Poetry is woven on the line. The line contains a thought that often spills beyond it. The breaks, breath, and movement of the line exist differently to the eye than they do to the ear. A single moment exists in a sequence in time. The most interesting quality of the puzzle is the search for form.
Archibald Randolph Ammons (1926-2001) was a twentieth century genius of American poetry. He was born in rural North Carolina on a farm that would never recover from the Depression; his younger brother died at eighteen months. The first words he heard and memorized were from hymns and the Bible.
To the extent that one might be “inside” or “outside,” for a poet who has won so many of America’s highest literary honors, Ammons’ origins were surprisingly outside of the American academy. He entered Wake Forest as a premed, but graduated with a degree in general science and a minor in English. He had an aptitude for sound, and went to the Fleet Sonar School in Key West (as, oddly, did New York School poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, a parallel Ammons marvels at in his poem “Ping Jockeys”). The Fleet Sonar School’s program was heavily technical, focusing on theories of sound, sound motion, and the mechanics of sonar equipment, rather than tactics and inter-branch coordination. Ammons then served on an escort vessel in the South Pacific. He went to UC Berkeley, then worked for his father’s company for nine years, became a vice president, and left for a teaching post at Cornell which he held for thirty-four years.1
Ammons wrote during the time of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound. The influence on him of other poets skips a generation, back to Emerson and Whitman, yet are otherwise undetectable. He did not like the Europeans, preferring the Anglo-American tradition. His coast is not the east coast, but the North Carolinian shore of the American South, with all that may imply.
Ammons has an obsession with the particular. There is a blend of scientific language, idiom, slang, expression high and low, that lend themselves unsteadily to at times a microscopic precision. He loves the triad line. Harold Bloom loved him; Camilla Paglia takes the “psychedelic” evolutionary biology tortrices of his poem “Mechanism” as her “primary exhibit for the isolation and self-destruction of American poetry over the past forty years.”2 In the Emersonian observation, poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock. There is an impatience, a velocity. He was incredibly prolific. He loved flow, motion, line and the momentum thereof: several of his books, notably Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), were written on tape, a continuous scroll spilling into a trash can. In an unpublished essay he wrote, “If it is form, it shall die; if it is thin, fluxing, formless, it is eternal.”
When asked where he believes inspiration originates— in the self, outside the self, or elsewhere— Ammons responded, “I think it originates in anxiety.” The occurrence of an image coils the trap, and expression releases it, discharging the complication: neurosis transmuted into beauty. The poem is the cast-off resolution, like a snake’s skin, or a bezoar, or a pearl.
The poem “Hymn” is from Expressions of Sea Level (1964). It, and the four other Hymn poems, were written earlier than the rest of the poems, around the same time as the publication of his first book Ommateum and Doxology (1955) (An ommateum is a single compound eye, composed of thousands of ommatidia, each of which has its own cornea, lens, and photoreceptor cells, each pointing in a slightly different direction and receiving its own image that is then summed into a whole of soft resolution and swift reaction; a doxology is a hymn of praise to God, from the Ecclesiastical Greek doxologia drawn from doxologos “praising, glorifying,” of which “doxa” [glory, praise] is drawn from the PIE root *dek- “to take, accept.”)
Of the five Hymn poems, the first is the most beautiful.
Hymn
I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark
And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces
You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside
I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves
(A. R. Ammons, 1956)
There is a great deal to delight in here but I will call out three areas:
“You” The poem is addressed to something mysterious, that is not-the-poet. To all that is not the poet’s peculiar soul, “that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart.” The self is attained through negation and the motion of reach.
“Sporangia” “coelenterates” “all the soul of my chemical reactions” A beauty of science is in the precision of language. Sporangia are a plant or fungal structure that produce spores, like the neat and narrow rows of pods that form on the underside of ferns like hormone zits. Coelenterates are aquatic and include cnidarians and ctenophora, many of them siphonophores. Chemical reactions being what one has, not what one is, nor what one emerges from. I have a pet hypothesis that scientists and engineers make for better writers.
“If I find you I must” And the consequences are exact: the whole of self will be torn and reduced, with the obligation to become more than the narrow singularity of self. Any merging with a whole will both dissolve and refine into focus.
“The Reliable Stream: On A.R. Ammons’s The Complete Poems, V. 1 & 2,” W.W. Norton 2017 by T.R. Hummer is an excellent article on the poet.
From “Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn.”