The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1

by A. R. Ammons

  “Ivy, a Winding)”: Nov. 20–23, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “West Virginia.”

  “The Hieroglyphic Gathered, the Books”: Dated “Thanksgiving” (presumably 1975). One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Alabama.” Line 715: The “imagistes” (French for “imagists”) were early twentieth-century poets committed to the precise evocation of an image, usually in free verse. Line 716: Impatient for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, the Hebrews made a golden calf and worshiped it (Exodus 32).

  “Your Full-Service Mover, Madam”: Nov. 28, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Connecticut.”

  “When in Early”: Dec. 1–5, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Ohio.” In line 938, “what it is” is corrected to “what is it,” following TS. Line 929: Annus mirabilis is the Latin for “miraculous year” (and the title of a poem by John Dryden); by dropping one n, Ammons jokingly suggests that the year had been awful. Lines 940–46: Michael G. Kammen, a Cornell history professor, won the Pulitzer Prize for People of Paradox: An Inquiry into the Origins of American Civilization (1973). By the time of the poem’s composition, Bernard Bailyn, a professor of history at Harvard, had won the Pulitzer Prize for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1968) and the National Book Award for The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974); he won a second Pulitzer later, for Voyagers to the West (1986). Ruth Novarr was the wife of David Novarr, a colleague in the Cornell English Department.

  “The Arc”: Dec. 6, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Maryland.”

  “There! the Light of Human Reason!”: Dec. 8, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “New Hampshire.” In line 1036, “consistency so that” is corrected to “consistency so the,” following TS.

  “Hard Lard”: Dec. 9, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Iowa.”

  “Hard Fist”: Dec. 10, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “South Dakota.” Lines 1263–64: Willard Straight Hall is the student union building at Cornell.

  “8:45 A.M.—Doorbell Rings: Wife”: Dec. 11, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Hawaii.”

  “Shall Will Be Used Properly or Will Shall”: Dec. 13, 1975. Lines 1539–40: National Football League teams.

  “No Tirement Like Retirement”: Dec. 14, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “New Jersey.”

  “Light Falls Shadow and Beam through the Limbo”: Dec. 14, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “New York.”

  “Mist Curtains Lower and Dissolve”: Dec. 15, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Colorado.”

  “The Snow Is Fine-Sightless Today the Ground”: Dec. 16, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Nebraska.”

  “The Hen Pheasants Streak Out of the”: Dec. 17, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “New Mexico.”

  “Dawn Clear”: Dec. 18, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Arkansas.”

  “If You Were Standing under the Elm and”: Dec. 19, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Florida.”

  “In the Old”: Dec. 21, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Oregon.” Line 2076: At this time, Joe Namath was the quarterback for the New York Jets.

  “Forecast for Today (Winter’s Firstday)”: Dec. 22, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Pennsylvania.”

  “I Come in from the Snowy World”: Dec. 23, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Illinois.” Line 2148: In an NFL game played on December 14, the New York Giants defeated the New Orleans Saints 28–14.

  “Poetry Is the Smallest”: Dec. 23, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Mississippi.” After line 2268½ (the right column), one life of space after “trifle” in TS is here restored. Also following TS, the dots in line 2243 and line 2267 are here restored. The embedded poem beginning “you don’t mind, do you” (lines 2244–65) was originally a separate poem titled “Freedom 1976,” dated June 22, 1975.

  “Christmas Eve Morning”: Presumably Dec. 24, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Wisconsin.”

  “Analysis Mines and Leaves to Heal”: Dec. 25, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Tennessee.”

  “Snowed Last Night a Lot but Warmed Up”: Dec. 26, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Arizona.”

  “Those in Ledge Fright Seek”: Dec. 27, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Kentucky.” In line 2454, the comma at the end of the line in TS is here restored.

  “But If the Way Will”: Dec. 27, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Maine.” Line 2545: The Dallas Cowboys and the Minnesota Vikings (NFL teams) were scheduled to play each other the next day, December 28.

  “The Sun Climbs Daily Higher”: Dec. 28, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Louisiana.”

