Two Poems from A.R. Ammons’ Brink Road
“. . . as for writing, why,
it’s like walking, you aren’t working but you aren’t
doing nothing:”
–A.R. Ammons (“Summer Place”)
The poem “Play” is another of A.R. Ammons’ gems, this one from his book Brink Road (1996), which follows his more famous book Garbage, written in a similar form and published three years earlier. In “Play”, Ammons seems to be giving permission, in his colloquial, spirited, highly original way, to the bi-polars among us: Go ahead, be manic, enjoy: “it’s okay/to yearn/too high:/ the grave accommodates/ swell rambunctiousness &//ruin’s not/compromised by magnificence”. He combines simple, monosyllabic words and concepts like “yearn” and “high,” “grave” and “ruin,” and slang words like “swell” with an elaborate, highly decorative, Latin vocabulary –words like “accommodates,” “rambunctiousness” “magnificence.” The poem is a kind of lyric argument consisting of eight thoughts punctuated in Ammons’ typical, odd manner.
Play
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:
that cut-off point
liberates us to the
common disaster: so
pick a perch—
apple branch for example in bloom—
tune up
and
drill imagination right through necessity:
it’s all right:
it’s been taken care of:
is allowed, considering
Note the porosity of “Play” versus the density of “Summer Place.” What effect does the openness of the poem have on you as a reader? Are there issue of control and freedom that arise? If “Play” is terse and to the point, Ammons’ long poem “Summer Place,” is rambling, discursive, and, well––hilarious. “Summer Place” is a poem of 1,160 tercets, or three-line stanzas in rough iambic pentameter. That’s right, one-thousand, one-hundred-sixty stanzas, taking up 145 pages, also from Brink Road. “Summer Place” is, as Ammons tells us, essentially a long complaint—about his readers, his students and their demands for letters of reference and advice, about the summer doldrums, about writing–– his own and others, including book store owners who want him to help them market his books—all “the world’s/ inroads, the small invasions where my little landscapes/ are stripped, defoliated, re-arranged”. At midlife, he’s “tired of being put upon by this and that person’s / demand and need and having to swelter inside/ with the moral melting of whether to do this and that// or not”. If the tercets of “Summer Place” are Dantesque, you might say he in this poem he traverses the circles of Hell, each realm a fresh level of discomfort or disgruntlement.
“Summer Place,” which seems to have been written in the 1970s, well before it was published in Brink, shows us how poets of the next generation, poets like Billy Collins (b. 1941), arrived at their easy (at least on the surface) conversational style, the style of the flanuer poet, the interior monologist whose material is precisely, colorfully observed, down-to-earth by an observer who is both aloof and socially aware, troubled yet insouciant, humorous, well-informed and au courant, yet slangy and irreverent. Ammons’ ramblings of “Summer Place” were written in a time of social upheaval when a lot of people, not just Ammons, were tired of “having to swelter inside/ with the moral melting of whether to do this and that,” as Ammons puts it. It is well before Billy Collins published his first book (in the 1990s I believe), but one can hear in it the Billy-Collins-to-come. In the following passage, Ammons’ antic pairing of lawyers with bowling coaches, and of poets with either one, the quick, humorous characterizations of other poets, the digression to coeds—and not only to coeds, but to the “skinny/ bellies of coeds with the pear-like rump rondure. . .” in the passage below–– has the irreverence, humor, and dailiness of much poetry to come in the second half of the 20th Century.
why is it that doctors expect to be paid for their
time and lawyers and bowling coaches for their
time but nobody expects to pay a poet: I guess poets
are supposed to be so used to poverty they don’t need
any money: I suggest you send your poems to Galway
Kinnell who knows a lot about the art of poetry or to
Richard Howard who can afford the postage: don’t send
to John Hollander who knows so much about the art of
poetry you wouldn’t understand a thing he said:
what gets you around here are the raunchy, skinny
bellies of coeds with the pear-like rump rondure
sloping the dinky-little bicycle seats: wouldn’t
it be fun to be leather: such starvation, what
gauntness of sinew and vein, what personal hairpullings
and twistings with the sheets, what hold-overs and
backorders, what lineations described with delight’s
elaboration, what fingers in the mind twiddling, flicking,
what sudden bombastic progressions and reversal, what
braiding and upbraidings of the rope of the self . . .
