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Life time

A.R. Ammons, with one of his strongest books yet, is clearly not going gentle into that good night

by Elizabeth Schmidt

GLARE, by A.R. Ammons. Norton, 279 pages, $27.50.

Maybe the '90s, in high contrast to the past 30 years, will go down as the decade of the old. Mick Jagger and Tina Turner shake it harder than ever. Fashion magazines not only use real people as models in their spreads, but often real sixtyomething people. And, perhaps most surprising of all, our poets actually take care of themselves. They don't routinely scandalize college campuses with their drunken escapades, and don't seem as obviously tortured -- or they are aren't as flamboyant about taking their mental strain out on their bodies.

This has been a good thing for America, whose poets now age prolifically. Though we have lost too many of our great poets in the past decade -- Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, Jane Kenyon, Joseph Brodsky, James Dickey, and Allen Ginsberg -- they were all, with the sad exceptions of Kenyon and Brodsky, well past middle age when they died, and they all left some of their best poems in their posthumously published volumes. Stanley Kunitz, still going strong at 91, published a remarkable new book last year that is full of vivid childhood memories. And the most talked-about book of poetry in 1996 was the 90-year-old, blind Virginia Hamilton Adair's first book, Ants on the Melon, a volume of poems about love and sex and strange feats of perception that sold more than 20,000 copies in nine months.

Now A.R. Ammons, at 70, has published his 24th book, a volume composed of two long poems that celebrate and excoriate the poet's body and mind as they prepare to depart "from all being." Ammons is known for his long, Whitmanesque meditations on the self or on a particular cultural issue. His next-to-last book was a long poem that tackled the problem of garbage, of human waste at the turn of the century. The poems here are by turns hilarious, outrageous, and poignant, and judging from their vitality and sharpness, we may well have many more years to hear this great voice. Ammons's lines move with amazing speed, helped along by his characteristic use of abbreviations and his fondness for linking phrases by colons and dashes (there are no periods or semicolons) that allow the meaning to move along in unbroken surges -- bringing to mind the Sanskrit word for poetry, best translated as "joinery."

The first poem, "Strip," was typed, as many of Ammons's long poems have been, on a long strip of adding-machine tape, which means that the poem's 171 pages flow in long sections of two-and-a-half-inch lines, like a narrow stream or a time line. But "strip" as a verb also conveys the elemental, spontaneous, seemingly artless (and often delightfully raunchy) style of the poem: "stripping is/what I do, keeling to this band of/paper." Ammons states several times that his goal in this poem is to "make nothing interesting," to "reduce" the "technique of poetry" so that his narrow strip of verse becomes "the rim bounding nothing." "Nothing" in the history of literature is absurdly big and rich terrain, home to everything that isn't artifice: from Cordelia's "nothing" in response to her father that sets the whole tragedy of King Lear in motion, to Wallace Stevens's snowman "who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is," to Ammons, who declares in the fifth section of this poem, "I affirm nothing except/that I affirm nothing: just give me breezes in the treezes and let wisdom/out the door."

In both poems, the concept of "the nothing" ranges from a kind of amusing humility ("where I come from it/wouldn't be smart to talk about art: talk about sawing logs or getting/the swamp hogs") to a finely articulated belief in a secular Lord who's not "Something" in any formal doctrinal sense. According to Ammons, there's no omnipotent God looking down and counting our sins, so this earthly life is simply what we make of it. And unlike his great forerunner Emerson, Ammons, who has often been categorized as a "nature poet," doesn't see the natural world as an expression of divine order.

the hills are alive with indifference,
a trembling, high-voltage

who-gives-a-hoot: I am so glad I
feel it so strong: they are not

after me, the hills, nor is anyone:
and I am not responsible to raise

them high or treed or consoled:
mountains could bother them: but I

don't care: mountains don't bother
them, though, because mountains,

too, are indifferent, only bigger:

Ammons, basking in the world's indifference, sees it as an opportunity for intense, explosive freedom from the shackles of "Art" and "Religion" alike.

The second long poem is aptly titled "Scat Scan." It's the perfect compressed definition for Ammons's hybrid art -- a play of improvised images, puns, and ideas (as in scat singing), but one held in a scannable system of complex relations by a poetic rigor and logic. Indeed, Ammons -- though sometimes confessional and often very loose -- at one point makes clear that his art isn't to be aligned with the Beats: "life has left me beaten up and beat/down, yet, I confess, I am neither//beat, beaten, nor Beat: sorry to/disappoint you." And the title also plays on the term CAT scan, because many passages comment on the medical wizardry that attends old age.

. . . one ailment

tilts another: medication becomes
virtually self-diseasing: so many pills you

can't tell the effects from the side effects:

. . . are your feelings

lofty or zolofty, red or blue, down or double
downdown

But it's clear from these lines that Ammons is having a hell of a time complaining. Old age, it would seem from these long poems, has given him a new terminology, a whole new set of sensations to riff on. From the nothing state of medicated pain, in part, comes the abundant something of this book, the result of a mind alive and gorgeously accommodating. It satisfies, as Ammons writes near the book's close, the longing

. . . for a poem

so high, but not too high, where every agony
can be acknowledged as a quiver in the easy

ongoing of the pacific line. . . .

---

Elizabeth Schmidt is an editor of the literary journal Open City.