The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1

by A. R. Ammons

  “Two Motions”: July 2–11, 1962. First appeared in Chelsea, no. 14 (Jan. 1964).

  “Composing”: 1958. First appeared in Poetry, July 1965.

  “Ithaca, N.Y.”: July 1963. First appeared in Poetry, July 1965. The poem is dated July 1963, the same month the poet gave a reading at Cornell (at poet David Ray’s invitation) and made the contacts that led to his employment there beginning the following year.

  “Consignee”: 1951. First appeared in Niobe, no. 1 (1965).

  “February Beach”: Feb. 6, 1963.

  “Self-Portrait”: Aug. 16, 1964. First appeared in Modern Occasions, edited by Philip Rahv. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

  “Passage”: Aug. 27, 1964. First appeared in Modern Occasions, edited by Philip Rahv. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

  “Peak”: Aug. 22, 1964. First appeared in Modern Occasions, edited by Philip Rahv. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

  “Zone”: June 9, 1964. First appeared in Modern Occasions, edited by Philip Rahv. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

  “Muse”: Dec. 6, 1959. First appeared in Poetry Northwest, vol. 5, nos. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1964–65).

  “Sitting Down, Looking Up”: Feb. 16, 1964. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 17, no. 4 (Winter 1965).

  “Belief”: Mar. 1, 1964. First appeared in Of Power and Power, edited by Erwin A. Glikes and Paul Schwaber. Basic Books, 1964.

  “Orientale”: Dec. 16, 1958.

  “Mays Landing”: Oct. 23, 1963. Mays Landing is a New Jersey community near Northfield. In lines 17–18, “two’s and / three’s” is here corrected to “twos and / threes.”

  “Sphere”: Oct. 6, 1960. First appeared in Chelsea, no. 14 (Jan. 1964).

  “First Carolina Said-Song”: Sept. 5, 1962. First appeared in Red Clay Reader, no. 2 (1965).

  “Second Carolina Said-Song”: Sept. 6, 1962. First appeared in Red Clay Reader, no. 2 (1965). Fayetteville is in southeastern North Carolina, not far from Whiteville. It is home to Fort Bragg, a major U.S. Army base, as well as the Fayetteville VA Medical Center.

  “Discoverer”: May 1962. First appeared in Damascus Road, no. 2 (1965). Lines 7–10: Although most readers will remember that a circle’s area is the product of π and the square of its radius, fewer will know Johannes Kepler’s second law of planetary motion: the fact that, however elliptical a planet’s orbit, the area of its sweep will be the same over any given period of time. “The Albatross,” a poem by the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, draws an analogy between that seabird’s life and a poet’s.

  “A Symmetry of Thought”: Apr. 1958. First appeared in Accent, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 1959).

  “Holding On”: July 27, 1963. First appeared in the Quarterly Review of Literature, vol. 13, nos. 1–2 (1964). The poem appears here as revised for RSP, with “tread” replacing “tire” in line 1, and a comma replacing a dash between “sight” and “as” in line 7.

  “Uh, Philosophy”: Sept. 20, 1959. First appeared (as “Canto 44”) in The Carleton Miscellany, in vol. 4, no. 1 (Winter 1963). The semicolon at the end of line 30 was changed to a colon in CP51–71; however, Ammons’s TS for CP51–71 retains the semicolon, and that is restored here. In line 58 “anyway” is here corrected to “any way.”

  “The Numbers”: Oct. 1964.

  “Empty”: Sept. 14, 1964.

  “Unbroken”: Aug. 18, 1963. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 17, no. 4 (Winter 1965).

  “Fall”: First appeared in the Quarterly Review of Literature, vol. 13, nos. 1–2 (1964).

  “The Wind Coming Down From”: June 19, 1958. First appeared in Accent, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 1959). For information about the Ezra persona, see the note on “So I Said I Am Ezra.”

  “Interval”: First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 10, no. 3 (Autumn 1957). The eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus developed our modern principles of classifying organisms, as well as our system of binomial Latin nomenclature (e.g., Pinus coulteri for Coulter’s pine).

  “Way to Go”: Aug. 18, 1963. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 17, no. 4 (Winter 1965).

  UPLANDS

  Uplands was published by W. W. Norton in 1970; the dedication (“for Mona and Vida”) is to the poet’s sisters. The book’s title suggests the hills of Ithaca and surrounding Tompkins County, which the Appalachia Regional Commission recognizes as one of the northernmost counties of Appalachia.

