Perhaps what I love best about Steinbeck is that his characters are immediately recognizable within American culture. Which makes me wonder if readers from other countries feel disconnected from his books. And I also wonder if his books will only truly resonate with post World War II America, which I would define from the early 1940's up to about our current times-- where Americans have seen major changes in how we understand our place in the world at both military and economic levels. Meaning, children born after 2000 are going to understand a much different world than their parents. Anyway, I thought this paragraph from the Introduction to the current edition was enlightening:

Detached, always the observer, ironic and self-contained, Ethan is a modern everyman. "The Alone Generation," read a headline from the late 1950's, assessing postwar temperament. But for Steinbeck, humanity's lot was always something other than gritty individuality. "I believe man is a double thing," he wrote in "Some Thoughts on Juvenile Delinquency," a 1955 essay, "a group animal and at the same time an individual. And it occurs to me that he cannot successfully be the second until he has fulfilled the first. ...The Winter of Our Discontent is Ethan's quest to assert his individuality, however ruthlessly pursued, and then to find the double thing in himself, his deep connection to a group, family and community and friends-- the Arthurian circle intact. By the end of the quest, the thread of connection is a frail one at best, but it is there.

I remember thinking how wise a man was H. C. Andersen. The king told his secrets down a well, and his secrets were safe. A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.....But perhaps the well of Hosay Andersen is best. It only receives, and the echo it gives back is quiet and soon over.

--from The Winter of Our Discontent; John Steinbeck

Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent was published in 1961 and was to be his last work of fiction. During the 1950's he suffered in his writing process to bring something new to his readers that he had not already accomplished within East of Eden and what resulted were some more experiential modes for The Winter of Our Discontent. Unfortunately, the critics, more than not, responded negatively to the new approaches and erroneously dismissed the efforts as poor writing rather than seeing them as artistic innovations.

The components of the narrative are as American as any of Steinbeck’s books, the setting being a small seaside village populated with a few generations of families and a culture composed of both Puritanism and pirates. The narrator is Ethan Allen* Hawley and, despite his liberal arts education at Harvard, he finds himself at age 40 as a lowly grocery clerk and at the end of several generations of wealth that were enjoyed by his family. In some respect, Ethan is labeled as a sad sack, although still with loving wife, son and daughter. As his town succumbs to the grey areas of greed and corruption, Ethan finds the social pressures too great to ignore his rank any longer and formulates a plan to better his standing within the community (and choosing to do so during an ironic Easter weekend). So far the story is classic Steinbeck. But where Steinbeck deviates is both in the narrative voice and an ending that focuses more upon the progression of his character rather than a final conclusion.

For the narrative voice, Steinbeck chose not to utilize consistency and realism. Instead Ethan’s internal thoughts are filled with Shakespearean soliloquies (produce and grocery stocked shelves being the audience), intertextual references to classical studies (for which there is a reference guide in the back), questing drama one would expect from an Arthurian Knight, witty romantic banter with his wife, existential late night strolls in the shoes of J. Alfred Prufrock, and so on. In other words, while Ethan is a character within the story, he also becomes a literary vehicle for Steinbeck’s imaginative play. Which didn’t go over too well with the critics at the time but could now be recognized as an early technique of post-modern literature.

For the character development and the conclusion, Ethan, again, becomes more conceptual than definitive. When first meeting Ethan, his self-definition is based upon how he interacts with his community rather his acquirements and status. He's a good guy. However, when he makes the choice to change his lot in life (as a result of not having a strong enough personality to withstand the surrounding social pressures), the effectuating gusto required resurrects Ethan into a much stronger, chiseled, personality-- one now more capable of confronting life’s challenges. Only, Ethan has also entered into the realm of the morally ambiguous in order to improve his conditions in life.

In this, Steinbeck is providing comment upon American culture. However, he avoids didacticism by broadening his work to the conflicts that can be found within the Darwinian rules of survival, how the more equipped we are to survive, the more likely we are to be doing so at the expense of another. Which raises the question of the extent to which morality is offset by doing what one can to better the chance of personal survival. Is this an inevitable tradeoff? Or is it only a result of American culture and/or a capitalist mind set? Will the moral always be destined for irrelevancy? Obviously these are issues that get more into the unsolvable paradoxes and conflicts within the human experience and are without clear answers. Appropriately, the novel ends with open-ended irresolution, which the critics slammed, but I loved.

*The historical Ethan Allen was both a leader within the Revolutionary War but also cited for treason.

[Untitled (Book); Philip Guston, 1968]

Typography animation by Leandro Araújo with Bruna Piantino [poetry] and Projeto Lise Daniel Nunes [music].

