We love best the discoveries we make on our own. In October 1970 I went to Cambridge University in England for two years of graduate study. In that month's issue of Poetry, then edited by Daryl Hine and wielding an influence unmatched today when many more poetry magazines exist, there appeared poems by John Hollander, Richard Howard, and Josephine Jacobsen and, in the back of the magazine, lively prose criticism. Hollander had written on Harold Bloom's version of Yeats, Howard on John Ashbery's The Double Dream of Spring, and John Koethe on James Schuyler's first collection. All these made an impression, but it was the poetry of A. R. Ammons — lyric poems, brief and spare, a baker's dozen of them — that took the top of my head off.

The literary love affair thus begun preceded my acquaintance with the poet (whom I met on a visit to Ithaca, New York, in 1976) and survives his death at age 75 on February 25, 2001. Our friendship, gathering momentum after I moved to Ithaca in 1980, blossomed on occasion into a collaborative literary enterprise. We worked together on The Best American Poetry 1994, on Archie's Paris Review interview (1996), and on a gathering of his prose pieces, Set in Motion (University of Michigan Press, 1996), among other projects. I shall miss the man terribly. I already do. But I have his poems to console me. Great numbers of them: Archie was a prolific poet, who wrote sometimes on a daily basis (as in Tape for the Turn of the Year and The Snow Poems), though he liked to complain, when you met him for lunch or coffee, that he hadn't written anything in years. A few weeks after this mournful pronouncement you would learn that he had a new book coming out. He was always writing, at least until the stroke he suffered in 1998 and the subsequent illnesses that consumed his last three years. The protestations to the contrary were just Archie's way of warding off what he would welcome — it was what Richard Howard might call an "apotropaic" gesture. It was also one way he had of dealing with his anxiety.

Archie maintained that anxiety was the source of his writing. "Anxiety's Prosody," which Donald Hall chose for The Best American Poetry 1989 and Harold Bloom for The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-I997, states the case. The poem begins in a homely enough manner, likening the process of composition to the making of a stew:

Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew, carrots, takes
the skimmer to floats of greasy globules and with cheesecloth

filters the broth, looking for the transparent, the colorless
essential, the unbeginning and unending of consommée:
                                                                (Brink Road 29)

The poet is in effect a master chef (who knows, as he liked to tell me, that "you don't have to know everything to be a master knowing") and an agent of anxiety. At the end of the poem, "anxiety burns instrumentation // matterless, assimilates music into motion, sketches the high / suasive turnings, skirts mild natures tangled still in knotted clumps." Writing brought Ammons a temporary relief, his version of a "momentary stay of confusion," in Frost's famous phrase. Writing enabled him to attain the state when, as he puts it in "Anxiety's Prosody," "patience and calm define borders and boundaries, / hedgerows, and sharp whirls." If the transmutation of anxiety produces poetry, Ammons welcomes the influence of anxiety, which almost seems like a realist's way of defining inspiration. In a note on "Anxiety's Prosody," Archie observed that anxiety "tries to get rid of everything thick and material — to arrive at a spiritual emptiness, the emptiness that is spiritual."

A number of Ammons's poems do seem to achieve a transcendent emptiness and calm. Consider the resolution of "The City Limits" ("and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise"), of "Triphammer Bridge" ("that's it, just / the sound, and the imagination of the sound — a place"), and of "Cascadilla Falls" ("Oh / I do / not know where I am going / that I can live my life / by this single creek"), each a little miracle of closure. In each case the resolution achieved works in direct proportion to the amount of energy released in the poem, as if, in Ammons's adaptation of Einstein, energy equals anxiety transformed into matterless motion multiplied by the speed of light squared. The effectiveness of the resolutions owe something as well to Ammons's mastery at line-breaks, which rivals Robert Creeley's.