  “A Seventeen Morning &”: Dec. 29, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Alaska.” Line 2744: Thanks to Michael McFee for pointing out that the word “cattybiarsoned” is probably related to “catabias,” which the Dictionary of American Regional English defines as “out of line, askew” or “diagonally; positioned diagonally from.” Thanks too to Shelby Stephenson for confirming that he heard “cattybiarsoned” (but more often “cattybisoned”) used to mean something like “askew” while growing up in rural eastern North Carolina about a decade after Ammons did.

  “The First Morning in a Few”: Dec. 30, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Nevada.” Lines 2793–95: A bomb explosion at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport the evening of December 29, 1975, killed eleven people and injured many more. The perpetrators were never identified.

  “This Is”: Dec 30, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Georgia.”

  “Quilted Spreads”: Dec. 31, 1975. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Washington.”

  “Dung Ball, Round Graveyard”: Jan. 1, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Vermont.”

  “I See Downhill a Patch”: Jan. 2, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “North Carolina.”

  “The Stomach Is Quite”: Jan. 2, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Texas.”

  “My Neighbor Shakes Feed along”: Jan. 3, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Delaware.” Line 3198: In The Cantos (No. 81), Ezra Pound writes, “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.” Lines 3198–99: Ammons’s statement that “we’re / splinter assertions of the great iamb” is both a comment on prosody and a joking reference to Exodus 3:14, in which God tells Moses, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you” (King James Version).

  “Nature As Waterfalls”: Jan. 4, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “California.” Line 3271: At this time, Larry Brown was a running back for the NFL team the Washington Redskins.

  “The Wind Picks Up Slick”: Jan. 4, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Massachusetts.” Line 3296: At this time, Ed White was an offensive lineman for the NFL team the Minnesota Vikings. Line 3297: The Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboys are NFL teams. Line 3306: The spelling is “arrrive” in TS, and when the galley proofs were sent to him with the spelling corrected to “arrive,” Ammons circled the word and wrote, “3 r’s in arrive.” Given the context, this may be an onomatopoeic joke referring to the sexual sense of “coming.”

  “Cold Didn’t Keep the Stuff”: Jan. 5, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Virginia.” Lines 3366–67: In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates recommends—and explores the meaning of—the aphorism “Know yourself.” Line 3415: The Welsh painter and poet David Jones (1895–1974), author of In Parenthesis and The Anathemata.

  “Teeth Out”: Jan. 5, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Utah.” Lines 3441–42: “le mismo / difference” is a macaronic and grammatically garbled passage mixing French, Spanish, and English; Ammons seems to mean something like “same difference.” Line 3447: In The Study of Poetry (1880), Matthew Arnold says that poetry should offer “criticism of life.” See also “Theory Center” in RSP.

  “When I Think of ‘the Poet”: Jan. 6, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements�
��: “South Carolina.” Lines 3448–49: The quotation is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who in his sonnet “Shakespeare” dubs the poet and playwright “the Poet paramount, / Whom all the Muses loved, not one alone.”

  “You Can’t Get It Right”: Jan. 7, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “North Dakota.”

  “The Perfect Journey Is”: Jan. 10, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Michigan.” An early title was “The Parkway.”

  “Snow of the”: Jan. 11, 1976. One of the “Fifty Statements”: “Kansas.”

  “[here a month of snow]”: Undated.

  “The Prescriptive Stalls As”: Feb. 10, 1976.

  “After the Dissolve”: Feb. 11, 1976.

  “A Sift, Sprinkling, or Veil”: Feb. 12, 1976.

  “Structureless Rage, Perhaps”: Feb. 13, 1976. In lines 4044–46, following TS, the passage in the right-hand column begins one line earlier than in the book as published.

  “Tell What Will Not Tell Direct”: Feb. 15, 1976. In line 4127, “blanced” is here corrected to “balanced,” as it appears in a handwritten draft.

  “Spread It Thin”: Feb. 16, 1976.

  “Dark Day, Warm and Windy”: Feb. 17, 1976. Lines 4189–90: The Well-Tempered Clavier is a collection of solo keyboard music composed and compiled by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750).

  “Like Fifty”: Feb. 18, 1976 (the poet’s fiftieth birthday). In line 4234, the “a” before “stringy wilderness” is restored, following TS.

  “A 41 Morning, Still Cloudy”: Feb. 19, 1976.

  “Produce and Fuctifry”: Feb. 20, 1976. Lines 4366–71: As “mill race” gradually transforms into “Milton,” it passes through (at line 4369) the brand-name anti-anxiety medication Miltown.

