INTRODUCTION
by Helen Vendler
ARCHIE RANDOLPH AMMONS (1926–2001) became one of the great American poets of the twentieth century. He remained less widely known than his contemporaries because he avoided reading his poems in public (“I get stage fright,” he wrote), and even when he received the National Book Award in 1993, his intimidating anxiety forbade his appearing in person to accept the award: “As you’ll recall,” he wrote to me, asking me (as one of the judges) to read aloud his acceptance speech, “I show off but not up.” In spite of that intense and lifelong emotional fragility, he wrote tirelessly, ever seeking to reinvent lyric poetry for contemporary America, deliberately suppressing overt mention of the poetry of England while feeling free to allude to it often—almost invisibly—within his own work. In the perpetual standoff between tradition and the individual talent, Ammons chose to exhibit the individual talent more openly than poetic tradition. Eliot, with his allusive multilingual poems, chose to display an open recognition of the European and English tradition, establishing his individuality against it. Ammons, however, declared with every volume that he defined himself explicitly as an American poet writing of American places and American people.
Yet Ammons’s America stretched from the magma underneath the American continent to the expanding universe above, ranging from the invisible subatomic particles of the laboratory to the constant proliferation of the innumerable galaxies. He extended Whitman’s America by incorporating into his own work not only the vocabulary and formulae of modern scientific discovery but also the imaginative revolution that has followed in the wake of modern science. He became a writer of Whitmanian amplitude and excess, but he adopted a geometrical idea of poetic structure rather than Whitman’s more geographic one. Each volume published in his lifetime revealed a new and surprising phase of Ammons’s creative experimentation. He had the great good luck of remaining a striking poet into old age.
But when I read Ammons’s posthumously published last volume, with its self-mocking authorial title Bosh and Flapdoodle, I at first could not understand—in spite of the transparency of the language—what he was up to as a poet. That bewilderment had also been present in the late seventies when I first encountered Ammons in The Snow Poems: who was this poet of dazzling language who so insouciantly filled up his page any way he liked—with doodles, with word lists, with a careening progress from personal events to weather reports to sublime testimony? Ammons regarded The Snow Poems as a single long poem in spite of its plural components because he made the sequence cohere as a grim and comic calendrical chronicle of Ithaca’s near-interminable snow, from the first flakes in the fall to the last sleet in the spring. From The Snow Poems I read backward to Ammons’s first volume, Ommateum, and forward through every subsequent volume. I became more and more moved and delighted by Ammons’s inventiveness, humor, and daring as he expanded lyric possibility. Under his accounts, short and long, of personal and cosmic comedy, meditation, satire, elegy, and wonder, lay tragedy, first encountered at the age of four.
I lamented, with others, the absence of any comprehensive volume after the 1972 Collected Poems. Now, at last, under Robert West’s expert and learned editorship, Ammons’s volumes have all been assembled in this Complete Poems, together with a gathering of poems published in journals during Ammons’s lifetime but never collected in volume form. Another smaller group of poems saw periodical publication after Ammons’s death. West includes only two unpublished poems: one, “Finishing Up,” opens the collection, and the other, “Bookish Bookseller,” appears in the notes for Sphere. There remains a large amount of writing not yet in print, including letters and journals (some of which are reprinted in the raw and revealing collection of youthful documents called An Image for Longing).1 But at last, in West’s helpfully annotated edition, we have a properly ample register of Ammons’s life-work as a poet. It will no doubt generate a new Selected Poems.
We will also have in the future a stirring comprehensive biography of Ammons now being written by Roger Gilbert of Cornell University, an expert on Ammons and the Ammons archive. It will shed light especially on Ammons’s obscure rural beginnings, including his unpublished early work. With gratitude for his permission, I have drawn on Professor Gilbert’s early chapters for some of the biographical information below.
Ammons, of Scots-Irish descent, grew up poor, the child of William Ammons (a farmer known as Willie) and his wife Della. They lived near Whiteville, North Carolina, in a frame house with no electricity (they had kerosene lamps) and no indoor toilet, scraping by at first as subsistence farmers with a mule and a plow, raising pigs and chickens. (Later, they attempted commercial tobacco farming, but fell into debt and lost the fifty-acre farm when Ammons was seventeen.) Willie and Della’s first child, a daughter, died at five months, before Archie was born; and a few years later, when Archie was four, he suffered the decisive trauma of his life when his little brother Elbert died of a fever. The poet-to-be underwent a kind of breakdown, related in the unforgettable elegy “Easter Morning” and narrated more specifically in the volume Glare. It was Archie’s first encounter with irremediable tragedy and personal guilt: the little brother had eaten raw peanuts while Archie was nearby, and “a rupture” caused the baby’s death. (The family’s last child, a son, was stillborn; Archie and his sisters Mona and Vida survived.)
When Archie’s dramatic childhood Christianity (experienced chiefly in the charismatic Pentecostal Fire-Baptized Holiness Church) failed him, he found in his late teens a system he could credit intellectually—the universal and inflexible laws of the universe in disciplines from the bacteriological to the astronomical. The conflict between those lofty (and inhuman) laws and the physical life of the body generated much of Ammons’s poetry. As he wrote in 1970 to the Yale critic Harold Bloom, his first academic admirer, “I think what I’ve tried to bring off is a further . . . secularization of the imagination. . . . [T]he spiritual has been with us and will remain with us as long as we have a mind. . . . I don’t feel the desertion Stevens felt [when the gods disappeared], but how could I, I never felt the comfort he imagines before the desertion” (Image, 362). What Ammons had chiefly felt during his early exposure to religion was terror—the dread of Hell and the fear of the Rapture.
In his childhood house, the poet said, there were only three books: the family Bible and two others. And there were as well (who knows how) eleven pages of Robinson Crusoe, which, along with sermons and hymns, helped form his literary imagination. In the eighth grade, Ammons’s teacher, Ruth Baldwin, recognized his verbal gift and highly praised his first composition; he wrote to her in gratitude until her death. He began to read voraciously, and read copiously throughout his life in various fields—the sciences, anthropology, ancient history, and of course poetry. After high school, he worked in a shipyard in Wilmington; when the war began, he enlisted in the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army. (He did not see combat, but as his ship sailed into the harbor at Tokyo, a mine exploded near it.)
His ship was the USS Gunason, a destroyer escort in the Pacific theater. Archie began to keep a journal, to amass vocabulary lists, and to study the materials available from the Navy for courses in speech and composition. (After being trained as a sonar man, he became a yeoman, was assigned to a clerical job, and had his first access to a typewriter, a machine later indispensable to some of his poetic effects.) During night watches, he wrote his first groups of poems, inept pieces in standard rhyme and meter, varying from the sentimental to the comic. More essential to him than these early attempts at verse was his awed realization of the dynamics of sea and land: these earthly phenomena replaced the biblical account of creation and separated Ammons forever from denominational Christianity:
The whole world changed as a result of an interior illumination: the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of actions—runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves—motions and bodies. . . . I was de-denominated.2
The multiple separate actions absorbed into ocean swells and affecting the bordering shore tutored the young sailor in the vexed relation between multiplicity and unity, an absorbing lifelong theme.
After the war, the G.I. Bill enabled Ammons to enroll in Wake Forest University, taking premedical and English courses, and graduating with a BSc in General Sciences. After his graduation, he married his young Spanish teacher, Phyllis Plumbo; we know from his letters to her before their marriage the agony he felt in trying to arrange his adult life so as to support a family and still write. The young couple went to Cape Hatteras, where for a year Ammons taught and acted as principal in an elementary school. Finally deciding to risk the uncertainty of a poet’s life, he enrolled in an MA program (which he left unfinished when his father fell ill) at the University of California at Berkeley. There, for the first time, he received ongoing encouragement from the poet Josephine Miles, to whom he showed his work (although he silently chafed under the friction of their incompatible poetic tastes). After he left Berkeley, his wife’s father offered him a job as a salesman in his New Jersey scientific glassware business: in a very dignified letter Archie explained that he could not betray his own nature by taking a position that would threaten his resolve to write poetry. However, not long after, realizing that he and Phyllis could not live on his writing, he accepted the job, and for the next nine years, somewhat to his surprise, was by his own account a successful sales manager, rising to be Executive Vice-President. He seems not to have been beset in that role by the anxiety always attending his self-presentation as a poet.
Even while holding the job, Ammons continued to compose poems and send them out to literary journals. The poems were almost uniformly rejected (except by the Beloit Poetry Journal and The Hudson Review), and he became so discouraged that in 1955, at the age of twenty-nine, he self-published with Dorrance (a vanity press in Philadelphia) a small book called Ommateum, the word for the compound eye of an insect. Motivated by a profound distrust of ideological prescriptiveness, whether religious or political, he explained his perspectivism in a letter to The Hudson Review:
[In] the complex eye of the insect, each facet . . . perceives a single ray of light, the whole number of facets calling up the image of reality. Each of the poems is to be a facet, of course, and the whole collection to call up the stippled outlines of the image of truth, truth, from the human point of view, as a growing thing, filling out. (Image, 59)
Ommateum did not sell (the royalty for the first year was, he told me, four four-cent stamps), and Ammons humbly decided that he needed further instruction in how to write. The Chicago poet John Logan was offering a correspondence course in poetic composition, and in 1956, from New Jersey, Ammons sent him Ommateum: in this lucky moment of his life as an author, he found an enthusiastic reader who understood his achievement. Logan wrote, “I have read your book several times and I find it completely beautiful” (Image, 103). Subsequently, through the sponsorship of the poet Milton Kessler (met at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1961), Ammons’s second book, Expressions of Sea Level (1964), was published by the Ohio State University Press; on the basis of its success he was appointed to the faculty at Cornell University and moved to Ithaca, in upstate New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. After the move to Cornell, books came in a cascade: in 1965, both Corsons Inlet and Tape for the Turn of the Year, and in 1966, Northfield Poems (all published by Cornell). His publisher then became W. W. Norton, with Uplands in 1970, Briefings in 1971, and in 1972 the premature Collected Poems 1951–1971. Volumes subsequently came out from Norton at frequent intervals until Ammons’s death (and even after his death, in the case of Bosh and Flapdoodle). Although the poems won increasing recognition—a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, the National Book Award in 1973 for the Collected Poems, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and a second National Book Award in 1993 for Garbage—Ammons never again issued a Collected Poems. This edition of the poetry offers the first complete record of Ammons as a poet of singular originality and insight.
In a 1960 journal entry, Ammons reported the crucial change in his idea of poetry, tracking his evolution from an overintellectual poet to one who had come to respect feeling. This passage marks the watershed in the poet’s poetry between an “objective,” abstract, scientific language of thought and a broader language in which feeling—the larger entity summoned by experience—incorporates the intellect:
I wish I could put into words the coming-round I have experienced (intellectually) the last few years. I once despised feeling as worthless, evanescent, of no “eternal significance.” I thought only of the “permanent” outside, the revolving galaxies, the endless space, and man on his tiny speck seemed meaningless. Can I now make the shift to humanity? Can I feel again? Can my blood stir at last? I now see feeling as incorporating the intellect—I once thought them separate. Intellect is the slow analytic way—the unexperienced way to action: feeling is the immediate synthesis of all experience, intellect as well as emotion. (Image, 165)
“Can I now make the shift to humanity?” the poet asks himself. A decade later, in a 1971 letter to Harold Bloom, he put his creed somewhat differently. When he gave up the neo-Platonic philosophical One—a “saving absolute”—in favor of the Many—the vicissitudes of human life—existence took on luster, presence, significance:
I ran my motor fast much of my life seeking the saving absolute. There is no such item to be found. I had known these thoughts for a long time, and they meant very little, until I experienced them. I remember the hour I experienced them. Nothing changed, and yet everything changed. Grief, fear, love, life, death, everything goes on just as before, but now everything seems lifted, just a bit, into its own being. (Image, 375)
As we pursue Ammons’s poetry from its early scientific phase to its most explicitly human phase in Bosh and Flapdoodle, we cannot represent either end of the continuum as sovereign, nor could Ammons himself. The most solid proof of his vacillation between the One and the Many is his vacillation between short poems and long ones. He could publish a volume (Briefings) full of short poems; or he could publish a volume (Garbage) consisting of one book-length meditation. The worry he felt about the long poems—into which he deliberately inserted as much manyness as possible—arose from the doubt that he could carry off such a degree of arbitrariness and multiplicity and still call the result a poem. His fretfulness about the short poems arose from the contrary doubt that they could represent the grand inclusivity of thought and language to which he aspired. And—for Ammons was musical, played the piano, and had a fine singing voice—he worried about what sort of music the lines would convey. That restlessness drove his perennial reinvention of style.
Ammons’s first two books were uncertain ones. Ommateum (1955) indeed found a style, philosophical but colloquial, which allowed appealing dialogues with items in nature—the indispensable sun, the poetic moon:
I went out to the sun
where it burned over a desert willow
and getting under the shade of the willow
I said
It’s very hot in this country
The sun said nothing so I said
The moon has been talking about you
and he said
Well what is it this time
She says it’s her own light
He threw his flames out so far
they almost scorched the top of the willow
Well I said of course I don’t know
(1, 6–7)
Comic diffidence before supreme items of nature remained a part of Ammons’s psyche, as did the Emersonian truculence of the moon, here rebelliously (however incorrectly) declaring her light to be her own, not borrowed from the sun. Poetry—immemorially connected to the moon—existed side by side with solar nature, and claimed its own inspiration.
Ammons never forsook the delights of the colloquial; his last book, like his first, makes ordinary speech a fundamental principle of style. Nonetheless, he was—as he must have known—the first American poet to whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural. He had been saturated in it as an undergraduate at Wake Forest, and it had for him a moral intimation as well as an intellectual one: it spoke provable truth, and so became an object of alliance in his disaffection with Christianity. His second book, Expressions of Sea Level, contained some rather unintegrated science-speak:
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,
the gastric transformations, seed
dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge
(1, 56)
Yet in both Ommateum and Expressions of Sea Level, there were, besides scientific declarations, poems of tender pathos, among them “Nelly Myers,” commemorating a mentally disabled woman who lived with the Ammonses, and “Hardweed Path Going,” an achingly sorrowful poem commemorating the young Archie’s pet hog, Sparkle, slaughtered by his father. “She’s nothing but a hog, boy,” says the father, holding the axe, but to the boy she is a friend, her execution horrifying:
Bleed out, Sparkle, the moon-chilled bleaches
of your body hanging upside-down
hardening through the mind and night of the first freeze.
(1, 67)
It was in his third book, Corsons Inlet, that Ammons developed the two central tenets of his poetics: that life is motion, and that there can be no finality, no absolute vision. (In this, he resembles Wallace Stevens, one of whose poems is entitled “Life is Motion.”) Walking the Jersey shore, Ammons realizes that he is not satisfied with “narrow orders, limited tightness,” but hopes to describe the “widening scope” of perception, rejoicing in his new freedom:
enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
(1, 95)
Various structural experiments occur on the page, as the poet prolongs a single sentence into an entire poem (“Prodigal,” “The Misfit”) or, as in “Configurations,” turns to writing in columns down rather than in links across:
when
I
ambringing
singingthosehome
,twoagain
summerbirds
comes
back
(1, 110)
Such an arrangement provokes a reader’s question: Does this patterned sentence truly differ from its prose replication—“When I am singing, summer comes back bringing those two birds home again”—and if so, how and why? The erratic comma, the lowercase spelling, and the absence of end-punctuation speak of E. E. Cummings; the careful downward progress of the words resembles the tentative cat steps in Williams’s “Poem.” Such lines directly contest the Whitmanesque long lines to which Ammons was so attracted. And although both choices of line—short and long—offer freedom from ordinary lineation, still Ammons is not truly free. He has not yet learned that his poetics will not permit poems to end with conventional summings-up: he is still relying on such assertive conclusions as “I faced // piecemeal the sordid / reacceptance of my world” (1, 138). Such a conclusive termination is incompatible with the ever-anticipated “new walk” promised tomorrow. And although the poet celebrates the casual tone of the placid “new walk,” he has yet to accept, intellectually, that violence will perpetually break out as one of the indispensable and inevitable ingredients of his lyric world, confronting the pastoral of the seashore with a furious wind: “Song is a violence / of icicles and / windy trees: . . . violence / brocades // the rocks . . . a / violence to make / that can destroy” (1, 119). Acknowledging hostility in himself, and seeing an equivalent violence in nature, Ammons is preparing for the emotional explosions in his later poems.