In the 21st Century, and even before then, umbrage would be taken in some quarters to Ammons’ desire not only to emulate but to become the leather bicycle seat ridden by a female coed!! And Ammons, being Ammons, the country farm boy from the Ozarks, is aware of this. After all, he was writing when Feminists like Adrienne Rich were making a name. (Perhaps it’s just as well he delayed publication.) In short, he was an “old-style man”, much like Robert Penn Warren. Here is more from “Summer Place.”
what a
time I’m going to have with women’s movements, Adrienne
is going to give me the sullen, if understanding and
patient, eye and then burst into an oratorio of
verse-like abuse! Denise is off there by herself, now:
she won, her victory our embarrassment: how I wish I
would hear from her! what old-style men wanted of women
was to get them down, fill them up, and go play golf,
leaving the ladies to simmer in fruitfulness, wondering
what hit them, drenching and draining: new style men
have to remember that ladies like to play golf, too:
Ammons’ thinking on the subject of men and women is obviously complex: Adrienne Rich could be, as I read her, menacing when those she counted as her own —the poor, bedraggled women of the New York City projects––were threatened, but (the mother of sons and tragic circumstances) she was in her work and life all-in-all meticulously fair-minded and equitable. In the game of golf, Ammons has found a way to carry the whole domain of sports over into sexual politics, and to state some facts of biology in a way that is clear and leavened with humor. He knows his place in a good sense of the phrase: he remembers his roots as they exist in the colloquialisms and slang and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary he employs and as these roots inevitably show themselves in his perceptions and attitudes. In this he has succeeded in translating his interior life, and his own humble beginnings, into an art that is comprehensible to readers from other strata. Not that he is complacent about it! For he writes in “Summer Place”—
how delightful to be so
accomplished you’re completely unread! practically too
much to imagine with coolness:
What are the comparative merits and uses of the two different forms used by the two Ammons poems discussed here? “Play” is an open field poem––left margin not strictly adhered to, lots of enjambment and no regular line to speak of. But it would be hard to see how Ammons could sustain a lengthy argument or discussion using the open lines of “Play.” “Summer Place” gives him just the scope and flexibility he needs to present his thinking and tell his story: It is a kind of monologue, with some of the homey, camp vocabulary and diction of Frost’s country dialogues. However elevated his tone could be, Yeats located in his tetrameters and in loping interlinked stanzas (as in “In Memory of Alfred Polexfen” for example) a way of expressing and narrating the pace and movement of Irish life (as distinct from Yeats’ iambic pentameter poems that are more meditative, more philosophic). In the tercets of “Summer Place” as in Garbage, Ammons finds a different, distinctively poetic way of narrating what we might call a mid-life crisis, a multifaceted, complex set of attitudes. If you read the hand-out, you’ll see that he covers many topics in “Summer Place,” not just those mentioned here. In his hands, the form becomes a flexible, versatile way of expressing subtleties of feeling, attitude and intellect.
I can tell you right now I don’t know how to write
verse, not even poetry: if I did I wouldn’t be here,
so to speak: I’d be off on a Greek island with Merrill
or in the radiantly inaccessible regions with Ashbery
or vanishing into the clearest plenitudes with Merwin
or reading from my works to the Poetry Society of
America or South Orangeburg . . .
Some of Ammons’ best lines have to do with writing (see the passages below). I love, for example: “performance//exceeds creativity into its own genius”. This contributes to my understanding and appreciation of poetic forms. Though Ammons of course claims here that he knows nothing about verse and doesn’t much work in form (he’s the “slouch”, he says), nonetheless “Summer Place” with its iambs and tercets is a highly crafted poem.
one way to write is not for permanent improvement but
just to give the reader a place to be while he’s there:
he might want to come back later and be there again: