I've hated at times the self-conscious POEM: - A. R. Ammons types up some antipoetry - the reason I write so much is that I can’t do anything else:

For months, I have been rummaging around in recent American poetry – Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove, Peter Cole – without writing much about it.  After, or during, all of that eminently Victorian poetry I had been reading Swinburne and The Ring and the Book and The Earthly Paradise – I needed a break.  I needed to recalibrate the sensors.

For various reasons I kept returning to the poems of A. R. Ammons, an old favorite of mine, and I since May I have read ten of his books.  Only a couple of days ago did I realize that Ammons was a kind of antipoet.  He shares with Nicanor Parra:  a mix of high and low language, stabs at big philosophical issues and retreats to ordinary life, deep suspicion of Romantic poetical rhetoric which they both regard as artificial, self-deprecating humor, and constant messing around with poetic form.  Both were descendants of Walt Whitman.  Ammons mixed in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams – all of the Americans with Ws in their name I guess.  Ammons was a genuine nature poet – that’s a difference from Parra.

That he called collections The Really Short Poems (1991) and Selected Longer Poems (1980) gives an idea of his blunt formal experimentation.  Poetry had become radically free, so it was time to re-impose some limits.  My favorite is the time he stuck a roll of adding machine tape in his typewriter and wrote a diary-in-verse on it until the tape ran out.  That’s Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965):

6 Dec:

today I
decided to write
a long
   thin
   poem
          employing certain
classical considerations:  (p. 1)
[snip]
it was natural for
me (in the House &
              Garden store one
night a couple weeks
ago) to contemplate
     this roll of
adding-machine tape, so
narrow, long,
unbroken, and to penetrate
     into some
     fool use for it:  (pp. 2-3)

Man, this is going to be a long post.  The book is 205 pages, all just this tape-constrained column running down the middle of the pages.  As long as Ammons stays on the tape, he can do whatever he wants, whether or not he can think of anything to do.  An Ammon signature, by the way, which appeared at this time and lasted to the end was replacing periods with colons.  The lines no longer seem separate but rather chained together. 

     I’ve hated at times the
self-conscious POEM:
     I’ve wanted to bend
     more, burrowing
with flexible path
into the common life
     & commonplace:  (144)
[snip]
poetry has
one subject, impermanence,
which it presents
with as much permanence as
possible:  (145)

Whether that is true or not, Ammons at this point begins typing up the weather (“thank it’s agonna snow / some: / don’t keer if it do:”), as he does when he seems unsure of himself, before switching to the childhood memory of a cherry tree in May:

how can these
pictures stay
in my head:
      how, after lying 30
yrs in darkness, can
they be brought up,
looked at, and
resubstantiated?
    what we don’t
    know’s a scare:
    & comfort:  (148)

Maybe I should focus more on nature, the many birds in the poem:

two bald iggles
     been sighted out
     there:
     tell me:
     can you beat that?
     I looked for any but
couldn’t find some:  (188-9)

But I keep returning to the method, to the tape, because it is so much fun watching Ammons fight with it:

the reason I write so much
is
that I can’t do anything
else:
poem must be now
close to 40 feet long: I
can’t get it out
to write letters or
postcards or anything:
     well
     if
     it
     must
     be
     onward
     to
     the
     end,
     let’s
     get
     there
     in
     a
     hurry: or
is that cheating?  (58-9)

One could also take that as a philosophical question.