poetry pocket: the city limits, a.r. ammons
when you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold itself but pours its abundance without selection into every nook and cranny...
dear little voice,
consider the radiance:
each morning, the Sun builds its slow house in the world and you welcome it as an old friend, its perfect circle stilling the insects’ thousand bodies, scattering the birds from their trees, fastening light to every falling thing let loose on transparent wings— and, suddenly, it tempts you— tempts you, for a moment, to be glad to know it.
to be glad you decided to sit. to be glad to know it. to get nothing done.
glad you didn’t make a poem of it. just sunburnt your shoulders—
so glad to be amazed. glad the day wasn’t so special, simply some broad and green and modest acres.
glad you found a ribbon fastened to a tree branch.
glad to be followed about by a dog with a stick its owner called “Joycey”.
glad you lay down on the cool earth afterwards with your eyes closed; the grass, the trees, your outstretched arms all listening to the sound of the wind in the tops of leaves unfolding. glad, for a moment, to pretend to have died: to have had time, and, for a moment, time to spare, with only streams and birds for company; time to build a life of a few wild stanzas, of a sun’s circle and the open and welcoming earth. to have opened your eyes to the birds’ glad and ample song.
in that moment, to be glad to be alive.
it’s the kind of moment that makes you think of someone you love and suddenly want very much to put a hummingbird in an envelope just so that they have reason to smile when they open the postbox. so long as he doesn’t get hurt.
glad to know you, little voice. glad to have picked up the pen. glad to be lying here, now, myself, let loose on transparent wings.
when i sit up, I see the warm sky and its sails.
i think i see you too.
A.R. Ammons.
poet A.R. Ammons was the brilliant and eternal armchair philosopher of scavenged tapes and typewritten treasures, capaciously cataloguing the radiance of everyday ordinary encounters. he was a metaphysician of the everyday with an obsession with the lucid wonder at the heart of each bird’s wing, each discarded candy wrapper, each palm raised in hello, or in goodbye. he even wrote an epic poem on the subject of Garbage. it was wonderful.
as the New York Times writes:
“In November of 1963, A. R. Ammons, known to family and friends as Archie, the author of a single, privately printed book of poems and a manager at his father-in-law’s glass factory, picked up a roll of adding-machine tape at a local store and began to “contemplate . . . some fool use for it.” Back home, Ammons threaded the roll of tape into his Underwood typewriter and, beginning on December 6th, sat down to write a poem that recorded his daily impressions. The poem’s margins were set by the tape’s width, about two inches; it began where the tape started and ended when it ran out, with no chance for revisions as Ammons’s words slalomed down its length. This was during an unusually frigid spell in Millville, New Jersey, the shore town where Ammons and his wife lived; we can confirm it from the poem, which, among its many commitments to uneventfulness, tends to register the forecast with each new day’s entry. Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” a record of three feverish weeks composed on a scroll of paper, was already a legend. Ammons was the anti-Kerouac: a shy, puttering man of ordinary routines, square verging on dorky in appearance, devoted to his back-yard jays and spruces. “Tape for the Turn of the Year,” the title an echo of the dactyls used by Homer and Virgil, was his homebody, D.I.Y. epic.”
- The Great American Poet of Daily Chores, Dan Chiasson, New York Times
Ammons writes, of his poems’ origins:
“I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognized by burning.”
I am reminded of Lao Tzu, little voice: “nothing that can be said in words is worth saying”:
“John Ashbery says that he would never begin to write a poem under the force of inspiration or with an idea already given. He prefers to wait until he has absolutely nothing to say, and then begins to find words and to sort them out and to associate with them. He likes to have the poem occur on the occasion of its occurrence rather than to be the result of some inspiration or imposition from the outside. Now I think that’s a brilliant point of view. That’s not the way I work. I’ve always been highly energized and have written poems in spurts. From the god-given first line right through the poem. And I don’t write two or three lines and then come back the next day and write two or three more; I write the whole poem at one sitting and then come back to it from time to time over the months or years and rework it"“
but perhaps that is why it is a righteous act to try to say it at all: to bear our teeth grinning in the face of the impossible— to build a slow home in it, in the work of the Sun.
love,
ars poetica.
Oh, my gosh...