Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry
I’ve moved on from the “Modern” volume, and am now in the “Contemporary” volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.
A.R. Ammons (Archie Randolph Ammons) was born in 1926 in North Carolina. He died in 2001. He’s an interesting case because he had a wide life outside of poetry, and yet, come the 70s and 80s, he started winning all of the plum prizes for poetry – National Book Award in 1973, Bollingen Prize in 1975, National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1982, and then another National Book Award in 1993. He received a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”), one of the first, and he also got the Tanning Prize in 1998. It’s interesting to look at those dates. This was a man born in 1926, who got a B.S. in 1949 (he was very scientifically inclined – I think the two poles: science and art – were always in him – his poems reflect that), fought in WWII, and then held down various jobs that had nothing to do with poetry. He was an elementary school principal. He worked in a glass-making firm. Yet all alongside of this … is poetry.
I think his wide interests give his poems a spark. They are not academic. They breathe with all of his interests and passions. They seem casual, at first. His voice is chatty, informal. But by the end of the poem, you have been on a journey and a half. He is always moving towards something: a revelation, an acceptance, an epiphany. Apparently, he composed his poems on the typewriter – he was very conscious of how the type looked on the page, how the lines lined up, all that. For one poem, he typed it on an unfolding roll of tape from an adding machine. He wanted to force the poem he was writing to adapt itself to the paper it was being written on. An experiment. If you don’t have as much space, to let lines flow out to the right margin, how do you express yourself? Using terminology from science – biology, chemistry, geology – gives his poems a grounded feel. I like his stuff very much. I don’t know that much about him, and certainly haven’t read all of his poems, but I like the MIND behind the work. I like how he puts phrases together. Some of his poems are quite short. And some are huge, epic almost.
The Anthology states in the introduction to Ammons’s section:
Ammons writes poetry of motion, process, movement. In “Tombstones”, he states “the things of earth are not objects” but “pools of energy cooled into place.” The natural world is continuously cooling, radiating, shrinking, mutating, decaying, and reassembling, never in stasis. This vision finds its organic analogue in the loose formal shape and colloquial manner of his poems. Like the mind and like the world, the poem must move and twist and flow. It would be a mistake to try to halt this motion by punctuating its language with end-stopped lines or periods, by impeding it with abstract organization or syntactic closure. Ammons lets his syntax course forward through colons and commas, his enjambed lines, ideas, images, and clauses tumbling over one another. Because “there is no finality of vision,” as he says in “Corsons Inlet”, the poet should “make no form of / formlessness,” “no forcing of image, plan, / or thought: / no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept.” In his voluble longer poems and sequences, Ammons wants “to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening / scope.”
His long emotional poem “Easter Morning” is a perfect example of what they describe. But it’s also a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier: the journey of the poem itself. Ammons is going somewhere, and he doesn’t tip his hand right away. He lets the poem itself unfold – it feels like an organic process. I find this poem very moving. Profound.
Easter Morning
I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow old but dwell on
it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left
when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, its convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how hes shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles who
were the rumored fathers of cousins
who whispered of them as of great, if
troubled, presences, and school
teachers, just about everybody older
(and some younger) collected in one place
waiting, particularly, but not for
me, mother and father there, too, and others
close, close as burrowing
under skin, all in the graveyard
assembled, done for, the world they
used to wield, have trouble and joy
in, gone
the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
cant get by, but the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a flurry and
now, I say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry, now it cant come
back with help or helpful asides, now
we all buy the bitter
incompletions, pick up the knots of
horror, silently raving, and go on
crashing into empty ends not
completions, not rondures the fullness
has come into and spent itself from
I stand on the stump
of a child, whether myself
or my little brother who died, and
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
for me it is the dearest and the worst,
it is life nearest to life which is
life lost: it is my place where
I must stand and fail,
calling attention with tears
to the branches not lofting
boughs into space, to the barren
air that holds the world that was my world
though the incompletions
(& completions) burn out
standing in the flash high-burn
momentary structure of ash, still it
is a picture-book, letter-perfect
Easter morning: I have been for a
walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook
works without flashing in an abundant
tranquility: the birds are lively with
voice: I saw something I had
never seen before: two great birds,
maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked
and headed, came from the south oaring
the great wings steadily; they went
directly over me, high up, and kept on
due north: but then one bird,
the one behind, veered a little to the
left and the other bird kept on seeming
not to notice for a minute: the first
began to circle as if looking for
something, coasting, resting its wings
on the down side of some of the circles:
the other bird came back and they both
circled, looking perhaps for a draft;
they turned a few more times, possibly
risingat least, clearly resting
then flew on falling into distance till
they broke across the local bush and
trees: it was a sight of bountiful
majesty and integrity: the having
patterns and routes, breaking
from them to explore other patterns or
better ways to routes, and then the
return: a dance sacred as the sap in
the trees, permanent in its descriptions
as the ripples round the brooks
ripplestone: fresh as this particular
flood of burn breaking across us now
from the sun.