[the universe within]

My mind shifts from thought to thought, unable to quiet. I never know, when this happens, what the cause. Soon, the pain may come, explain anything. I admit to being lonely. I think the river is watching me. I know the moths are watching it, with their antennae, their wings. They know it through the leaves they eat, their moisture and must. Sometimes there are voices. Sometimes sparks of light. These are always followed. The less defined-- vagueness, wanderings-- may not be. Laughter is a sure sign. Tears, not necessarily. I'm never lonely anymore.

Lisa Olstein

[the blessing you hope never to come near]

Morning. Nothing suits me-- fine lamplit wind under the brighter lights of dawn. No matter what I learn, there are reversions. I rely on silence, but I'm desperate to speak, to be spoken to. Sometimes a consciousness sifts up as if everything that's happended never happened at all, wonders where are my schedules, my tidy specimen drawers? For the most part, though, change strikes like a whipping cord-- once is enough.

Lisa Olstein

From nano-interview with Lisa Olstein at ArtSake:

What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Lisa: Li Po (she says with conviction).

Computer, longhand, or typewriter?

Lisa: Longhand on random slips and scraps to jot down passing phrases, then computer for the real deal, such as it is.

Do you secretly dream of being a) a pop icon, b) an algebra teacher, and/or c) a crime-solver/writer a la Jessica Fletcher?

Lisa: d) dolphin trainer, of happy, cage-free, entirely fulfilled human- and trick-loving dolphins.

How many revisions does your work typically go through?

Lisa: Anywhere from none (a rare and delightful occurrence) to dozens.

Do you ever revise your work on the spot during live readings?

Lisa: I really try not to, but occasionally a word here or there.

Please revise the following sentence:
Though every muscle in his body urged him not to, Sanderson crept toward the tinted windows of the gray-green Caprice.

Lisa:

Sanderson crept.
Every muscle, urge him
toward caprice. Urge him
forward toward windows
tinted grey-green in the body.
Urge him not to.

[via magickcanoe]

Well, in reviewing the posts in this blog over the past few months, I wonder if this will be the year for village and insect tropes. Previous entomology related works have included Abe's Woman in the Dunes and Ammons' Ommateum and small villagers have also been found in Louise Glück's A Village Life and, again, Abe's Woman in the Dunes. I've never really thought about the observation of bugs and creepy villages as being good topics for literary works, but I looks like they are. And I should note, unlike my weekly progressions, this was not planned. Anyway, now I’m going to add Lisa Olstein’s Lost Alphabet to this list. Maybe I'll have to get some Nabakov in here soon.

Through five sections composed of paragraph-prose poems, Olstein structures the collection of poems around a lepidopterist who arrives at a small village to study moths within her private hut, sometimes with the assistance of an enigmatic (know-nothing/know-everything) trickster-sort named Ilya. And maybe a possible reference to Ilya Prigogine? More likely that than the Inland Lake Yachting Association.

From a literary standpoint, the collection is dependent upon the merging of the two different writing methods of prose and poetry to make it work. On the one hand, there is the semblance of horizontal narrative concerning the new arrival to the village and her private study. And in this, the study of moths develops various metaphoric possibilities when thinking of group-individual dichotomy and symbiosis.

However, this is still poetry and also relies upon the vertical lyric, which demonstrates how many of the poems were likely composed from passing phrases Olstein would have had going through her head during the day and then her working of those into a poetic order by night. In this, the moths could be see a stand in for poetry and language itself. Each moth, the distinctions, the structures, the similarities equating to words, syntax, sentences and paragraphs.

Interestingly, many of Olstein’s topics could also be found in Ammons’ works, as there is the scientific method that emerges within the techniques behind the poetry and its development (which takes on some interesting detours as Olstein explores the distinctions between analysis and observation). Through this, like Ammons, Olstein confronts the physical inevitability of loss and perpetual change and how a person, with the illusion of a centered self, can develop a meaningful relation with these continual variances.

While the collection is somewhat academic, as there is an obvious focus upon the development of poetry as innovative craft rather than personal declaration, there remains in emotional interior that grounds the poems within the human experience. Perhaps it could have been developed a bit more– and certainly Ammons would be the go-to person for finding a perfected balance between a poetry of scientific approach with toned shading of interiority– but this is still a good collection that is both experiential and identifiably real.

Below are stills from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century. The film is based more upon assemblage technique, reoccurring visual motifs and atmospheric mood that calls David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick to mind rather than a focused narrative, but it loosely presents one story about his parents' courtship in two different settings-- a rural hospital and an urban health center. In doing so Apichatpong explores the concepts of love, memory, karma, fate, nature, order and the intangible mysteries that lay beneath our conscious understanding. Its a film not to be analyzed, but to be absorbed. Apichatpong on his editing process: "Sometimes I'm consciously doing things with the structure, sometimes during the editing process. But I don't think about the process too closely." Not unlike his thoughts about nature: "In nature man can reflect on himself, his history. There is no society, no rules, no judging you."