Back in October 1970, before I knew that the A. in A. R. stood for Archie, I read his poems in Poetry with some astonishment. To my knowledge no one else besides Ashbery was writing with the same appearance of ease (sprezzatura) in a diction so unusually blended of the humble and the magnificent, about subjects as tricky as the fear of death. "Play," for example, opens:

Nothing's going to become of anyone
except death:
    therefore: it's okay
to yearn
too high:
the grave accommodates
swell rambunctiousness &

ruin's not
compromised by magnificence:
                                                 (Collected Poems 272)

Notice how the staccato lining creates one surprise after another — "death" in line two, "okay" in line three, the sudden outburst of polysyllabic abstractions ("swell rambunctiousness"), the remarkable conclusion. In "Play," the brute fact of "the common disaster" awaiting us all at the end of our lives turns into a liberation, the permission to "drill imagination right through necessity." And how does one do that? One starts in the natural world. "So," the poem instructs, "pick a perch— / apple bough for example in bloom."

Ammons's lining may resemble that of William Carlos Williams in some ways, and there are other elective affinities linking Ammons to the author of Paterson. Ammons acknowledges the debt in a poem written in the early 1960s, when he lived on the Jersey shore. These are the opening lines of "WCW":

I turned in
by the bayshore
and parked,
the crosswind
hitting me hard
side the head,
the bay scrappy
and working:
what a
way to read
Williams!
                              (Collected Poems 147)

Unlike Williams, however, Ammons would never limit his ideas to things. In his "Essay on Poetics," he runs Williams's well-known proclamation through his own transformational grammar, with the result that "the symbol apple and the / real apple are different apples, though resembled: 'no ideas but in // things' can then be read into alternatives— 'no things but in ideas,' / 'no ideas but in ideas,' and 'no things but in things': one thing / always to keep in mind is that there are a number of possibilities." Another thing to keep in mind is that the speaker means what he says though he seems to be putting an ironic spin on his words, which may make him grin and you chuckle.

Experimenting with short lines, sometimes typing poems on adding machine tape to limit the length of his lines, Ammons aimed to shift the movement of a poem from across the page to down the page. He wanted, he wrote, a "downward pull," a "certain downward rush to the movement, something like a waterfall glancing in turn off opposite sides of the canyon." Landscape as metaphoric for verse is entirely characteristic of Ammons, and so is the effort to act on the resemblances he apprehends behind motions and movements natural (a waterfall, a comet) and man-made (the rhythm and pattern of poetry). At the end of Sphere: The Form of a Motion — a subtitle that Ammons liberated from its parliamentary origin in a Cornell University faculty meeting — the reader feels he or she has traveled on a ride that "beats any amusement park by the shore: our Ferris wheel, what a / wheel: our roller coaster, what mathematics of stoop and climb." That ride is the rotation and revolution of the planet captured in the bend and swerve of three-line stanzas. The image or conceit that engendered the poem was the orb itself as photographed from outer space. It is an image that made Ammons feel he could write about anything and everything on earth and beyond, and in the spinning of the orb on its axis as it revolves around the sun he had found a motion to meditate on and turn into the intricate turnings of verse.

On the colon Archie has something of a patent, the way Dickinson does on the dash. The use of colons where periods would be expected — in book-length poems such as Sphere and Garbage — is a crucial element of Ammons's versification. Unlike the comma, semicolon, ellipsis, or period, the colon looks two ways; it works somewhat like an equal sign, suggesting that what precedes the mark and what follows it are part of a continuum. In "Composition as Explanation" Gertrude Stein had declared that modernity required a "continuous present" and perhaps no one heeded the injunction as brilliantly as Ammons, whose colons continually postpone closure and create the illusion of perpetual motion until an arbitrary end (the end of a tape, for example) is reached.

In retrospect, the thirteen poems in the October 1970 Poetry — which included "Mountain Talk," "Here and Now," "Project," "Reversal," "Working Still," "Play," "Cougar," "Dominion," and "Admission" — still seem to me as good a door-opener to this brilliantly original poet as a novice could want. On display in these works, all reprinted in Ammons's Collected, are his sly wit, his characteristic movement from the scientific to the spiritual, his fresh and immediate relation to his natural surroundings, even his distinctive punctuation (call it his "colonization") and his rhetorical affection for words like "nevertheless" and "so" and "therefore" as the hinge word in a poem. Above all in these poems you find Ammons's distinctive habit of allegorizing the landscape, presenting the encounters of the lonely American self with the grand indifferent universe. In characteristically peripatetic poems, Ammons occasionally presents an animated, colloquial dialogue between a mountain and a man, with the wind as one favorite subject and height as another. This happens in both "Mountain Talk" and "Reversal," as in the earlier "Close-Up" and subsequent "Classic."

Ammons was always more comfortable writing about, or addressing, a part of nature than another human being. As he writes in a later poem ("Poverty"), "being here to be here / with others is for others." The one personage striding forth in the thirteen poems in the October 1970 Poetry is the neighbor in "Dominion." Being perfectly indifferent to the cosmos, the poem's Mr. Schafer is perfectly uninteresting. Asked if he will "get up to see the comet," Mr. Schafer says no:

he has leaves to rake
and the
plunger on the washing machine isn't working right:

he's not amused
by ten-million-mile tails
or any million-mile-an-hour
universal swoosh

or
frozen gases
lit by disturbances

across our
solar arcs
                                                (Collected Poems 201)

Amused at the unamused Mr. Schafer the poet reserves his wonderment for a natural event that he is almost uniquely equipped to translate from the scientific to the poetic.

For a more stimulating conversation partner than the errand-preoccupied Mr. Schafer, Ammons turns to the mountain "across the way." Like Wordsworth, Ammons is not a social poet, but a solitary walker who pauses now and then to confer with a willow or a contemplate a rock ("a poem like a rock is silent but inexhaustible"), then returns home to type up his musings. The dialogue with a mountain becomes a parable in "Close-Up," in which the mountain, "reluctant to / admit my praise could move it much / shook a little / and rained a windrow ring of stones / to show / that it was so." Dusting himself off, the poet realizes that getting close to greatness may endanger his health with no appreciable benefit. The poem ends on a sublime note of pathos when the "friendless" mountain, isolated in its greatness, "said / it couldn't help / itself." The double meaning of that last phrase — it couldn't give itself assistance, and it couldn't prevent itself from raining stones on those who would climb it — adds to the poem's impact.

The philosophical problem of the one and the many, which Ammons also phrases as the problem of "focus" versus "comprehensiveness," has long vexed him into poetry. It is an epistemological problem with literary consequences, and it's an example of the way Ammons brings philosophy as well as physics to bear on his poetry. The problem of the one and the many is simply stated: Does reality inhere in disparate phenomena or is there some unifying principle rolling through all things? And on a practical level, how do you capture the essence of a particular thing without losing the larger picture of which it is part? The more narrow your focus, the greater the danger of obscuring the whole; but the more comprehensive the sweep of your gaze, the more will the minute particulars blur into vagueness. So what is the writer to do? How will the artist reach a condition of unity without sacrificing the multifariousness of things? One reason Ammons is attracted to the image of a mountain (whether encountered in nature or along the side of an interstate highway in the form of a gigantic garbage heap) is that its triangular shape suggests a way of depicting the one-many problem, unity versus diversity, the summit versus the base. For Ammons, the mountain — and what else is the mound of trash that gave rise to his long poem Garbage (1993) — is a compelling image: pyramidal, hierarchical. Ammons is drawn to hierarchy as a concept and as a word; his work is full of puns on both the "higher" and "Archie" parts of the term. The mountain stands for hierarchy and for "massive symmetry and rest," but it also signifies "a changeless prospect," "an unalterable view," as Ammons writes in "Mountain Talk." At the apex of the mountain there is the unity of a single point in space, elevated, unchanging, but it comes at the expense of the multiplicity of phenomena at the base. "So," the poet says, using a favorite connecting word: "so I went on / counting my numberless fingers," preferring to continue "along a dusty highroad" instead of stopping at the mountaintop.