  “I Look Up Guff and Find the First”: Feb. 21, 1976. In line 4456, “kept it :they” is corrected to “kept it: they,” following TS.

  “One at One with His Desire”: Feb. 22, 1976. In line 4514, a period following the colon has been deleted, following TS.

  “Dull Lull”: Feb. 23, 1976. Line 4611: Parian is a kind of porcelain. The allusion is to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Snow-Storm,” which says of the snow-blowing north wind, “Mockingly, / On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths.” Line 4666: In Plato’s thinking, everything in the material world is an imperfect copy of an ideal or form.

  “The Temperature Rose 15 Degrees over”: Feb. 24, 1976. Lines 4743–44: Spanish for “believe it or not” followed by Spanish mixed with English for comic effect, “believe it or yes,” also suggesting “believe it—oh, yes.”

  “As for Fame I’ve Had It”: Feb. 27, 1976.

  “When One Is a Child One Lives”: Feb. 28, 1976.

  “Cloud Strays Rounded Up”: Feb. 29, 1976. Line 5007: the New York Rangers, a professional ice hockey team, ended the 1975–76 season with 29 wins, 42 losses, and 9 ties. Line 5035: “peoples’ knees” is here corrected to “people’s knees.”

  “It’s Half an Hour Later Before”: Mar. 1, 1976. In line 5107, a comma is added to the line’s end, following TS.

  “This Poem Concerns”: Mar. 10, 1976.

  “The Word Cries Out”: Mar. 11, 1976.

  “I Woke Up at 6 and It Was”: Mar. 18, 1976.

  “A Flock of My Days”: Mar. 19, 1976.

  “You Can’t Imitate”: Mar. 19, 1976. Originally headed “a jumble of jottings.” Line 5352: Ammons addresses Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), thinking perhaps of Stevens’s poem “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws,” which introduces its readers to “a parakeet of parakeets.”

  “Spring’s Old Hat Is Older”: Mar. 21, 1976.

  “The Temperature Fell”: Mar. 22, 1976.

  “You Can”: Mar. 23, 1976.

  “Cunit”: Mar. 24, 1976.

  “It’s a Wonder the Body”: Mar. 25, 1976. Line 5729: In the Odyssey, Polyphemos (more commonly “Polyphemus”) is a one-eyed giant, a Cyclops, who eats members of Odysseus’s crew.

  “Today Was Like Vomiting”: Mar. 27, 1976.

  “It’s April 1”: Apr. 1, 1976.

  “I’m Unwilling”: Apr. 2, 1976.

  “The Sky Clabbered Up with”: Apr. 2, 1976.

  “A Single Fact”: Apr. 3, 1976.

  “It Does Not Rain in”: Apr. 4, 1976. In line 6036, “motion holding moving” is corrected to “motion holds moving,” following TS. In line 6045, “Anarctica” is corrected to “Antarctica.”

  “One Loves”: Apr. 4, 1976.

  “The Miltonic (Miltownic) Isn’t”: Apr. 5, 1976. Line 6091: The adjective “miltonic” can refer either to the work of the poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, or to others’ work that resembles Milton’s. Again Ammons playfully juxtaposes Milton’s name with that of the anti-anxiety medication Miltown.

  “My Father Used to Tell of an”: Apr. 9, 1976.

  “Arm’s Length Renders One”: Apr. 10, 1976.

  “I’m the Type”: Apr. 10, 1976.

  “Snow Showed a Full Range”: Apr. 11, 1976.

  “No Matter”: Apr. 11, 1976.

  “It’s So Dry the Brook, Down”: Apr. 13, 1976.

  “Today Will Beat Anything”: Apr. 14, 1976. Line 6489: “One’s Self I Sing” is a poem by Walt Whitman. Line 6490: Section 4 of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” includes the line “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am.”

  “Sight Can Go Quickly, Aerial, Where”: Apr. 15, 1976. In line 6526, “to be be back” is corrected to “to be back,” following TS.

  “These Days Most”: Apr. 16, 1976.

  “The Cardinal, Slanted Watershed”: Apr. 17, 1976.

  “One Desires the Cutting”: Apr. 18, 1976.

  “I Wonder if Pagan Is”: Apr. 18, 1976.

