More than 40 years ago, in a discussion about poets overproducing, I remember saying that poets have a right to produce new work as often as they can or care to but that they shouldn’t necessarily send it all out for publication. I closed my argument by predicting that when the complete poems of A. R. Ammons, one of my three favorite American poets, would eventually land on us, we would have a pretty unwieldy beast on our hands.
We now have the complete Ammons, and I was right.
The opus comes as two plump volumes. Not counting notes and indices, each volume contains more than a thousand pages of poetry, so that the total work is roughly three times the length of the most complete edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. And it quickly becomes clear that Ammons did not by any means avoid the traps of compulsiveness, repetitiveness and self-imitation.
I have just finished the first volume with a strong feeling that what we now need is a new volume (there was an earlier one)presenting a judicious selection from Ammons’ output.
That said, it was wonderful to encounter many of the new poems and return to so many strong poems first read years ago, particularly those in the early books, including the remarkable 1965 book-length poem Tape for the Turn of the Year, the first work of his I ever read, which led me to remain loyal to him for more than half a century.
I have a framed illuminate calligraphic presentation of his “Hymn,” from the 1964 collection Expressions of Sea Level, on a wall of our bedroom/library. It remains one of my favorite poems by anyone. If you know me personally, I’ve probably shared it with you before at least once.
HYMN
I know if I find you I will have to leaver the earth
and go on out
over the sea in marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark
And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces
You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside
I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves.i
No matter how tired or discouraged you may get as the pages accrue, wonders such as this keep showing up to startle you, move you, and keep you going.
In his introduction to the 1949 edition of William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems, Randall Jarrell wrote: “One has about him the amused, admiring, and affectionate certainty that one has about Whitman: Why, he’d say anything! — creditable or discreditable, sayable or unsayable, so long as he believes it.” The same could be said of Ammons. From Tape for the Turn of the Year:
cabbage
releases energy in us
that trembles
our vocal cords
to tangle with air
& give it shape!
On reencountering this favorite passage, I had the thought that the shape could be speech, song or even a belch, and I believe Ammons would share my pleasure in that thought.
Later in Tape comes this:
if you don’t think
mechanisms work
in the green
becoming
of
the
lichen, I don’t care
what you think.
Close attention to and musing about natural processes distinguishes his work all the way through. (He attended college under the G. I. Bill of Rights and took his degree in general sciences.) If you’ve been reading him at length, just stepping out into your yard can be dizzying — with a heightened awareness of how much is going on around you, above you and below you, and has gone on before you and will go on after you.
He can also be irresistibly silly. While writing Tape, Ammons receives his author’s copies of Expressions of Sea Level:
13 DEC
my book came today, Friday
the 13th
wooooooooooooooooooooooooo
woo woo woooooooooooooooooo
The shape, narrow margins and even the length of this poem come from his having typed it on a roll of adding machine tape.
Ammons can muse and play and extend a poem for pages, or he can give us this memorable two-liner:
MIRRORMENT
Birds are flowers flying
or flowers perched birds.
Almost anyone is going to come up short trying to discuss Ammon’ oeuvre. Au fond, I finish the first volume of the complete Ammons wanting to both take him to task and praise him to the skies. Let’s have that new selected Ammons soon. Meanwhile, I look forward to foraging through Volume Two for the sure rewards.
I appreciated seeing in the notes at the back of the book acknowledgment that two poems first appeared in Apple, the poetry ”little magazine” I edited and published from Springfield, Illinois, from 1967 until 1976. Ammons’ “Virtu,” one of his many poems addressed to the wind, appeared on the first page of the first issue, which closed with my “appreciation” of Tape for the Turn of the Year. I was 25 years old and pleased as pie.
It’s deeply gratifying for me to know that in the public library in Downers Grove, Illinois, the hometown of my dear friend and former coworker Bonnie Kendall, there are copies of both volumes of The Complete Poems with bookplates indicating that the books are there in memory of her. I like to think that Bonnie too would have responded to them with a combination of exasperation and delight.
Someone has commented that the two volumes appear not to be sewn in signatures. If that’s true (and, to my eye, it may be) that’s disappointing to say the least. We don’t want books at 50 bucks apiece to be bound like notepads. If I’m not mistaken, Viking Press notoriously committed this sin years ago with the flimsy first edition of Saul Bellow’s Herzog. Alas, an evident rule of book publishing: as the prices inflate, the physical quality goes down. First we had full-cloth bindings. Then cloth spines with paper covers. Then nothing but paper. What next? So along came Kindle. Ugh. I hear “Kindle book” the way I hear “turkey sausage.” Give me a book with palpable printed pages in it, and give me sausage with some requisite, flavorful fat in it.
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