By temperament Ammons is a poet who would dismantle the hierarchies that he seeks and find the sacred not in the high places alone but among the weeds and the lichen and the beggars with stumps instead of legs. In "Cougar," the poet tells us he "gained insouciance" by being "Deprived like the cougar / into heights." The key word here is "deprived." In "Still" he writes of looking high and low and of finding in the end that "there is nothing nothing lowly in the universe":

       at one sudden point came still,
       stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
       with being!
                                              (Collected Poems 142)

At such moments Ammons seems to fulfill his own earliest prophecies in his "I am Ezra" poems: he sounds like a prophet possessed of spiritual truth.

When, in "Reversal," Ammons declares that "the mt in my head surpasses you," the actual "mt" accuses him of "arrogance." On whom or what does the mountain pin the blame? "The wind in your days / accounts for this arrogance." The wind, we learn in "Project," is nothing else than the initiating wind of creation, animating all things, itself invisible, like the breath that drives the waves and leaves in Shelley and that makes the harps of nature burst into song in Coleridge:

My subject's
still the wind still
difficult to
present
being invisible:
nevertheless should I
presume it not
I'd be compelled
to say
how the honeysuckle bushlimbs
wave themselves:
difficult
beyond presumption
                                  (Collected Poems 214)

Ammons comes as close to the American sublime as we get in modern poetry. In his work you find a sort of secular religiosity — M. H. Abrams calls it "natural supernaturalism" in his study of the great English romantic poets. Romantic that he is, Ammons seems to apprehend the divinity at the heart of natural things, or in the teleology of natural processes. The wonder is that he insists continually on rubbing the nose, his own and his reader's, in the unsavory wastes of civilization, like the "flies swarming the dumped / guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit" in "The City Limits," perhaps his most celebrated shorter poem. Of the monumental garbage dump that triggered the writing of Garbage, he commented, "My hope was to see the resemblances between high and low of the secular and the sacred. The garbage-heap of used-up language is thrown at the feet of poets, and it is their job to make or revamp a language that will fly again. We are brought low through sin and death, and hope that religion can make us new. I used garbage as the material submitted to such transformations, and I wanted to play out the interrelationships of the high and the low." In the moment of vision that preceded the composition of Garbage, Ammons saw the dump as a sort of American church, with the garbage man as priest and the stench functioning as incense.

Not religion but poetry provides the transformative agency in Ammons's poetry. Not orthodoxies of the church (though the rhythms of Sunday school hymns affected him profoundly) but a scientific understanding of natural phenomena girded his faith: "The whole world changed as the result of an interior illumination" that occurred to Ammons when he served in the South Pacific on a naval destroyer escort during the waning days of World War II. "The water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of actions — runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves — motions and bodies — the full account of how we came to be a mystery with still plenty of room for religion, though, in my case, a religion of what we don't yet know rather than what we are certain of."

Ammons's short poems are lyric outbursts, aptly characterized as "briefings" or "diversifications" (to cite two Ammons titles). Most of his great short poems, from "The City Limits" to "Corsons Inlet," were written in one sitting. He can be wonderfully informal ("Here and Now" begins "Yes, but") or cheeky (his poem "Shit List" brilliantly exemplifies the catalogue or inventory form). There are moments when the poet feels discouraged: "I can't think of a thing to uphold," he confesses in "Working Still." But there are visionary moments when the eye of the observer merges with the object of its contemplation, and the thought and the image are one, as in the title and text of "Reflection":

I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it
                     (Collected Poems 170)

This poem's shapeliness is manifest. As an object lesson in lining and line-breaks it's up there with Williams's canonical "Red Wheel Barrow." Roald Hoffmann, Ammons's Cornell University colleague, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1981, has written eloquently about the mirror image. "Note how deftly this little poem sashays around Bishop Berkeley's ontological dilemma — you don't have the slightest doubt of the existence, forever and ever, of either weed or observer, do you?" Hoffmann concludes: "This is the best poem in the English language written in words of no more than six letters. "