  “Rage Spells More of My Words Right”: Apr. 18, 1976.

  “On This Day Noteworthily Warm”: Apr. 19, 1976.

  “Some Nights I Go Out to Piss”: Apr. 19, 1976.

  “My Structure Is, Like the”: Apr. 20, 1976.

  “You Think of the Sun That It”: Apr. 23, 1976. Line 6992: “MacDonald’s” is here corrected to “McDonald’s.” Line 7012: Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), German philosopher. Harmonium is the title of Wallace Stevens’s first book; italics are here added. Line 7015: “Pleides” is here corrected to “Pleiades.” Line 7019: At the time, Stanley Fish was best known for his work on literature of the English Renaissance.

  “Snow”: Apr. 26, 1976. In line 7116, a comma is added to the line’s end, following TS.

  “It Snowed All Night Snow”: Apr. 27, 1976.

  “Drip Drip”: Apr. 28, 1976.

  “Some Fluffy, Long-Swaggly Catkins”: Apr. 29, 1976.

  “My Father, I Hollow for You”: Apr. 30, 1976. First appeared in The Iowa Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1977).

  “I Knew”: May 1, 1976.

  “I Cannot Re-wind the Brook”: May 2, 1976.

  “Considering the Variety”: May 2, 1976. In line 7466, “supresses” is corrected to “suppresses.”

  “Variable Cloudiness Windy”: May 3, 1976. The embedded poem beginning “when I was young the silk” (lines 7527–41) first appeared in The Iowa Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1977). Dots setting off that embedded poem, though present in TS and the galleys, were omitted from the published book; they are here restored.

  “On Walks I Go a Long Way along”: May 4, 1976.

  “One Trains Hard for”: May 5, 1976.

  “Will Firinger Be Kissed: Will”: May 7, 1976. Line 7654: Thanks to William Harmon for pointing out that the opening question is an example of metathesis—in this case a slight scrambling of the question “Will Kissinger Be Fired?” At the time of the poem’s composition, Kissinger was serving as U.S. Secretary of State under President Ford, as he had under President Nixon; the following November, Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter, who replaced Kissinger with Cyrus Vance. Line 7655: Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), French Post-Impressionist painter. Line 7660: “Provide, Provide” is the title of a poem by Robert Frost. Line 7666: Possibly a reference to the Midwestern poet
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Lines 7686–89: This seems to be a response to the final line of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Among School Children”: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

  “If Walking through Birdy Trees”: May 9, 1976. Line 7722: Following TS, “whole colth” is corrected to “whole cloth.”

  “They Say It Snowed”: May 22, 1976. Line 7738: Ammons and his family lived in a house on Hanshaw Road in Ithaca from 1966 to 1992.

  HIGHGATE ROAD

  Ammons self-published Highgate Road in July 1977, in consultation with his friend Stuart Wright, publisher of Palaemon Press, under the name The Inkling X Press. (See The Snow Poems, lines 1090–92 for references to “The X Press.”) The edition was limited to 200 copies. Hoping to sell the book as a collector’s item, the poet priced it at $100 per copy—but only a few copies sold. In 1979 he decided to destroy the remaining majority of the edition, explaining in a letter to Wright that by doing so he expected to raise the market value of the existing copies, and thus reward those who had bought the book.

  “Shuffling”: First appeared in The New York Times, Aug. 13, 1976.

  “For Louise and Tom Gossett”: Probably drafted in the fall of 1974, given its placement in the Chrono V notebook. Louise and Tom Gossett were professors emeriti of the English departments of Salem College and Wake Forest University, respectively; they were Ammons’s neighbors during the 1974–75 academic year, when he held a visiting appointment at Wake Forest. Louise Gossett is the author of Violence in Recent Southern Fiction (1965); Tom Gossett’s books include Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963) and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture (1985).

  “Significances”: July 24, 1971. First appeared in The Nation, Mar. 19, 1977.

  “Release”: Apr. 29, 1975.

  “Speechlessness”: First appeared in The Grapevine, Nov. 23–29, 1976.

  “Gardening”: Apr. 21, 1968.

  “Blue Skies”: Oct. 17, 1974.

  “Camels”: The poem appears here as it does in RSP, without the hyphen in what in HR was “non-literary.”

  “Immediacy”: The poem appears as it was revised for RSP. The earlier version was as follows: