The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2 by A R Ammons -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Title Contents Preface Introduction Six-Piece suite (1978)

I (“led by words into a multiplicity of contact . . .”) II (“poetry though a big sport helps one bear . . .”) III (“so many things sound contradictory . . .”) IV (“hope until there is no hope . . .”) V (“the years pile up substanceless . . .”) VI (“how snow can cling . . .”)

A Coast of Trees (1981)

Coast of Trees Swells Continuing In Memoriam Mae Noblitt Weather-Bound Where Strolls Getting Through Eventually Is Soon Enough Density Vehicle Response Easter Morning White Dwarf Distraction Rapids Neighbors Keepsake Antithesis Traveling Shows Breaking Out Range Dry Spell Spiel Mountain Wind Night Finding Fourth Dimension Country Music Wiring Sunday at McDonald’s Sweetened Change Parting Feel Like Traveling On Poverty Givings An Improvisation for the Stately Dwelling An Improvisation for Jerald Bullis Persistences

Worldly Hopes (1982)

Room Conditioner Extravaganza Righting Wrongs Subsumption Immoderation Vines Extrication Spruce Woods I Went Back Snow Roost Shading Flight In Precious Weak Fields Night Chill Calling Reaction Rates Progress Report Lost & Found Epistemology The Role of Society in the Artist Scribbles Hermit Lark Shit List Limits Sizing Bride Rainy Morning The Scour Meditation Oblivion’s Bloom Immortality Design Augmentations in Early March Working Differentials Winter Sanctuaries Cold Spell Hollows Volitions Providence Going Without Saying Devastation Merchandise Pairing Rivulose

Lake Effect Country (1983)

The Bright Side Zero and Then Some Localizing Theories of Height The Spiral Rag The Fairly High Assimilation Rag I Could Not Be Here At All Written Water Retiring Nature Poetry Holding Still Windy Morning with a Little Sleet Playback Positive Edges On Being By the Boulder Cluster the Wind Instancing Trigger Apologetics Songlet Is the Only Enough None Giving Up Words with Words Settling Up Negative Pluses Yadkin Picnic Laces The Only Way Around Is Through Old Desire Making Room Exchangers Lips Twisted with Thirst The Eclipse Goes by Drawing Dusk Water Pet Panther Singling & Doubling Together Motioning Love’s Motions Helping Hand Debris Coming Round Dismantlings Down Low We, We Ourselves Measuring Points Section Buttermilk Falls Spring Vacation Meeting Place

Sumerian Vistas (1987)

1: The Ridge Farm

1 (“The lean, far-reaching, hung-over sway . . .”) 2 (“last night, the wind clunked . . .”) 3 (“a poet hands me his poem and says . . .”) 4 (“if nature could speak . . .”) 5 (“knowledge, perception, this action . . .”) 6 (“there is no tedium, apparently . . .”) 7 (“some branches . . .”) 8 (“we went for a raw walk . . .”) 9 (“cauliflowers are either real or . . .”) 10 (“the clumps and small reservoirs . . .”) 11 (“rather than the play of the mind . . .”) 12 (“how to exclude the central . . .”) 13 (“I like the ridge, its rolls my fixed ocean . . .”) 14 (“I’ve had all the apples . . .”) 15 (“considering mutability and muck . . .”) 16 (“nature that roots under us . . .”) 17 (“we live again in the bellies . . .”) 18 (“I go to nature not because . . .”) 19 (“I wouldn’t give up a hair . . .”) 20 (“when the hand falls apart . . .”) 21 (“heaven can be as purified . . .”) 22 (“once you’ve caught the notion . . .”) 23 (“slice thirty degrees off the summer . . .”) 24 (“last year we got this strawberry . . .”) 25 (“the rat was a mole . . .”) 26 (“there is something about . . .”) 27 (“I like, as I have said before . . .”) 28 (“it doesn’t matter to me if issues . . .”) 29 (“I wake from a nap . . .”) 30 (“words cast up . . .”) 31 (“I was this . . .”) 32 (“today Jerry, Fran, Phyllis and I went . . .”) 33 (“I’m split but not . . .”) 34 (“don’t think we don’t . . .”) 35 (“wherever mortality sets up a net . . .”) 36 (“straitened narrow, river-wound . . .”) 37 (“everyone watches the world end once . . .”) 38 (“I don’t care if I don’t tell the truth . . .”) 39 (“in the small walks & chasms . . .”) 40 (“the honeysucklebushes already weighty . . .”) 41 (“we were talking about our MFA program . . .”) 42 (“minutiae is a fussy word . . .”) 43 (“the high farm beseeches my mind . . .”) 44 (“sweeps of space haunt the slopes . . .”) 45 (“the thought that . . .”) 46 (“culture, hardened . . .”) 47 (“peeling the bark off a crabapple . . .”) 48 (“at dusk rabbits settle . . .”) 49 (“little showers yesterday evening . . .”) 50 (“a light catches somewhere . . .”) 51 (“I like nature poetry . . .”)

2: Tombstones

1 (“the chisel, chipping . . .”) 2 (“it breaks the heart . . .”) 3 (“the ground flat . . .”) 4 (“set on the line . . .”) 5 (“the spirit, though . . .”) 6 (“but why put a stone there . . .”) 7 (“rivulets of scattering . . .”) 8 (“dust’s shape in air . . .”) 9 (“the stone-name signifies . . .”) 10 (“as if the name . . .”) 11 (“the grooves fill with moss . . .”) 12 (“a mockingbird sings . . .”) 13 (“the wind roars, sweeps, whirls . . .”) 14 (“a stone sinks in soil . . .”) 15 (“when gliding perhaps under a glacier . . .”) 16 (“stones, names in them . . .”) 17 (“what does it matter . . .”) 18 (“stones, as if forms of intelligence . . .”) 19 (“the things of earth are not objects . . .”) 20 (“the stone makes . . .”) 21 (“not coarse, hard . . .”) 22 (“if love is fine . . .”) 23 (“the light in an eye . . .”) 24 (“the universe is itself . . .”) 25 (“nothing, though, not stone . . .”) 26 (“if the tombstones . . .”) 27 (“a flock . . .”) 28 (“this boundary stone plunked down . . .”) 29 (“the letters . . .”)

3: Motions’ Holdings

Questionable Procedures Frost’s Foretellings 20 January Early Indications Loft Chiseled Clouds Scaling Desire Tertiaries Upper Limits Laboratory Materials A Tendency to Ascendancy Information Density Stone Keep Autonomy Backcasting Checking Out the Resources Dominion (“Glittery river, I said . . .”) Hairy Belly Entranceways Dominant Margins Power Plays Target Postulation Subsidiary Roles Working Out Remembering Old Caves Becoming Become Of Holding Sway The Dwelling The Hubbub Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder Red Shift Saving Spending Long Sorrowing Eidos White Passages A Way Away Pots and Pans Aquarium Watch Earliest Recollection Liquidities Surgeons Motion’s Holdings Burnout in the Overshoot Telling Moves Coming Round Recoveries Trivial Means Tracing Out Some Any Memory Sight Seed Negative Symbiosis Citified

Previously Uncollected Poems from The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons (1990)

Weathering Hype Over and Done With Cousins Equilibrations Second Party Digging Wonder Tryst Success Story Glacials Stoning Stone Substantial Planes Settlement Deaf Zone Scarecrow Filling in the Dots Figuring Belief Crinkling Trails Cracking a Few Hundred Million Years Soul’s Seas Clarifications Celestial Dealings Waking Glass Specialty Pedagogy Agog Touching Planet Actions Worky Shallows Still Frame This Spring Tornado Bottommost Time Spans Crow Ride Roundel Calling That Day Poetry to the Rescue Ah Pebble’s Story Whitelash of Air Rapids Late November Leaning Up Twangs & Little Twists Night Post Late Look Grove’s Way Nearing Equinox Circling Splinters Squall Ball Teleology Negligence These Days Theory Center Around Here Salute Grisly Grit Close Relations Spring Clearing Resurrections Course Work Quit That Swoggled Likely Story Market Adviser Stills Bulletin The Upshot Milepost Coming Right Up Their Sex Life Kingpin Kith Layabout Resolve Cold Rheum Reorganization Preexistence Permanence Orchard Lost and Found Capture

Garbage (1993)

1 (“Creepy little creepers . . .”) 2 (“garbage has to be the poem of our time . . .”) 3 (“toxic waste, poison air, beach goo . . .”) 4 (“scientists plunge into matter . . .”) 5 (“dew shatters into rivulets . . .”) 6 (“a pain in the knee or hipjoint . . .”) 7 (“is it all going to be like this . . .”) 8 (“sometimes old people snap back . . .”) 9 (“you don’t want to succeed too early . . .”) 10 (“in your end is my beginning, I repeat . . .”) 11 (“an early June morning in early June . . .”) 12 (“a waste of words . . .”) 13 (“the real trouble with a blabbermouth . . .”) 14 (“take, in leavetaking, the leavings . . .”) 15 (“what are we to think of the waste, though . . .”) 16 (“a bird dabbed me, a virgin soil . . .”) 17 (“the heap of knickknacks . . .”) 18 (“should I go on, fearful of the phobias . . .”)

Brink Road (1996)

A Sense of Now Picking Up Equations Enameling Up-Country Sparklings Cool Intimacies Fascicle Loving People Standing Light Up Establishment Broad Brush First Cold Regards Regardless The Time Rate of Change Greeting Verses Mind Stone Downing Lines Whitewater Erminois Construing Deconstruction Elite Street Good Morning, This Morning Walking Song Sentiment Anxiety’s Prosody The Land of the Knobble-Jobble Tree Capabilities Minutial Impress Showups Modes Against Too Much Sky Rides Heights Known Conservationist A Little Thing Like That Getting About December Starlings Strings Winding Up Middling Seasons Looking Way Off Obsession Anger Tangle The Deep Slow Saying Saying Away Line Drawings Prey Very High Condition The Category of Last Resort The Clenched-Jaw School Ceppagna Pit Lines Silvering Shadow Abscission Microinscriptions Readings by Ways Abandon Local Antiquities Changing Stations Collapsed Structures Flat Rock Flurries The Deep End Reasoning Power Tenacities Blues in the Valley Packaging Serpent Country Early Stones Connecting Misses Evasive Actions Tenure’s Pleasures Pressing On The Story Period The Way of One’s Desire Hurricane The Crystal Tree A Pretty Looking Sight Focus God Is the Sense the World Makes Without God Painlessness, to Pain, Is Paradise Flaws in Dominance How Things Go Wrong Eternity’s Taciturnity Killing Stuff Off Boon Downstream Ruin’s the Palace of Commencement Holding Heights Walking About in the Evening Museums Second-Rate Perfection The Planet That Was There Terebene Scene Rain Gauges Safe Reading Ta’o Chien Geezerly An Improvisation for Soot and Suet An Improvisation for the Killers of Meat Reckless Endangerment Swimming Night Ontology Precedes Teleology Disclaimer Spike-Tooth Harrows Picking Where Out of When Odysseus for Eva Maria Rodtwitt High Desiring The Damned What Was That Again Prisons There and Not Moving Figures All’s All Hard and Fast So Long, Descartes Marginals Day Ghosts Next to Nothing For My Beloved Son Outlines of Absence Same Old Story Beautiful Woman Cognoscenti Continuity Gung Ho Appendix Stand-In Magic Rarities Old Geezer Financial Services Rolling Reality Thresher Putting on Airs Superstars Standing on the Corner Watching All the Wheels Go By Home Place Postmodernist Views Expropriations Nitty Gritty Enfield Falls The Many Ways Not Supreme Sojourning Death and Silhouettes Fall’s End A Part for the Whole Lofty Calling Weightlessness Rosy Transients The Incomplete Life Chosen Roads Summer Place

Glare (1997)

