Roger Gilbert on A. R. Ammons's "Other News":

One day in the spring of 1998, Archie beckoned me in to his office and asked if I would mind listening to a new poem. (While Archie had decidedly mixed feelings about poetry readings, he seemed to enjoy reading to single listeners, perhaps because he liked to think of his work as directed toward individuals rather than groups.) As he began reading the poem in that mild, singsong drawl, I found myself reacting with a mixture of amusement and impatience. I was of course accustomed to Archie's habit of using poetry to vent his spleen on various matters, but in this case the target, a minor transgression by a small-time editor, seemed banal even by his standards. I chuckled dutifully at the opening joke ("it's not who I think you are"), and settled in for what promised to be a prolonged huff. As I listened, the poem imperceptibly modulated in tone from peevish to plangent, and by the time it was over I found I wasn't breathing. Reading the poem on my own after his death, I realized that Archie's vocal inflections were still there in every line, almost as if my brain had made a tape recording of those few minutes in his office.

I can't remember if it was on the same day or a later one that Archie presented me with the original typescript of "Other News," warmly inscribed. (Like most of his late poems it had been typed on a swatch of adding machine tape, this one about 4 inches wide.) Touched as I was by this gesture, I've often wondered why he chose this poem especially for me, offering it in both oral and written forms. Might he have suspected that I would one day occupy the position of the rapacious "young editor," picking through his literary remains for the choicest morsels? The implied image here is of a vulture or carrion-feeder, an analogy reinforced by the rueful declaration "I'm just a carcass." By means of a subtle rhyme the lone editor gets multiplied into a pack of "baying creditors," calling in the debts the poet has accrued through a lifetime of imaginative profligacy. This economic motif then provides the ingredients for one of Archie's signature chiasmi, which here marks a literal turnaround: "I have spent the parts & / now the parts spend me." All these tropes express the poet's dread at being reduced from agent to commodity, a transformation he must have known would be sealed by death.

But now a note of quiet acceptance enters the poem, slowly swelling to a crescendo of affirmation. The movement is gradual; it begins with the poet's resolution to give up all "temporizing remedies," to accept the encroachments of age, disease, and death on his body. Archie seldom passed up an opportunity to enumerate his ailments, usually with a certain perverse relish. Enlisting farm hats and overcooked mutton to limn his afflictions, he declares his readiness to be consumed by "the insatiable verities" (which bear a disquieting resemblance to worms as they "emerge / from their crevices"). In purely literal terms, these lines reflect Archie's deep ambivalence toward medical science. No doubt he realized he might purchase another few years of life through a strict regimen of diet and drugs, but he had little patience for such delaying tactics, preferring to "alert alive what / pleasure remains."

The full leap from resignation to faith occurs in line 24, punctuated by repetition: "I will not hinder: no, I / will not hinder but, then, I will trust their / ways to keep me longer than my trust." Archie's attitude toward organized religion was complex, as one might expect of a temperamental skeptic weaned on the Bible and Baptist hymns. But while he keeps the language of the church at an ironic distance, attributing his sermon to an "old man who walks the halls," there is real fervor in his invocation of "the sanctity of the great dispositions" (that last a favorite word smuggled into the devotional rhetoric). Especially moving here is the poet's wary relinquishment of agency. Most of the verb phrases in the poem's concluding movement position the self as object rather than subject — "picks you up," "clothes you," "burns you up," "turn me here and there." But the most important verb is "take," which passes through three distinct iterations that mirror the poem's larger passage from resistance to acceptance to participation: "I will not be taken," "I take the blame," "we take the way." That the poem ends with an ambiguous "we," at once poet and reader and poet and God, suggests a last enlargement of self to encompass other; this may indeed be the "Other News" the poem has to tell. What saves these final lines from grandiosity is that lovely "okay," a pure Ammons touch that encapsulates the poem's tone of reluctant acquiescence in the homeliest of terms. Though we have traveled a long way from the disgruntled grunts with which the poem began, the voice is still Archie's, and I still hear it.

Roger Gilbert is Professor of English at Cornell University and is writing a biography of A. R. Ammons.

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