An American romantic in the line of Emerson and Whitman, Ammons asserts the prerogatives of the self in opposition to the demands of community. Tired of symposia in which the faculty debate "the role of the artist in society," he inverts the terms in his mordant poem "The Role of Society in the Artist." He crafts a parable in which "society" sends the young poet an "invitation to go to / hell." By the time the poet achieves some recognition ("society... said it liked my unconventional / verses best") it's his turn to do the rejecting, so he "invited society to go to hell." "Correction" defends and explains Ammons's Emersonian refusal of any political imperative:

The burdens of the world
on my back
lighten the world
not a whit while
removing them greatly
decreases my specific
gravity
                                     (Collected Poems 237)

As is often the case with Ammons, what is distinctive is the rhetorical hinge in the middle of the poem ("while"), the surprising change in vocabulary as the poem abruptly ends ("specific / gravity"), and the lining, the distribution of twenty-two words over the course of the poem's seven lines. The effects — including the alliterative linking of "greatly" and "gravity" and the double meaning of "lighten" — are subtle. The wit is at the service of wisdom.

In Ammons's long poems you get a sense of freedom in composition that recalls the emphasis on improvisation in Abstract Expressionism. Long poems are the way he would "manage the multifariousness of things and the unity of things" by finding a single organizing image or gesture that would lend coherence to a discourse capable of encompassing everything, associatively, from abstract philosophical questions to the quotidian details usually left out of the short poems. My current favorite of Archie's long poems is his first, Tape for the Turn of the Year, which chronicles the period of December 6, 1963, to January 10, 1964, in daily entries that I found particularly inspiring as I embarked on my own project of writing a poem a day in 1996. Tape begins with an address to the muse, to whom the poet explains the nature of the enterprise and pleads for help:

because I've decided, the
Muse willing,
to do this foolish
         long
         thin
         poem, I
specially beg
assistance:
help me!
a fool who
plays with fool things:

so fools and play
can rise in the regard of
the people,
provide serious rest
and sweet engagement
to willing minds:

and the Muse be manifest:
                                               (Tape 2)

The poem originated, Archie explains, when he saw a roll of adding-machine tape in a housewares store and decided to "penetrate / into some / fool use for it." This is "serious novelty" indeed: the choice of the tape is decisive in determining the shape of the poem. The challenge for the poet is whether his mind can be "as long as / a tape / and unwind with it." It is characteristic of the author that he quickly undercuts his own eloquence. The second day's entry begins: "today / I feel a bit different: / my prolog sounds phony & / posed."

The freedom to reverse himself, the faith in a vernacular American that could climb to the peaks of lyric intensity or sink to the sewer, the mastery of his own prosody and system of punctuation — these are aspects of a poem that seems to have grown organically, and observed itself in the act. It is full of weather reports, opinions, memories, diary notes. For the writer it was marvelously liberating to conduct this "conversation with a / piece of paper" that will outlive the circumstances of its occurrence. I have read the end of this poem aloud on several occasions and each time I find my eyes filling with tears when I reach the moment when the poet says, "Muse, I've done the best / I could: / sometimes you ran out / on me / & sometimes I ran out on you." And on to the last lines:

the roll has lifted
from the floor &
our journey is done:
thank you
for coming: thank
you for coming along:

the sun's bright:
the wind rocks the
     naked trees:
     so long:
                                (Tape 205)

                                                           •

Considering the Radiance:
Essays on the Poetry of A. R. Ammons
David Burak and Roger Gilbert, ed.s

W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London

Copyright © 2005 by David Burak and Roger Gilbert.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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Selected books by and about A. R. Ammons:
Considering the Radiance: Essays on the Poetry of A. R. Ammons, David Burak and Roger Gilbert, ed.s — Hardcover
Bosh and Flapdoodle — Hardcover
Collected Poems: 1951-1971 — Paperback

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