  “Snow Log”: Jan. 13, 1969. First appeared in Southern Poetry Review, vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring 1970). There are several early TSS of “Snow Log” (including one Ammons sent to his sister Vida with other recent poems in April 1969); in all of them, line 15 ends with “I take in on myself,” and the poem appeared thus in Southern Poetry Review. In the galleys for Uplands, however, Ammons indicated that “in” should be changed to “it,” adding a note now lightly crossed out: “mistake in MS—but must be changed.” That the original phrasing, so consistently typed and retyped, was a mistake seems unlikely: he probably simply changed his mind about using that construction. He reprinted the poem three times (in CP51–71, SP77, and SP86), never reverting to the earlier text.

  The revision stands here, but the earlier version is worth considering. Compare “I take in on myself” to two passages in “The Woodsroad”: “I take myself in” (line 4) and “I take myself / all in” (lines 17–18). See also the opening to “Vehicle”: “I take myself, in / the goal of my destiny, / the way the wind takes / me. . . .”

  “Upland”: Apr. 2, 1969. First appeared in Pebble, no. 3 (1969).

  “Periphery”: Mar. 9, 1969. First appeared in Southern Poetry Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall 1969).

  “Clarity”: Mar. 9, 1969. First appeared in Apple, no. 4 (Autumn 1970).

  “Classic”: Mar. 7, 1969. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

  “Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness”: July 18, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Feb. 1970.

  “If Anything Will Level with You Water Will”: July 17, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Feb. 1970.

  “The Unifying Principle”: July 9, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Feb. 1970.

  “Runoff”: June 30, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Feb. 1970.

  “Transaction”: June 27, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Feb. 1970.

  “Then One”: Apr. 14, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “Further On”: July 11, 1969. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 4 (Winter 1970).

  “Hope’s Okay”: June 11, 1969. First appeared in Southern Poetry Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall 1969).

  “Life in the Boondocks”: May 30, 1969. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 4 (Winter 1970).

  “Spiel”: First appeared in Poetry, Feb. 1970.

  “Guitar Recitativos”: Fall 1967. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 1968). Ammons reversed sections 3 and 4 when he reprinted the poem in CP51–71, and the text here retains that reversal.

  “Laser”: Aug. 30, 1964. First appeared in Foxfire, vol. 1, no. 1 (Mar. 1967).

  “Virtu”: July 30, 1965. First appeared in Apple, no. 1 (Summer 1967).

  “Choice”: Summer 1955.

  “Body Politic”: June 2, 1967. First appeared in Kumquat, no. 1 (1967).

  “Apologia pro Vita Sua”: Apr. 1956. First appeared in Compass Review, no. 2 (Apr. 1958). The title, Latin for “Defense of His Life,” is best known as the title of English theologian John Henry Newman’s 1864 spiritual autobiography.

  “Offset”: June 26, 1967. First appeared in The Quest, vol. 3, no. 2 (Winter–Spring 1969).

  “Mountain Talk”: June 1, 1964. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “Impulse”: First appeared in The New York Times, Feb. 10, 1969.

  “Needs”: May 24, 1968. First appeared in Stony Brook, nos. 1–2 (Fall 1968).

  “Help”: May 26, 1968. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

  “Love S
ong”: Aug. 10, 1966. First appeared in Poetry, June 1967.

  “Love Song (2)”: Aug. 10, 1966. First appeared in Poetry, June 1967.

  “Mule Song”: Nov. 1958. First appeared in The New York Times, June 8, 1969. Other poems in which Silver appears are “Silver” and TTY (the “22 Dec:” section).

  “Script”: Apr. 14, 1968. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

  “Holly”: June 4, 1968. First appeared in New: American and Canadian Poetry, no. 8 (Fall 1968).

  “Small Song”: First appeared in The New York Times, June 16, 1969.

  “Possibility Along a Line of Difference”: Apr. 1, 1959. First appeared in TriQuarterly, no. 15 (Spring 1969).

  “Cascadilla Falls”: July 7, 1966. First appeared in The Quest’s “Poetry Pamphlet Number One: Poetry Extra” (1969). Cascadilla Falls is on Cascadilla Creek, which runs through Ithaca’s Cascadilla Gorge.

  “Summer Session”: 1968. First appeared (as “Summer Session 1968”) in Epoch, vol. 19, no. 3 (Spring 1970). Restored here is a colon at the end of line 10 that appears both in the Epoch text and in U, but did not print on the photocopy from U used in setting up the poem in CP51–71 and was likewise omitted in SLP. In line 167, the word “nickelodean” is not a misspelling of “nickelodeon”: the intended meaning seems to be “made of nickel.” In line 194, “the weewee’s,” which is not possessive, is here corrected to “the weewees.”

