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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\nI 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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n
\nEaster Morning<\/big><\/b><\/p>\n
I have a life that did not become,
\nthat turned aside and stopped,
\nastonished:
\nI hold it in me like a pregnancy or
\nas on my lap a child
\nnot to grow old but dwell on<\/p>\n
it is to his grave I most
\nfrequently return and return
\nto ask what is wrong, what was
\nwrong, to see it all by
\nthe light of a different necessity
\nbut the grave will not heal
\nand the child,
\nstirring, must share my grave
\nwith me, an old man having
\ngotten by on what was left<\/p>\n
when I go back to my home country in these
\nfresh far-away days, its convenient to visit
\neverybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
\nlook how hes shooting up, and the
\ntrinket aunts who always had a little
\nsomething in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
\nor a penny or nickel, and uncles who
\nwere the rumored fathers of cousins
\nwho whispered of them as of great, if
\ntroubled, presences, and school<\/p>\n
teachers, just about everybody older
\n(and some younger) collected in one place
\nwaiting, particularly, but not for
\nme, mother and father there, too, and others
\nclose, close as burrowing
\nunder skin, all in the graveyard
\nassembled, done for, the world they
\nused to wield, have trouble and joy
\nin, gone<\/p>\n
the child in me that could not become
\nwas not ready for others to go,
\nto go on into change, blessings and
\nhorrors, but stands there by the road
\nwhere the mishap occurred, crying out for
\nhelp, come and fix this or we
\ncant get by, but the great ones who
\nwere to return, they could not or did
\nnot hear and went on in a flurry and
\nnow, I say in the graveyard, here
\nlies the flurry, now it cant come
\nback with help or helpful asides, now
\nwe all buy the bitter
\nincompletions, pick up the knots of
\nhorror, silently raving, and go on
\ncrashing into empty ends not
\ncompletions, not rondures the fullness
\nhas come into and spent itself from<\/p>\n
I stand on the stump
\nof a child, whether myself
\nor my little brother who died, and
\nyell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
\nfor me it is the dearest and the worst,
\nit is life nearest to life which is
\nlife lost: it is my place where
\nI must stand and fail,
\ncalling attention with tears
\nto the branches not lofting
\nboughs into space, to the barren
\nair that holds the world that was my world<\/p>\n
though the incompletions
\n(& completions) burn out
\nstanding in the flash high-burn
\nmomentary structure of ash, still it
\nis a picture-book, letter-perfect
\nEaster morning: I have been for a
\nwalk: the wind is tranquil: the brook
\nworks without flashing in an abundant
\ntranquility: the birds are lively with
\nvoice: I saw something I had
\nnever seen before: two great birds,
\nmaybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked
\nand headed, came from the south oaring
\nthe great wings steadily; they went
\ndirectly over me, high up, and kept on
\ndue north: but then one bird,
\nthe one behind, veered a little to the
\nleft and the other bird kept on seeming
\nnot to notice for a minute: the first
\nbegan to circle as if looking for
\nsomething, coasting, resting its wings
\non the down side of some of the circles:
\nthe other bird came back and they both
\ncircled, looking perhaps for a draft;
\nthey turned a few more times, possibly
\nrisingat least, clearly resting
\nthen flew on falling into distance till
\nthey broke across the local bush and
\ntrees: it was a sight of bountiful
\nmajesty and integrity: the having
\npatterns and routes, breaking
\nfrom them to explore other patterns or
\nbetter ways to routes, and then the
\nreturn: a dance sacred as the sap in
\nthe trees, permanent in its descriptions
\nas the ripples round the brooks
\nripplestone: fresh as this particular
\nflood of burn breaking across us now
\nfrom the sun.<\/p>\n
\n
![\"15210828.JPG\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/15210828.JPG\")
Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0393977927\")
<\/i>, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair<\/p>\n![\"ammons.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/ammons.jpg\")
<\/p>\n