In 1965, Ammons publishes the first of his winter diaries, Tape for the Turn of the Year. Convinced that a poem aspiring to true manyness must be cut off, in both breadth and length, at a perfectly arbitrary place, he shapes his journal-poem to the narrow breadth and unforeseeable length of an adding-machine tape fed into his typewriter, his truncated lines confined between the left and right edges of the tape. A portion of Ammons’s winter improvisation, at its most extreme, becomes a concrete poem:
clusters!
organizations!
shapes!
)/(/(/)/)/(/(/)/)/(
designs!
(1, 191)
Since Ammons saw forms visually, as shapes, we can take it that these instances represent, first, a single module () repeated in diamond shape (succeeded by an excited interpretation declaring such assembled forms “clusters!”); there follows a rectangular form composed of identical repetitions of the same module (preceded by a new triumphant announcement, “organizations!”). Then there arrives a more complicated and varying pattern of four ingredients—(concave parenthesis, convex parenthesis, virgule, and underline) upon which the poet bursts out in sheer pleasure, declaring them “designs!” (a word implying a mind behind such configurations, as the words “clusters” and “organizations,” which arise in nature, do not). We deduce from this visual example that this is the way Ammons views the accreting form of his poems: first an intelligible module in a recognizable shape; then a repetition of the same module in a new shape; then a more complex set of new modules, unintelligible at first glance but interpretable as a whimsical and intended design. Substituting for such abstract module-arrangements traditional poetic shapes (alliteration, anaphora, quatrain, paradox), we can see sentences embodying them as they construct themselves in Tape for the Turn of the Year.
Sitting down once again at the turn of the year in 1970–71, Ammons opens a new winter diary, Hibernaculum, with a Keatsian landscape (“I see a sleet-filled sky’s dry freeze”), and later, parodying Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” the hibernating poet (now in his mid-forties, married and with a son) narrates his “studies” of a comically comprehensive world always assembling itself into design:
54
much have I studied, trashcanology, cheesespreadology,
laboratorydoorology, and become much enlightened and
dismayed: have, sad to some, come to care as much for
a fluted trashcan as a fluted Roman column: flutes are
flutes and the matter is a mere substance design takes
its shape in: take any subject, everything gathers up
around it:
(1, 618)
Although Hibernaculum exhibits Ammons’s preferred end-punctuation, the colon (representing the unbroken continuity of sentence-thoughts in a stream of consciousness), the poem still appears relatively conventional, with 112 stanzas, each containing nine broad lines laid out as three tercets, with the stanza breaks completely arbitrary. Without an artificial container—the unchanging nine-line tercet-stanzas of Hibernaculum—Ammons fears that shapelessness will overtake his poetic diaries. Toward the end of Hibernaculum, he mocks his own irrepressible inclusiveness that can’t decide what to leave out:
if there is to be
no principle of inclusion, then, at least, there ought
108
to be a principle of exclusion, for to go with a maw at
the world as if to chew it up and spit
it out again as one’s own is to trifle with terrible
affairs: I think I will leave out China[.]
(1, 638–39)
Pursuing such reflections, he begins in 1976 to compose another winter diary, The Snow Poems, where his flirtation with the page creates the most unconventional poem he ever wrote, the one that charmed me into being a lifelong reader of his poetry.
Ammons wrote memorable long poems, including the single-sentence Sphere (1974) and the tragic Glare (1997). They continued his pursuit of improvisation—a form of art known to every pianist, long accepted in music. About the eighty-page Garbage, he wrote:
I’ve gone over and over my shorter poems to try to get them right, but alternating with work on short poems, I have since the sixties also tried to get some kind of rightness into improvisations. The arrogance implied by getting something right the first time is incredible, but no matter how much an ice-skater practices, when she hits the ice it’s all a one-time event: there are falls, of course, but when it’s right, it seems to have been right itself.3
Ammons is speaking here of the constant will-to-form in the maker’s mind, a will that seems to come from within the object itself rather than from “outside.” Of course, as the will to form changes, the creative results change with it. The elated reader always wants more of the same, while the transforming writer always writes under a new imperative. The extraordinary geography of Ammons’s inner world alters as the reader reads the Complete Poems: there are hills and declivities, creeks and snowstorms, dark weathers and brilliant ones, high altitudes and swamps. Although the actual geography of the world always came first, Ammons’s symbolic world grew from the natural one. Whether the original impulse of the poet was a technical one—“a vague energy”—or an intellectual one—“an intense consideration”—the impulse moved always toward a fusion of nature and sensibility:
Nature is not verbal. It is there. It comes first. I have found, though, that at times when I have felt charged with a vague energy or when I have moved into an intense consideration of what it means to be here, I sometimes by accident “see” a structure or relationship in nature that clarifies the energy, releases it. Things are visible ideas.4
Although Ammons, with his complex eye, has become one of America’s most compelling nature poets, one must not forget that a geometrical “seeing” creates his templates. In a strange essay, “Figuring,”5 published only posthumously in 2004 but probably written, according to Roger Gilbert, in the late sixties, Ammons startles the reader by admitting to a prior geometrical element in everything he writes: “Since I ‘see’ what to say and then attempt to translate the seen into the said, and since any translation distorts, I thought I might try by figuring here to get close to the given mental images themselves” (F, 535). “Mental images” follow, of which the first is a straight line going in a single direction indicated by its final arrowpoint: Ammons comments,
This is flow, movement, motion. . . . The flow here is unidirectional, one-dimensional, unbounded: it is uncontested, unobstructed flow. It is motion “homogeneous,” meaningless. It is what the poetic line (except for special effect) should never be—loose, fluent, uninformed, unstructured. (F, 535)
(This linear forward motion is of course the basic motion of prose, “meaningless” in the realm of lyric.) After the repudiated figure of the advancing straight line, Ammons offers a succession of fascinating geometrical alternatives, all directed against conclusiveness: “The poem, if it is to stop, must carry heterogeneity all the way to contradiction” (F, 538). The final geometrical shape, too complex to reproduce here, is a two-layered sphere with five named radii, providing Ammons with his ultimate belief and reassurance:
If the earth, the mind, and the poem share a common configuration and common processes within that configuration, then it ought to be possible for us to feel at home here. (F, 543)
“Figuring” will eventually modify critical discussions that fasten chiefly on the immediately appealing thematic dimensions of Ammons’s poems—emotional, philosophical, and epistemological. The dilatory “progress” of the long poems can seem exasperating until one recalls the active geometry of utterance subtending the poet’s utterances; one knows that he wishes, at all costs, to avoid complacency, conclusiveness, and conclusion. Weather, as he realized in The Snow Poems, is his perfect aesthetic counterpart: it cannot be arrested, never repeats itself exactly, and remains unpredictable in its changes. But underneath the geometry, underneath the metaphorical correspondences, lie the strata of personal suffering that the poet must understand and transform. Poetry, Ammons wrote in 1989, moves “the feelings of marginality, of frustration, of envy, hatred, anger into verbal representations that are formal, structuring, sharable, revealing, releasing, social, artful. . . . Poetry dances in neglect, waste, terror, hopelessness—wherever it is hard to come by.”6 Every reader of Ammons will recognize the dance of geometry among feelings.
I had thought in the past that by reading all of Ammons, from epigrammatic “Briefings” through shapely lyrics through “epic” meditations (embodying “minor forms within larger motions”)7— I had seen all his qualities. Then, in 2005, after Ammons’s death, there appeared Bosh and Flapdoodle—composed in the late nineties but not published by Ammons, who by retaining his last book kept his poetry alive, cryopreserved, so that he would not be dead as a poet while still living in the flesh. That last volume so disconcerted me that I could not for some time find a way to write about it. Its subject (not a new one) is death, faced now not conceptually but directly and epigrammatically and dismissively: “Fall fell: so that’s it for the leaf poetry” (2, 713). Bosh and Flapdoodle is the most transparent of Ammons’s books: although airy on the page because printed in couplets, it is generated by a bizarre poetics, one where pathos is bathos and vice versa, all often confined to an arrantly simple diction. Why? I asked when I read it. I can answer only by giving a wonderfully original sample of bathos, pathos, humiliation, and primer-language, as we see old age (with heart trouble and diabetes) recalling an interview with a cheery hospital nutritionist. With barefaced inclusiveness Ammons ostentatiously names the poem “America”: everyone in America is dieting and backsliding, fasting and slipping. I can’t refrain from quoting from the superb comedy of the rebellious hungry self’s dialogue with itself:
America
Eat anything: but hardly any: calories are
calories: olive oil, chocolate, nuts, raisins
—but don’t be deceived about carbohydrates
and fruits: eat enough and they will make you
as slick as butter (or really excellent cheese,
say, parmesan, how delightful): but you may
eat as much of nothing as you please, believe
me: iceberg lettuce, celery stalks, sugarless
bran (watch carrots, they quickly turn to
sugar): you cannot get away with anything:
eat it and it is in you: so don’t eat it: &
don’t think you can eat it and wear it off
running or climbing: refuse the peanut butter
and sunflower butter and you can sit on your
butt all day and lose weight: down a few
ounces of heavyweight ice cream and
sweat your balls (if pertaining) off for hrs
to no, I say, no avail: so, eat lots of
nothing but little of anything: an occasional
piece of chocolate-chocolate cake will be all
right, why worry:
(2, 688–89)
The preposterousness of dieting when one is dying (or nearly so) suits Ammons’s gift for social satire. But by including himself with the rest of us, he writes a humane satire, not a scornful one.
Ammons’s final aesthetic aim, as he says outright in Bosh and Flapdoodle, is to say the most with the fewest words: this sparse poetry, which he wryly named “prosetry,” can express the hellish as well as the comic. The rage and frustration that was so constitutive of Ammons’s earlier years never vanished; it was in fact the fire from which the poems erupted, poems that warmed readers while consuming the author:
did I take my bristled nest of humiliations
to heart: what kind of dunce keeps a fire
going like this: what do people mean coming
to hell to warm themselves: well, it is
warm: . . .
(2, 696–97)
Yes, it is warm, but it has innumerable other qualities as well: sympathy, anger, love, irritability, patriotism, sadness, humor, risk—and most of all, original perceptions, rhythms, and cadences. Ammons’s poems, first to last, are a record of American life, speech, and imagination in the twentieth century, a master inventory of the vicissitudes of human life, worked by genius into memorable shapes. In one of the most touching poems in Bosh and Flapdoodle, the inescapable paradigm for Ammons’s own style of writing—a colloquial commentary on unceasing change—becomes the Ammonses’ address book. Everyone, it seems, lives life pell-mell, with addresses that change as friends move away or die:
The people of my time are passing away: . . .
it was once weddings that came so thick and
fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:
now, it’s this that and the other and somebody
else gone or on the brink: . . .
. . . our
address books for so long a slow scramble now
are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our
index cards for Christmases, birthdays,
Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:
(2, 689–90)
Ammons’s style—one of wind and dynamics, of nature’s ebb and flow, as rapid and rapacious as time itself; a style of elemental views as it journeys over hills of drama and through valleys of lull; a style as stormy and as beatific as weather, expressed in constant humorous intimacy in everyday language—this inconclusive but powerful accreting of words in a singing current, shaped by a changing geometry of structure and producing torrents of unexpected words, is Ammons’s paradigm of the motion that is life. A voice of the rural South, modified by scientific modernity, observant and sardonic, he sounds like nobody else, his idiosyncrasy inimitable.