Part One: Strip

1 (“wdn’t it be silly to be serious, now . . .”) 2 (“where is one to find room enough . . .”) 3 (“I keep proving I’m not god’s gift . . .”) 4 (“hear me, O Lord . . .”) 5 (“seems like every winter . . .”) 6 (“the highest place, though . . .”) 7 (“when I was young . . .”) 8 (“if Homer can nod . . .”) 9 (“the hills are alive with indifference . . .”) 10 (“don’t go on about it . . .”) 11 (“the man four-legged with arm braces . . .”) 12 (“do things close up or close down . . .”) 13 (“the spirit is universal . . .”) 14 (“I struggle on in this pointless war . . .”) 15 (“money, enhancing the fluency of negotiation . . .”) 16 (“I don’t think things go round . . .”) 17 (“where do poems come from . . .”) 18 (“I need to get a picture . . .”) 19 (“how big is a drop of water . . .”) 20 (“it’s so cold this morning . . .”) 21 (“I tell myself to think happy thoughts . . .”) 22 (“if you miss life and get old . . .”) 23 (“lawsey-dawsey . . .”) 24 (“I am so ill-stanchioned myself . . .”) 25 (“it scares me to think that . . .”) 26 (“fracture the mirror . . .”) 27 (“how wonderful to be able to write . . .”) 28 (“two of the birch trees . . .”) 29 (“I know most people like . . .”) 30 (“oh, we go to Owego some Sundays . . .”) 31 (“my hands that in their motions . . .”) 32 (“I’m glad I don’t have fifty years . . .”) 33 (“I feel it is so necessary . . .”) 34 (“I see the eye-level silver shine . . .”) 35 (“the poet’s wandering finds . . .”) 36 (“she said, it’s hard to have hope . . .”) 37 (“one types to please and appease . . .”) 38 (“logs, limbs, and branches lying by . . .”) 39 (“the petunias are, this morning . . .”) 40 (“I guess it’s because of the downward . . .”) 41 (“the strong want to live on the edge . . .”) 42 (“can you make nothing interesting . . .”) 43 (“sometimes I get the feeling . . .”) 44 (“every now and then I drop a bead . . .”) 45 (“will I will the will to go on . . .”) 46 (“the yellow leaves left . . .”) 47 (“battalions of leaves routed . . .”) 48 (“missed by every movement . . .”) 49 (“if I don’t know what it is . . .”) 50 (“life has left me beaten up . . .”) 51 (“this summer the weeds . . .”) 52 (“breaking up the hang up . . .”) 53 (“so here I am fist-diddling . . .”) 54 (“in this life if you scramble . . .”) 55 (“if I say I did it, did I do it . . .”) 56 (“one good thing about being too late . . .”) 57 (“stars, too, are often twinkle-eyed . . .”) 58 (“you dragass around . . .”) 59 (“we’ll just be here while we’re here . . .”) 60 (“it’s a brisk, bright fall day . . .”) 61 (“see a penny, pick it up . . .”) 62 (“have I put my input in . . .”) 63 (“sixty years ago, I used to hear . . .”) 64 (“well, it’s true . . .”) 65 (“when the trees tug . . .”)

Part Two: Scat Scan

66 (“well, it’s true, clarity is in the extremes . . .”) 67 (“you scan the surface . . .”) 68 (“hang on—oh, hang on—to our frailty . . .”) 69 (“I confess my confessions never concern . . .”) 70 (“no use planning for the future . . .”) 71 (“it is so much easier to become known . . .”) 72 (“I tell my poor pitiful graduating MFA poets . . .”) 73 (“no, I carry hods, I’m a sideloader, cement mixer . . .”) 74 (“clamp the c (c-clamp?) of clog on log . . .”) 75 (“these cold days in May give me the woolly-willies . . .”) 76 (“your insidious eloquence makes me seek . . .”) 77 (“truth persists, if at all . . .”) 78 (“the rot of some deep-wasting roots . . .”) 79 (“it is hilarious how sad the world is . . .”) 80 (“you think if you say you’re going to die . . .”) 81 (“trust no one . . .”) 82 (“a hip pain, a swollen gum, eyes that stick . . .”) 83 (“you’ve probably heard the one . . .”) 84 (“consciousness is a kind of planet . . .”) 85 (“I don’t actually like the smell . . .”) 86 (“Love Poem”) 87 (“Old Age”) 88 (“my father-in-heaven is my father . . .”) 89 (“whatever happens now . . .”) 90 (“if the world were not commonly perceived . . .”) 91 (“the news of the week . . .”) 92 (“you could wish you were dead . . .”) 93 (“in time all the stories become the same story . . .”) 94 (“live unknown and when you go . . .”) 95 (“these are the longest days . . .”) 96 (“what will time, if time alone will tell, tell . . .”) 97 (“when I’m interviewed . . .”) 98 (“at a roadstand, in Dryden . . .”) 99 (“I asked C.A. what she thought about . . .”) 100 (“all my life I thought a swig . . .”) 101 (“I don’t care what becomes of me now . . .”) 102 (“if results tell the story . . .”) 103 (“how dangerous . . .”) 104 (“Uncle John was a cap’m at the beach . . .”) 105 (“nature poetry, nature poetry . . .”) 106 (“what is the difference . . .”) 107 (“Glenn (inventively—and wittily . . .”) 108 (“the past lifts . . .”) 109 (“it’s bad news in the OK corral . . .”) 110 (“if you’re constipated . . .”) 111 (“when I heard the learned astonisher . . .”) 112 (“in the middle of the piddle . . .”) 113 (“can one be powerful . . .”) 114 (“the world, so populous . . .”) 115 (“I just can’t buy the bi- words . . .”) 116 (“some notes: buy morning shoes . . .”) 117 (“what are the structures of upholding . . .”)

Fucking Right (1999)

Fucking Right Rough Estimate Old Sweet Coffee Shoppe Getting It on Straight Weeding Bong Bad Goods Foreshortening Outdoor Plumbing

Bosh and Flapdoodle (2005)

Fasting Reverse Reserve and You Have Reverse Surface Effects Aubade Oil Ode America In View of the Fact Get Over It Tail Tales Fuel to the Fire, Ice to the Floe Suet Pudding, Spotted Dick Focal Lengths Sibley Hall Good God Genetic Counseling Hooliganism Slacking Off Quibbling the Colossal Informing Dynamics Pyroclastic Flows Odd Man Out Squall Lines John Henry Rogue Elephant Mouvance Called Into Play Back-Burnerd A Few Acres of Shiny Water [They said today would be partly cloudy] Feint Praise Surfacing Surface Effects Free One, Get One By Dumb Clucks Sucking Flies Balsam Firs Tree Limbs Down Wetter Beather The Gushworks Body Marks Yonderwards Depressed Areas Dishes and Dashes Auditions Between Each Song Mina de Oro Widespread Implications Above the Fray Is Only Thin Air Home Fires Pudding Bush Sopping Wet Spew Vomit Thoughts Spit Lineage Now Then Shit Face Surprising Elements Out From Under The Whole Situation Rattling Freight Lines That’s What I Just Got Through Saying It Doesn’t Hold Water Tom Fool Ringadingding I Wouldn’t Go So Far As to Say That Thrown for a Loop Wrong Road Way Down Upon the Woodsy Roads

Appendix A: Poems Published During Ammons’s Lifetime but Uncollected

It Is As Far 11-25-56 Hymn (“Make lean the vowels of my lips . . .”) Slippery Log Swamp Canto 46 Canto 24 View Sung Reassertions Connection Community A Birth of Winter Urban Rage All Set Confessional Poem For Andrew Wyeth Dinah Chinaberry Diner Address Untelling Between Mid-Morning Necessity Scientific Breakdown Convergences Downward Self Attending Interim David Arete Away A Bit of the Bubbly for Ep Fogel An Improvisation for Goldwin Smith For Robert Penn Warren Man’s Nature The Grave Is An Improvisation for Fran Bullis Delineation Transcending Fire Going Marble One Extreme to the Other Thoroughfaring Spring Lines Maple Quick Song Spiritual Progress The Gathering Plain Divisions Taking Place Breaking for the Broken Could Be Marking Time Noted Imposition Summer Fashion A Priori Reticulum of Indirection Inclinations Why Is It Always the Way It Always Is Motion Which Disestablishes Organizes Everything Forerunners Slights of Sight Rosalie Generally Clear with Scattered Slippery Spots Saving Account Spot Check (“The least boring way . . .”) Commissary Time after Time The Surprise of an Ending Work Notes Castaways Settlements Winter Crop Countercurrency Time Being Religious Matters An Improvisation for Angular Momentum An Improvisation for the Pieties of Modernism Harry Caplan Oops Following Tragedy Opinion’s Pinions For Emily Wilson from a Newcomer The Sale Sale Turning Things Out Good Alligator Holes Down Along About Old Dock Somers Point White Echo Pileup Ping Jockeys Keeping Track Cornell’s Wee Stinkie Candle Lit Emerging Curves Sumerian Vistas Mucilage Clabberbabble Birthday Poem to My Wife Shot Glass Embedded Storms Periodontal Abscess Spills A Regular Mess

Appendix B: Poems Posthumously Published

Mule For Edwin Wilson For Emily Wilson Making Fields High Heaven MotionShape Woman Red Edges Core Sample Late Scene Speaking Good as Done Contested Ground Right Call Religious Feeling Spot Check (“We old people sit . . .”) The Skimpy Side of Nothing Other News Rap Sheet Frumpy Cronies Shuffled Marbles Don’t Rush on My Account Run Ragged Quanta

Notes Acknowledgments Index of Titles Index of First Lines Copyright

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