[Appropriately, West Michigan is having what will probably be the last snowfall of the season today. In contrast, while I was preparing this post, one red cardinal flew into the backyard and perched just above the yellow of some daffodils. Everything else-- grey and white.]

If anyone out there enjoys classical Asian verse, a blog that I found last year and highly recommend is Issa's Untidy Hut, which is managed by the small press publisher for the Lilliput Review. As to what one could expect should they subscribe to Lilliput Review, I'll cut and paste directly from the website:

Lilliput Review is a print magazine founded in 1989 and dedicated to the short poem. The magazine's normal format, 4.25 x 3.5", reflects its name and that focus. It is published quarterly, two issues at a time, with every 4th issue being a broadside featuring the work of a single poet.

With all poems required to be under ten lines (generally only three to five), the style is largely Eastern based. Other blogs that I read that are dedicated to the practice of short verse include Bare Feet and Nightgowns and the Middlewesterner, both of which have haiku-like poems posted on a daily basis. After reading these blogs for a while now, I've found myself scratching out my own short poems on a somewhat regular basis-- whenever something catches my eye and is need of being documented (texting myself on a cell phone is a great way to grab them while they're still fresh).

And if for some reason you don't like short verse poetry, read Salinger's thoughts posted below again. Recognizing the exceptional in the not-so-special can be quite valuable! But short poems can also be indescribably poignant. Consider this one from the master, Kobayashi Issa:

The world of dew --

A world of dew it is indeed,

And yet, and yet . . .

From Salinger's, Seymour: An Introduction:

At their most effective, I believe, Chinese and Japanese classical verses are intelligble utterances that please or enlighten or enlarge the invited eavesdropper to within an inch of their life. They may be, and often are, fine for the ear particularly, but for the most part I'd say that unless a Chinese or Japanese poet's real forte is knowing a good persimmon or a good crab or a good mosquito bite on a good arm when he sees one, then no matter how long or unusual or fascinating his semantic or intellectual instestines may be, or how beguiling they sound when twanged, no one in the Mysterious East speaks seriously of him as a poet, if at all.

If you ever want to quickly identify the social dynamics and personalities for a particular group of people, quickly place them into a car during New York City rush hour, and when they happen to be belligerent, chain smoking, sweating, hungry, etc. Almost a third of Raise the Roof Beam, Carpenters involves such a delicacy. How could your mouth not water? Anyway, this thought of Buddy’s I found to be of interest:

Why, then, did I go on sitting in the car? Why didn't I get out while, say, we were stopped for a red light? And, still more salient, why had I jumped into the car in the first place? ...There seem to me at least a dozen answers to these questions, and all of them, however dimly, valid enough. I think, though, that I can dispense with them, and just reiterate that the year was 1942, that I was twenty-three, newly drafted, newly advised in the efficacy of keeping close to the herd-- and, above all, I felt lonely. One simply jumped into loaded cars, as I see it, and stayed seated in them.

I’m sure most people who look back at their early twenties can relate, draft or no draft. And then, as this is later Salinger, references to Eastern thought are certain to make their appearance. Here’s a description of one of the occupants, a deaf-mute uncle, who befriends Buddy Glass despite his being the brother of Seymour:

...I glanced around at the tiny elderly man with the unlighted cigar. The delay didn't seem to affect him. His standard comportment for sitting in the rear seat of cars-- cars in motion, cars stationary, and even, one couldn't help imagining, cars that were driven off bridges into rivers-- seemed to be fixed. It was wonderfully simple. You just sat very erect, maintaining a clearance of four or five inches between your top hat and the roof, and you stared ferociously ahead at the windshield. If Death-- who was out there all the time, possibly on the hood-- if Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly. Chances were, you could take your cigar with you, if it was a clear Havana.

The adjective before ‘Havana’ makes for an obvious Buddhist pun. And there's something about 'ferociously but quietly' that I especially like.

The last time I had read anything of Salinger’s was Catcher in the Rye as either a Sophomore or Junior in High School. Outside of its general portrayal of emotional lability found within disassociated youth, I could remember little of the book. However, it only took me a few pages into Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters to immediately recall what it was like to enter into Salinger’s writing, as though it was only a few months ago rather than a few decades ago that I read Catcher in the Rye.

As with Catcher in the Rye, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is told with the urgency of a first person narration. The teenager Holden Caufield replaced with the twenty-something Buddy Glass, likewise the life events connected with those particular phases of young adult life. Buddy finds himself on leave from the military to represent the Glass family at the wedding of their eldest brother, Seymour– an already enigmatic individual that, not unlike Salinger himself, finds himself on the fringes of social norms because of an unwieldily aberrant intelligence. Only, when Buddy arrives at the wedding, it is discovered that Seymour has stranded his bride at the altar. As a result of the inevitable upset confusion, Buddy finds himself filtered into a car load of family members of the estranged bride, who are none to happy with Seymour, or anyone who may be associated with him. The tension becomes as wonderful as any that can be found in literature.