  Lines 330–40: Baxter Hathaway, a colleague in Cornell’s English Department, founded the creative writing program as well as the literary magazine Epoch. Barry Adams was chair of the department at the time Ammons wrote the poem.

  Lines 429–33: The note is from Neil Hertz, long Ammons’s colleague in English at Cornell, now professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins.

  BRIEFINGS: POEMS SMALL AND EASY

  Briefings was published by W. W. Norton in 1971. Its dedicatee, the poet John Logan (1923–1987), was a friend and an important supporter.

  “Center”: May 19, 1963. First appeared in The New York Times, Nov. 25, 1968.

  “Mechanics”: June 28, 1967. First appeared in The New York Times, Apr. 21, 1969.

  “Up”: Apr. 23, 1968.

  “After Yesterday”: May 1, 1968. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969). The poem appears as revised for RSP, with “blue” replacing “strungled” in line 2.

  “Event”: May 1962. First appeared in Epos, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 1963).

  “High & Low”: May 25, 1965.

  “Peracute Lucidity”: Mar. 15, 1969.

  “Increment”: June 9, 1968. Ammons added the hyphen in line 3’s “self-regard” for RSP.

  “Bees Stopped”: 1951.

  “Storm”: Nov. 13, 1963.

  “Two Possibilities”: Jan. 24, 1970.

  “Medicine for Tight Spots”: Apr. 19, 1969. The expression “fine-up” (line 8) is not an error for “fire-up”; see “fining up” in line 680 of “Essay on Poetics,” as well as “fines up” in line 125 of “Religious Feeling” (in Appendix B, in Volume II).

  “Brooks & Other Notions”: June 7, 1969.

  “Cougar”: Nov. 3, 1965. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “This Black Rich Country”: Aug. 14, 1955. First appeared in Epos, vol. 8, no. 2 (Winter 1956).

  “Attention”: July 27, 1963.

  “Return”: June 29, 1958.

  “This Bright Day”: May 1967. First appeared in Poetry, Mar. 1969.

  “Look for My White Self”: Sept. 9, 1955. First appeared in Epos, vol. 8, no. 1 (Fall 1956).

  “Undersea”: May 1967.

  “Auto Mobile”: May 1967.

  “Wagons”: June 14, 1968. First appeared in Southern Poetry Review, vol. 9, no. 1 (Fall 1968).

  “September Drift”: Sept. 8, 1968. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “Civics”: 1967.

  “He Held Radical Light”: May 17, 1965. First appeared in The Quest’s “Poetry Pamphlet Number One: Poetry Extra” (1969).

  “Locus”: Apr. 17, 1966.

  “Circles”: May 20, 1968.

  “Working Still”: Mar. 21, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “Tooling Up”: June 11, 1968.

  “Father”: Apr. 12, 1968. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

  “Sumerian”: Jan. 24, 1955. First appeared in Accent, vol. 16, no. 3 (Summer 1956). See note to O’s “Coming to Sumer,” above.

  “Hippie Hop”: June 9, 1968.

  “Garden”: July 10, 1965.

  “Hymn IV”: Nov. 21, 1957. First appeared (as “Hymn VI”) in Accent, vol. 18, no. 3 (Summer 1958).

  “The Mark”: Sept. 28, 1965.

  “Loft”: July 6, 1965.

  “Poetics”: Sept. 1965. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

  “Working with Tools”: June 5, 1968. First appeared in Southern Poetry Review, vol. 9, no. 1 (Fall 1968).

  “Doubling the Nerve”: Apr. 3, 1969. First appeared in Pebble, no. 3 (Nov. 1969).

  “Making”: May 3, 1968. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969). See the etymological note on “The Makers,” below.

  “Dominion”: Oct. 21, 1965. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “Round”: Apr. 18, 1968. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

  “Tight”: Sept. 10, 1968. First appeared in Lillabulero, Second Series, no. 7 (Summer–Fall 1969).

  “The Woodsroad”: Aug. 19, 1966. First appeared in The Quest, vol. 3, no. 2 (Winter–Spring 1969).

  “WCW”: Aug. 7, 1962. First appeared in The Quest’s “Poetry Pamphlet Number One: Poetry Extra” (1969). The title abbreviates the name of William Carlos Williams, whom Ammons visited and took for drives during the elder poet’s last years. In a 1996 interview with Steven P. Schneider, Ammons said, “I have never cared that much about the content of William Carlos Williams’s own writing, although I have borrowed so much from him in terms of form.”

