Alice Fulton on A. R. Ammons's "Red Edges":

While reading "Red Edges," I received an e-mail from scientist John Holland. He wrote: "The best A-life models are exploratory, testing the effects of principled changes in components and the network of interactions...." Though "A-life" abbreviates "artificial life," I couldn't help but hear it as Ammons-life, Archie-life, and "A-life models" as his ever-exploratory poems.

"Red Edges," a road trip to "the big unifier," was written on adding machine tape. Roger Gilbert tells me that the manuscript actually is edged in red, to indicate the end of a roll, and these literal red boundaries surely infiltrated Archie's musings on materiality. The poem considers the body's artificial architecture (bridges), as well as its toothless gums with razor-sharp edges. The red-edged scroll with its ineluctable end must have seemed a modern form of the skull on the desk, a momento mori, its white tape "running down the center of things...," a "streak of nothingness like a sewer pipe...." Yet a voice counters this assertion, saying "sir, is there not even a rat running up and down / your tube... / are there not fleas, no interesting diseases...." In Ammons-life, even the central nothingness is full of negative capability.

John Holland writes, "Each failure produces suggestions for new tries — the classic hypothesize-test-revise" method of science. It seems to me that Archie's poems often move this way. Errors are dear to his aesthetics. The first line of "Red Edges" asserts the value of "miscalculation," a trope suggested by an adding machine's function. Poems, famously, are news that stay news; they have eternal authority. But "Red Edges" suggests the danger of the authoritative newspoem: readers have faith in its inevitable mistakes, which results in "a confused illumination." On the other hand, a newspoem "given to misprints and errors of fact" allows readers to be generous and blaze their own trails. Later, the speaker (at a gas station) again recommends Emersonian self-reliance: "not that / the fillers don't sometimes know the way, they just / don't know the way to tell you the way. . . ." And the hedging double negatives fog their own authority.

Adding machines remind us that there's no such thing as a free lunch, but in the poem's economy there is at least a free breakfast at Day's Inn, a lowly version of the sublime: "god, I loved it," Ammons asserts. And he deeply did. The mundane left something to be desired, and that, I think, was part of the attraction. It also left nothing to be desired — a statement you can take two ways. There's such tough-minded cynicism in "Red Edges," mingled with appreciation. Such ambivalence. How else to apprehend the complexity of things? "It is likely that there are limits to the explanatory power of A-life models," Holland writes, "but we are not even close to knowing what these limits are." And so it seems, as I read and re-read Ammons.

Poet Alice Fulton is Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.

(Back to Poetry Daily Prose Feature - This Is Just a Place: The Life and Work of A. R. Ammons)