I want to be named the area where charlatan rationality comes to warp - Ammons looks at the sphere

well, I don’t know about that: will the worms
send us back to the chef: will we be too rare

or too tough or overdone or sauceless: I
think not: I think we will be acceptable:

anyhow,

     LET’S NOT SPOIL THE TRUTH
                  WITH BEAUTY
                    HERE, OKAY

That’s from Glare (1997), A. R. Ammons as cranky old guy, staring death in the face, getting everything off his chest while he still has a chance, even resorting to all caps like a true crank.  He is a quotable poet, from the earliest poem in Collected Poems: 1951-1971 up through Glare, as far as I’ve gone, forty years of poetry.

The unique voice was in place in the mid 1960s, circa Tape for the Turn of the Year, and runs through the rest of his work.  At times it feels like one giant mega-poem.  I’ll pick one and thumb through.  How about Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974):

my last fallacy of imitative form, my book on
roundness, disappointed me some (oh yes, it did), I meant
to write one unreadable, but a lot of people have

bought it, reading it or not: I wanted something
standing recalcitrant in its own nasty massiveness,
bowing to no one, nonpatronizing and ungrateful:
 I don’t know why:         (from “Summer Place”, Brink Road, 1996, p. 185)

And in fact I found Sphere to be by far Ammons’s most difficult book, an impossible attempt at the meaning of all things inspired by a photo of the Earth from space, something we now take for granted.   The subtitle, The Form of a Motion, comes, hilariously, from a college faculty meeting.* The form is 155 stanzas of four triplets each, long lines as opposed to Tape’s fragments, unrelenting, massive in feel even though the poem is only 69 pages long.  “it's hard to tell what an abstract poet wants” (stanza 132) – true, all too true.  Sphere is Ammons’s attempt at a cosmogony, although Hesiod never wrote a line like “if you bite me in the ear, I will knee you in the nuts” (st. 58).

Not much of an abstract reader, I searched the poem for passages like this:

                                                                           I thought
I saw a piece of red paper in the grass but it was a
cardinal: and I thought I saw  a clump of quince blossoms

move but that was a cardinal: one morning three orioles
were in the green-red quince bush: that was what it was:
the pear tree look like lime sherbet with whipped cream

topping: the bottom part all leaves and no blossoms and
the top part all blossoms and no leaves: a green sailboat
or a spring mountain, from tree-green to conic, glacial white:  (st. 96)

Or the manifestos, lines that maybe tell me how to read this dang poem (“now, first of / all, the way to write poems is just to start,” st. 125) or that are a statement of purpose:

         I want to be declared a natural disaster area:
I want my ruins sanctioned into the artifice of ruins: I
want to be the aspect above which every hope rises, a

freshening of courage to millions: I want to be, not shaved
marble in a prominence that cringes aspiration, but the
junkyard where my awkwardness may show:  (st. 129)

This sounds so much like Whitman, if Whitman had written about garbage.  Ammons wrote a book-length poem about garbage – Garbage (1993) – that I now see is a kind of sequel to Sphere, which continues:

                                    I want to be the shambles,
the dump, the hills of gook the bulldozer shoves, so gulls
in carrion-gatherings can fan my smouldering, so in the

laciest flake of rust I can witness my consequence and time:
I want to be named the area where charlatan rationality comes
to warp…

Now there’s a line to make Nicanor Parra or Knut Hamsun nod.

“[T]he best kind of poetry,” Ammons writes in Garbage, is “the kind that seeking resolution // and an easing out of tension still out-tenses the / intensifiers,” and I guess that is the kind he wrote often enough.

*  See the Paris Review interview from 1996 which is full of insights and good humor.

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.