  “Saying”: Mar. 21, 1965. First appeared in The New York Times, Dec. 28, 1968.

  “Looking Over the Acreage”: Nov. 30, 1968.

  “Gain”: Sept. 25, 1965. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

  “Off”: May 16, 1968.

  “Treaties”: Apr. 2, 1966. First appeared in Poetry, Mar. 1969.

  “Convergence”: June 30, 1965.

  “Project”: First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “North Jersey”: Spring 1968.

  “Ship”: Apr. 4, 1969.

  “Play”: Mar. 5, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “Spinejacking”: June 1, 1968. First appeared in Choice, no. 6 (1970).

  “Shore Fog”: June 9, 1968.

  “Meteorology”: Apr. 21, 1968.

  “Exotic”: Spring 1968.

  “Hosts”: Spring 1968.

  “Crevice”: Dec. 29, 1966. First appeared in The New York Times, Mar. 22, 1969.

  “Transducer”: May 28, 1968. Ammons added the comma at the end of line 8 for RSP.

  “Mean”: Apr. 1968.

  “Banking”: June 10, 1968.

  “Elegy for a Jet Pilot”: Feb. 26, 1964. First appeared in The Quest’s “Poetry Pamphlet Number One: Poetry Extra” (1969). The poem is dated one day after the February 25, 1964, crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 304; all passengers and crew members were killed. Another recent crash was Pan Am Flight 214: see the note to “9 Dec:” in TTY. Mays Landing is in New Jersey, where Ammons lived at this time.

  “Countering”: July 12, 1965. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “The Quince Bush”: July 7, 1967. First appeared in Abraxas, vol. 1, no. 1 (1968).

  “Square”: May 23, 1968. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “Autumn Song”: Oct. 20, 1968. First appeared in Lillabulero, Second Series, no. 7 (Summer–Fall 1969).

  “Early Morning in Early April”: Apr. 5, 1969.

&nbs
p; “Reversal”: Mar. 21, 1967. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “The Confirmers”: July 14, 1968. First appeared in Abraxas, vol. 1, no. 1 (1968).

  “Involved”: May 1967.

  “Admission”: June 9, 1966. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “Mission”: Mar. 11, 1965. First appeared in Poetry, June 1967. In a July 27, 1966, letter to the poet and translator Richard Howard, Ammons described this fourteen-line poem as a sonnet.

  “Cut the Grass”: July 10, 1969. First appeared in Poetry (Feb. 1970).

  “The Limit”: Nov. 28, 1968.

  “Concerning the Exclusions of the Object”: Jan. 12, 1965. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

  “The Makers”: July 14, 1968. First appeared in New: American and Canadian Poetry, no. 8 (Fall 1968). The word “poet” derives from the Greek verb poiein, meaning “to make,” and many poets have embraced the idea that they are “makers.” (See too the poem “Making.”) In the Chrono IV notebook at Cornell, an early TS of “The Makers” has in line 1 the word “shit” rather than “do.”

  “Levitation”: July 21, 1965.

  “Medium”: July 1, 1965. First appeared in Lillabulero, Second Series, no. 7 (Summer–Fall 1969).

  “Transfer”: June 26, 1967.

  “Monday”: May 27, 1968.

  “Pluralist”: July 14, 1969. First appeared in Poetry, Feb. 1970.

  “Here & Now”: Oct. 20, 1968. First appeared in Poetry, Oct. 1970.

  “The Run-Through”: June 25, 1969. First appeared in Southern Poetry Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall 1969).

  “The Put-Down Come On”: Sept. 13, 1968.

  “The City Limits”: Feb. 22, 1970. First appeared in Modern Occasions, vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1971).

  PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS

  FROM COLLECTED POEMS 1951–1971

  Collected Poems 1951–1971 was published by W. W. Norton in 1972; it won the 1973 National Book Award for poetry. Ammons included most but not all the poems he had gathered in his books up to then: he excluded the untitled poems beginning “Behind the I” and “I should have stayed longer idle” from Ommateum; “Portrait” (the only poem in SP68 not included in CP51–71), “Resort,” and “Morning Glory” from Corsons Inlet; “The Numbers,” “Empty,” “Unbroken,” and “Fall” from Northfield Poems; and all of Tape for the Turn of the Year. It also included a number of poems, some recent and some not, that Ammons had not yet collected. With some exceptions, the poems were sequenced by order of composition, without reference to the books in which they had originally appeared. The table of contents was broken into four sections, each representing roughly half a decade. The poems’ sequence, section by section, was as follows, with the titles of those first gathered in CP51–71 in bold type: