The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1
Page 83
Section 85:
Lines 761–62: The reference is probably to Jesse James (1847–1882), though his brother Frank James was a member of the same outlaw gang. The “Appleseed” who lived a “life of service” is the nurseryman and preacher John Chapman (1774–1845), widely known as Johnny Appleseed.
Section 88:
Line 784: The phrase “carless in Gaza” echoes “Eyeless in Gaza,” the blinded Samson’s description of himself in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671).
Section 92:
Line 820: The Irish author Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), a proponent of art for art’s sake, was convicted in a British court of “gross indecency with certain male persons” (i.e., homosexual activity) and sentenced to two years of hard labor. “Contra naturam” and “Contra mundum” (in line 823) are Latin for “against nature” and “against the world,” respectively.
Section 100:
Lines 894–95: The Latin term jus commune refers to common law or rights, whereas jus singulare refers to laws or rights established for special cases. See “One:Many” in NP.
Section 102:
Line 918: Hee Haw was a popular television variety show featuring country music and comedy, airing from 1969 to 1992.
Section 105:
Line 941: Californium 254 is a radioactive isotope.
Section 112:
Line 1006: Xenophon (c. 430–c. 350 BC) was a Greek historian and philosopher.
“Eyesight”: Feb. 7, 1971.
“Left”: Feb. 7, 1971. First appeared in Abraxas, no. 5 (1972).
“The Arc Inside and Out”: Feb. 20, 1971. First appeared in New American Review, no. 13 (1971). The literary critic Harold Bloom encouraged and advised Ammons and became one of the most passionate champions of his work. See also “For Harold Bloom,” the dedicatory poem to Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974). In a February 27, 1971, letter to Bloom, Ammons comments at some length on “The Arc Inside and Out,” beginning, “My little thesis is that within every circle, however infinitesimally tiny, is the bit of emptiness, void, nothingness, and beyond every circle, however great, is a great deal more of the same.”
SPHERE: THE FORM OF A MOTION
Sphere: The Form of a Motion was published by W. W. Norton in 1974; it won the 1975 Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Ammons included the dedicatory poem, “For Harold Bloom,” in both his 1977 and 1986 Selected Poems without indicating its relationship to Sphere.
Sections 1 through 10 first appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973). Sections 71 and 72 first appeared, under the title “Providences,” in Granite, nos. 7–8 (Spring 1974).
Between them, Cornell and East Carolina hold three TSS of the poem, all undated. Cornell holds an early TS with very few handwritten revisions; that version has 250 numbered sections that, like those of the book as published, consist of four tercets each. East Carolina holds an intermediate TS that has many sections struck out, but also has TSS of shorter poems interspersed and marked to be spliced into the poem. Cornell holds the final TS, the one with 155 sections that was the basis for the book as published.
The published poem’s final section, section 155, is section 215 of the earliest of the three TSS. Its concluding punctuation was an exclamation point (“we’re sailing!”) all the way up to the book’s galley proofs, where Ammons decided to use a period instead.
For a consideration of the differences between the poem’s early and final versions, see Susannah L. Hollister’s article “The Planet on the Screen: Scales of Belonging in A. R. Ammons’s Sphere,” which appeared in Contemporary Literature, vol. 50, no. 4 (Winter 2009).
Although the TSS are undated, letters collected in Kevin McGuirk’s An Image for Longing indicate the period of the poem’s composition and revision. In a June 25, 1972, letter to Josephine Jacobsen, Ammons writes, “I’ve done 166 twelve-line stanzas of a new poem in the last three months.” In an August 12 letter to Bloom, he announces, “I finished my long poem a few days ago. It’s called The Form of a Motion.” He then sets the poem aside for some time, but on November 22, 1973, he informs Bloom, “I have begun to do some new writing for the long poem. And I am slowly making other changes that I think will improve it.” On December 28, he submitted Sphere to John Benedict, his editor at Norton; the galley proofs, which are held at East Carolina, are dated April 19, 1974.
The Cornell archive holds undated TSS of an unpublished poem about Sphere:
Bookish Bookseller
Roll
up the edges of
the squared-off, flattened-out
two-dimensional
mind,
pull
the corners up and tie them off
at the top into a sphere or bag,
so that anyone thinking
will
have
to think about more
sides at once than one,
get volume into his
definitions,
and
become less certain
that summer with him is summer
elsewhere or that his ice cap is feeling’s sole
mood:
so
I recommend my new poem
Sphere: The Form of a Motion
with the hope that it will ensphere good and do somebody
some.
Section 17:
Line 195: Following TS3, “distingushing” is corrected to “distinguishing.”
Section 36:
Lines 427–28: Ammons is referring to his poem “Shit List,” which ends with the word “gallinule.” By the time of Sphere’s 1974 publication, “Shit List” actually had been published (in a 1972 issue of Abraxas), but Ammons did not collect it in one of his books until 1982’s Worldly Hopes.
Section 39:
Lines 463–64: Apollo 16 launched on April 16, 1972. It was the fifth—and next to last—mission to succeed in putting humans on the moon.
Section 42:
Line 501: Following TS3, “toaste” is corrected to “toast.”
Section 59:
Line 707: Following TS3, “popular” is corrected to “poplar.”
Section 73:
Line 872: The reference to Northfield is to Northfield, New Jersey, where Ammons resided for part of the 1950s and ’60s before moving to Ithaca.
Section 74:
Lines 877–79: Ammons seems to think “repodepo” an interesting typo (“a mischance of machinery”). Thanks to William Harmon for pointing out that the word is actually a widely used term for depots of repossessed vehicles.
Section 77:
Line 914: Cayuga Heights is a village just north of Ithaca.
Section 82:
Line 983: The term “sui generations of particularity” is based on the Latin phrase sui generis, which means “of a kind all its own” (i.e., unique).
Section 84:
Line 998: Silver was a mule on the family farm of Ammons’s youth. Her other appearances include the “22 Dec:” section of Tape, “Silver” in ESL, and “Mule Song” in U. Doll, one of the family’s cows, appears in no other poem; Ammons mentions her in his 1992 interview with Alex Albright.
Section 87:
Line 1040: For an articulation of “the one:many problem” (also referred to in lines 1456–61), see “One:Many” in NP.
Section 98:
Line 1168: “Jove” is another name for Jupiter, the Roman king of the gods and also god of the sky.
Sections 109–10:
Lines 1303–13: This imaginary trip sets out northward from Walvis Bay, in what is now Namibia. Sorris Sorris is still in Namibia but inland; Ammons seems to have thought it was coastal. Benguela and Lobito are both on the Angolan coast, Port Gentil is in Gabon, and Cape Palmas is in Liberia. Sidi Ifni is on the North Atlantic coast of Morocco; one would pass the Strait of Gibraltar (“the gaping Strait”) to the east as one continued to Oporto, on the west coast of Portugal. Brest is on the western tip of Brittany, in northwest France. Rounding Europe and following the Siberia
n (i.e., North Asian) coast, one would eventually pass through the Bering Strait, which divides eastern Russia from Alaska, and thus divides Asia from North America.
Section 119:
Line 1422: Oran is on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast.
Section 122:
Lines 1460–62: Following TS3, “plurisbus” is corrected to “pluribus.” E pluribus unum, a Latin phrase on the Great Seal of the United States, means “Out of many, one.” Although Ammons calls it the national motto, since 1956 the national motto has officially been “In God we trust.” Walt Whitman (1819–1892) wrote poetry and prose about the state of the nation—its promise as well as the challenges it faced.
Section 125:
Lines 1491–93: Ammons here caricatures Whitman’s view that a strong democracy must be founded on bonds of intimate male relationships.
Section 136:
Line 1631: Enlil was the Sumerian sky-god.
Section 141:
Line 1688: Following TS3, “thicked-jawed” is corrected to “thick-jawed.”
Section 148:
Line 1770: “Foliate saprophytes” would be leafy myco-heterotrophs—plants that parasitize fungi to supplement the food they make through photosynthesis.
DIVERSIFICATIONS
Diversifications was published by W. W. Norton in 1975. Its dedicatee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and translator Richard Howard, wrote several important appraisals of Ammons’s work, and devoted a chapter to it in his landmark 1969 study Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950.
“Transcendence”: July 15, 1973. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 23, no. 3 (Spring 1974).
“Insouciance”: First appeared (as “Insouciant”) in Salmagundi, nos. 22–23 (Spring–Summer 1973).
“Narrows”: First appeared in Chicago Review, vol. 24, no. 3 (Winter 1972).
“Full”: Oct. 8, 1963. First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Uppermost”: Apr. 5, 1974. First appeared in Brim, no. 3 (Winter 1975).
“Lightning”: June 30, 1965. First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“The Marriage”: Jan. 19, 1974. First appeared in American Review, no. 21 (Oct. 1974).
“Double Exposure”: Aug. 9, 1968. First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973). Line 1’s “Flounder-like” in D became “Flounderlike” in RSP.
“Currencies”: Dec. 10, 1964. First appeared in The New York Times, Sept. 27, 1972.
“Bonus”: Jan. 19–20, 1974. First appeared in Poetry, Sept. 1974.
“Emerson”: June 10, 1973. First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Meeting the Opposition”: Apr. 19, 1973. First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Appearances”: First appeared in The New York Times, Mar. 16, 1973.
“Measure”: Feb. 3, 1963. First appeared in the Quarterly Review of Literature, vol. 13, nos. 1–2 (1964). The poem’s dedicatee, the poet Robert Morgan, is a fellow North Carolinian who joined the Cornell English Department in 1971.
“Delight”: First appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Dec. 1973.
“Imperialist”: First appeared in The New York Quarterly, no. 17 (1975).
“Poem”: Nov. 1, 1973.
“Imago”: May 1, 1968. First appeared (as “Model”) in New Letters, vol. 39, no. 2 (Winter 1972).
“Light Orders”: Sept. 7, 1969.
“History”: First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Self-Projection”: Apr. 16, 1968. First appeared in New Letters, vol. 39, no. 2 (Winter 1972).
“Metaphysic”: June 11, 1969.
“Tussock”: First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“The Make”: Oct. 25, 1973. Appeared in Mademoiselle, Oct. 1975.
“Terminations”: First appeared in Antaeus, no. 9 (Spring 1973).
“Fundamental Constant”: First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Making It”: Oct. 13, 1973. First appeared in The Georgia Review, vol. 28, no. 3 (Fall 1974).
“Weight”: June 24, 1965. Appeared in The New York Quarterly no. 18 (Fall 1976).
“Ballad”: First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Three Travelogues”: 1962. First appeared in the Quarterly Review of Literature, vol. 16, nos. 1–2 (1969). Although one might expect the word in line 12 to be “standing,” “sanding” does appear to be the intended word. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “sand” when used as an intransitive verb to mean “to become clogged or bunged up with sand.”
“Sight Unseen”: May 6, 1973. Appeared in New Letters, no. 20 (1978).
“Facing”: Aug. 10, 1966.
“Glass Globe”: May 22, 1968. First appeared in Raven, vol. 2, no. 3 (Fall 1972).
“Separations”: June 30, 1965.
“Circling”: Apr. 10, 1966. Appeared in Mademoiselle, Oct. 1975.
“Fix”: Aug. 23, 1971. First appeared in Café Solo, no. 10 (1977).
“Weather”: Appeared in Mademoiselle, Oct. 1975.
“Coward”: On a photocopy, Ammons notes that he wrote the poem before 1973.
“Crying Out”: First appeared in Salmagundi, nos. 22–23 (Spring–Summer 1973).
“Certainty”: Nov. 5 or 6, 1968. First appeared in New Letters, vol. 39, no. 2 (Winter 1972).
“The Flaw”: June 26, 1967. First appeared in The New York Times, Oct. 19, 1968.
“Design”: June 5, 1968.
“Rocking”: May 29, 1968.
“Ars Poetica”: Nov. 29, 1959. First appeared in Epoch, vol. 23, no. 3 (Spring 1974). The title, Latin for “Art of Poetry,” is most often associated with the Roman poet Horace’s instructive verse letter to the Pisos—but Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Ars Poetica” would also have loomed large for Ammons. In TS, the colons in line 20 and line 28 were unitalicized, and so they are unitalicized here. Lines 19–20: The Hudson Review, Partisan Review, and Poetry were prestigious venues for poetry during the poet’s lifetime. Line 28: Epoch is a literary magazine published at Cornell.
“Course Discourse”: First appeared in Brim, no. 4 (Fall 1975).
“Obtrusion”: May 16, 1974.
“Louise”: First appeared in Granite, no. 4 (Autumn–Winter 1972–73). Line 1: Aurora is a New York village north of Ithaca, on Cayuga Lake. The episode is probably fictitious, the narrator an invented persona.
“80-Proof”: First appeared in Epoch, vol. 13, no. 3 (Spring 1964).
“Having to Do with Birth”: July 9, 1971. Appeared in The New York Quarterly, no. 19 (1977). In TS, the colon at the end of line 1 was unitalicized, and so it is unitalicized here.
“Mind”: Jan. 29, 1970. First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Attenuations”: Mar. 5, 1971. First appeared (as “Attentions”) in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Turning”: First appeared in Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973).
“Paradise”: Jan. 12, 1965.
“The Unmirroring Peak”: Apr. 9, 1971.
“Pray Without Ceasing”: Spring 1967. First appeared in The Hudson Review, vol. 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1973). In I Thessalonians 5:17, Paul tells the church at Thessalonica, “Pray without ceasing” (King James Version). Lines 25–33: Hermes Trismegistus is an eastern Mediterranean mythical figure, allegedly the author of an influential body of ancient philosophical and theological writings. A period at the end of line 305 is corrected to a colon, following TS. Also following TS, in line 373, “mixmaster, mixmaster” is here corrected to “mixmaster, maxmister.”
THE SNOW POEMS
Written from the fall of 1975 through the spring of 1976, The Snow Poems was published by W. W. Norton early in 1977. The title suggests a collection, but Ammons made clear that he considered the book one long poem: although his 1980 Selected Longer Poems omitted it, in that book’s preface he included it in a list of his long poems, and in the 1994 Pa
ris Review interview he said that of all his long poems, The Snow Poems was his favorite. In recognition of that concept of the book, the line numbering here is continuous from beginning to end. Every line on which any typing appears is counted—with the exception of the section headings, each of which merely repeats its section’s first line.
The poem appeared with the dedication “for my country.” Early on, Ammons considered writing a sequence of “Fifty Statements,” with each section headed by the name of one of the fifty states. As the total work evolved into something much longer, those titles were set aside. In the end, The Snow Poems included most of those sections; each of the state titles is given in the notes below.
Ammons’s father, W. M. (“Willie”) Ammons, died on November 25, 1966. His death looms large in this book, which was begun as the poet, who had become a father himself, neared turning fifty. Dates of the individual sections are given below; as the note on it indicates, Ammons wrote the “Like Fifty” section on his fiftieth birthday, February 18, 1976.
“Words of Comfort”: Undated. Line 11: Equanil is the brand name of an anti-anxiety medication.
“One Must Recall as One Mourns the Dead”: Sept. 13, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Missouri.”
“Things Change, the Shit Shifts”: Sept. 18, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Oklahoma.” In line 77, “sawmp” is corrected to “swamp,” following TS. The embedded “Envy” poem (lines 99–127) is dated May 23, 1976.
“My”: Sept. 19, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Idaho.”
“Here I Sit, Fifty in the”: Sept. 28, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Indiana.” In line 199, “skninyings” is corrected to “skinnyings,” following TS.
“My Father Used to Bring Banana”: Sept. 28, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Wyoming.”
“Have You Seen the Severe Waters”: Sept. 29, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Rhode Island.” Line 353: Here “etc” is emended to “etc.” (with a period), in keeping with Ammons’s usual practice.
“Early October”: Oct. 5, 1975.
“Terror of”: Oct. 18, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Montana.” Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the night sky, is part of the constellation Orion.