929) and Digging up the Past (first published in 1930), “as well as other reading on Sumer, particularly the work of S. N. Kramer,” author of Sumerian Mythology (1944).
“Gilgamesh Was Very Lascivious”: Gilgamesh is the hero of an eponymous Mesopotamian epic that is one of the world’s oldest recorded stories. See note on “Coming to Sumer,” above.
[“Behind the I”]: An early example of the poet’s fondness for aligning instances of a given letter (here, the pronoun “I”) from line to line—a practice facilitated by a typewriter’s monospacing. Such alignments appear frequently in his TSS of The Snow Poems.
“In the Wind My Rescue Is”: 1954. In SP68 the poem appeared under the title “I Set It My Task” and without what had been its first eight lines in O. When he reprinted the poem in CP51–71, SP77, and SP86, Ammons restored those lines and gave the poem the title under which it appears here.
“A Crippled Angel”: Josephine Miles, the dedicatee of O (see above), was wheelchair-bound and also did not have
the full use of her arms and hands.
“Doxology”: 1952. The word derives from Latin and ultimately from Greek, and means “an utterance of praise.” In Christian liturgy it designates a short formula of praise of God, commonly one beginning, “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. . . .” In line 20, “thirty-second’s” is here corrected to “thirty-seconds.” The reference is to thirty-second notes.
EXPRESSIONS OF SEA LEVEL
Expressions of Sea Level was published by the Ohio State University Press in 1964. The book bore a copyright date of 1963 but actually appeared the following year.
Ten of the poems had appeared together in The Hudson Review, vol. 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1960), and later in 1960 were privately printed as a not-for-sale chapbook titled Ten Poems. The chapbook was sequenced as follows and with these titles:
“Silver”
“Prospecting”
“Jersey Cedars”
“Bourn”
“Canto 1:” (retitled “Guide” for ESL)
“Canto 7:” (retitled “Risks and Possibilities” for ESL)
“Canto 8:” (retitled “Hardweed Path Going” for ESL)
“Canto 10:” (retitled “Terrain” for ESL)
“Canto 12:” (retitled “Bridge” for ESL)
“Canto 17:” (retitled “River” for ESL)
“Raft”: c. 1955–60. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer 1963).