A couple of years ago, shortly after a review by Wendell Berry of one of my books appeared in the Nation1—a review in which Mr. Berry noted my use in some poems of scientific terminology—Sonia Raiziss2 wrote to me suggesting that I edit an issue of Chelsea to contain poems having to do with science and technology.
I agreed to do this and Miss Raiziss and I began to notify poets we could contact by letter of our intention. To help us reach poets we did not already know, Henry Rago carried a notice of our plan in Poetry.
Obviously, the intention—poems having to do with science and technology—is so broad as to lack all useful definition. We felt, though, that only a broad definition could serve our purpose, which was exploratory, and which was to discover definition, if any were possible, from the poems themselves: that is, we felt that easy, a priori definition should give place to the rich, self-contradicting, complex “world” to be outlined by the hoped-for poems themselves.
Since I alone was to select the poems, however, a heavy restraint had to be acknowledged: my predispositions, limitations, blind spots would interfere with any world that was trying to become itself, to reach toward a complicated definition. I probably did not succeed in ridding myself of the inappropriate self entirely. After all, no part of the self is inappropriate to part of the task—the question. Is this a poem?
Consciously, then, I tried to keep my mind open to all possibility, to alarm myself at the encroachment of an idiosyncrasy. But since it is at least as difficult to know oneself as to talk about the relations between poetry and science, I have undoubtedly exercised, if unconsciously, some control on the world presented by these poems.
I did use one governing assumption: that it doesn’t matter what a poem is about unless it succeeds first in being a poem. In other words, in spite of the fact that we have devoted an issue to science and technology, we have felt that these provide “materials” for poems but that poems themselves are primary. I think it is legitimate to maintain this order and still focus attention on the experience resulting from contact with scientific materials. Much of what is impersonally, flatly new to us arises from scientific insight and technological innovation. It is part of the result of a poem to personalize and familiarize, to ingest and acquaint—to bring feelings and things into manageable relationships.
In this connection, Wordsworth’s statement in the Preface3 has been my guide and shelter:
If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.
Here, then, are poems—properly, not all welcoming—that give us the best knowledge that could be managed under the circumstances of the relation between poetry and science in our time. Each reader will come away with a different experience of this knowledge, but possibly the experiences of readers will be more nearly alike than unlike.
From Chelsea 20/21 (May 1967): 3–4.
1. Review of Expressions of Sea Level, Nation 198: 304 (March 23, 1964).
2. Editor of Chelsea at the time this was written.
3. Ammons is referring to the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” 1802.