Rereading Ammons's long poems

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2003 by McConkey, James

NEARLY ALL THE BOOK-LENGTH POEMS OF A. R. Ammons were written on adding machine tape that unrolled during their composition on his old typewriter. To compose a poem on a continuous strip of paper is to write it either without revision or with the revision a part of its ongoing movement. Ammons's long poems are journals of a particular sort, the record of a consciousness focused on the transcription into words of the associations it is currently making-a consciousness capable of contradictions, moments of brilliant illumination as well as moments of comic absurdity, self-deflation, and depression.

Ammons-Archie to his acquaintances-was a prolific poet. He wrote book after book of poems of various lengths, one collection (The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons) consisting of poems so brief that some are epigrams or puns. "Coward," for example, contains five words: "Bravery runs in my family." Another, called "Their Sex Life," requires an additional word: "One failure on / Top of another." These two poems reflect the pure fun Archie could find in words and phrases, while others, like "Small Song," carry that playfulness a step further into an impression with the haunting quality of a fine haiku: "The reeds give / way to the / wind and give / the wind away."

That quality, along with much else, exists in the collections of poems of a more conventional length. Though not in a collection, one such poem-the dedicatory poem to Harold Bloom that precedes the book-length Sphere-strikes me as one of the grandest poems written in English in the twentieth century, moving as it does through narrative to an end made inevitable by its action. Though they vary in intensity, I admire Archie's achievements in the shorter forms so much that they influenced my response to those that fill up a book. In reading the long poems as they became available over the years, I found myself always looking for the more concentrated poems they contained, individual poems often so lyrical that I thought of them as arias in an opera that went on too long. The remainder of the material struck me as a series of recitativesthat is to say, mere prose pieces, however carried along these segments might be in the rhythm that marks the whole work. To me, the book-length poems resembled the notebooks poets sometimes keep which give us an insight into what goes on in their minds as they are searching for the ideas and images that, once discovered, will burst into creative song. I wanted to hear those songs, without being privy to the process that created them.

Probably the prejudice I brought to my reading of these long poems is shared by others who think of the ideal poem as a concentrated expression that manages-through the author's selection and ordering of its images, through those sounds that become soundings-to imply so much more than its apparent subject permits that it expands in the reader's mind, becoming, paradoxically or not, an expression of what is beyond the ability of language to convey.

My response to the long poems was complicated by my attitude to my own writing. I am a writer of prose rather than poetry, a prose writer who is particularly dependent upon the spiritual resources of personal memory to justify and connect the various autobiographical experiences I am recalling. At the very least, I want my words and phrases to pay tribute to a unity or wholeness that lies beyond my ordinary life, and to do that to the best of my ability I revise as I go along. Archie was my friend and colleague over the decades, and I felt, in my private conversations with him as well as in his poetry, the kind of mutual, if unstated, understanding that one has for another whose intuitions or feelings are similar, however different the circumstances of their lives or their political leanings. He was a poet and I wrote prose, so I never felt myself in competition with him, never experienced envy at his growing fame-though I admit I was puzzled that it had much to do with the book-length poems that he turned to with greater frequency in his later years. And I also confess that my initial intent in writing this essay was to rescue the arias from the recitatives that surrounded them.

To achieve such a goal, though, meant that I had to reread those book-length poems, to give them a more attentive reading than I had managed during Archie's lifetime. They contain some typos that he missed, and some repetitions that he might not have intended-though, given this mode of writing, it is hard to determine that. (He once told me, with apparent surprise at the fact, that the book editors he worked with never suggested changes of any kind.) The width of the tape determines the length of a line in such books as Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), Garbage (1993), and Glare (1997). In Sphere (1974), the lines are somewhat longer, for here Archie seems to have used conventional typewriter paper, his line endings determined by the bell that rang in accordance with the right margin he had set. In these long poems, Archie sometimes complains of the restraint he has imposed upon himself by this method, but in interviews published in local papers he remarks that they provide the discipline poets once found in more conventional forms, such as the sonnet. In rereading the later book-length poems, I could see that he had developed an intuitive control of his self-imposed form that had been lacking in Tape, his fledging attempt -the one responsible for my prejudgment of the others. In the later poems, the line lengths vary from one book to the next, for the tapes are of differing widths. Combined with stanza lengths that also vary from book to book, the lines capture a mental rhythm in keeping with the thoughts and feelings being expressed.