Obviously, the phonies are under attack again. Buddy’s narration effuses biting satire towards the judgmental attitudes of the bride’s family as well as their placement of social roles above the necessity of understanding individual behavior, which is accomplished through Buddy’s descriptions of the events, the sharp bantering dialogue (which becomes especially claustrophobic when in the car prior to the family knowing Buddy’s identity) and Buddy’s own internal processing to arrive at a perspective not based upon preconceived notions. While borderline caustic at times- from an author who’s writing no doubt was occasionally fueled by piss ‘n’ vinegar- Buddy is not without humor and enough wisdom to at least attempt to understand, even be compassionate towards, the behaviors of the family members, lest he become as equally close minded.

If there was any fault to be found in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters*, it would be with it being too short! This is one of the stories when you find yourself in the conundrum of not wanting to stop reading but also not wanting to have it end. Fortunately, Salinger has other Glass family stories out there, and they will be read in the near future by this blogger.



*The collection’s second half is called Seymour, An Introduction. I don’t recommend this dry, boring, pretentious run-on of go-where thought. It is supposed to represent Buddy twenty years later while writing about exactly who Seymour was prior to a suicide at the age of 31 while vacationing in Florida. But the writing is really not much more than an opportunity for Salinger to pontificate without the forced direction an essay would rein him into. The reader learns little of Seymour. Initially, there are some interesting thoughts about Asian poetry, how less becomes more within their poetic forms, but this is only within the first 50 pages. And if that’s an interest to you, go for it. I did enjoy that aspect. The rest is drivel I couldn’t bring myself to finish. But do, DO DO DO DO, get around to reading Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

[Earth for Job; John Piper, 1948]

Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be

--W. H. Auden

......................................................I don't
care whether anybody believes me or not: I

don't know anything I want anybody to believe or
in: but if you will sit with me in the light

of speech, I will sit with you: I would rather
do this than eat your ice cream, go to a movie,

hump a horse, measure a suit, suit a measure:
I would at my age rather do this than

skateboard, but I can think of nothing I'd
rather do than think of skateboard loops out

of skateboard bowls, the various designs in the
momenta: the rising up in rounds over the rims.


--A. R. Ammons; from 'Garbage' (No. 11)

From an online post about Ammons and his predilection towards Austrian Econmics:

Unlike so many poets who genuflect to the State, A.R. Ammons is refreshingly iconoclastic when it comes to government and the arts. When the poet and author David Lehman asked in an interview, "How do you feel about government support of the arts," he replied:

"I detest it. I detest it on many grounds, but three first. And the first is that the government gouges money from people who may need it for other purposes. Second, the money forced from needy average citizens is then filtered through the sieve of a bureaucracy which absorbs much of the money into itself and distributes the rest incompetently – since how could you expect the level of knowledge and judgment among such a cluster to be much in advance of the times? At the same time the government attaches strings to the money, not theirs in the first place, to those who gave it in the first place. And third, I detest the averaging down of expectation and dedication that occurs when thousands of poets are given money in what is really waste and welfare, not art at all. Artists should be left alone to paint or not to paint, write or not to write. As it is, the world is full of trash. The genuine is lost, and the whole field wallops with political and social distortions."

[Oxford Tire Piles #8, Westley, California, 1999 © Edward Burtynsky]

Here's an excerpt from a scholarly artice entitled, Garbage: A. R. Ammons's tape for the turn of the century:

Construction of the cultural mirror through the examination of refuse is essential to Garbage as "a scientific poem" (20). We can best understand this process by considering briefly the science of garbology, its origins and purpose. Rathje and Murphy explain the scholarly interest in garbage by analyzing the Garbage Project, founded at the University of Arizona in 1973. The Garbage Project entered the "terra incognita" (23) of garbage to study "consumer discard patterns" (15) in the belief that "behavior is reflected in artifacts" (55) , "that what people have owned--and thrown away--can speak more eloquently, informatively, and truthfully about the lives they lead than they themselves ever may" (54). What began as the sorting of fresh garbage to study human behavior ultimately shifted to the excavation of landfills so as to study "garbage management" in the "aggregate" (21). They make the point only too vividly that garbology is anything but an abstract study: "To understand garbage you have to touch it, to feel it, to sort it, to smell it" (9), a comment which they follow up with a vile catalogue of the kinds of organic and nonorganic material one finds in a typical day's work. This particular type of archeologist makes it his or her job to "investigate human behavior 'from the back end', as it were" (14), because the garbologist believes that unlike most artifacts that cultures leave behind that are "little more than self-aggrandizing advertisements," garbage is "a kind of tattle-tale, setting the record straight" (12). In short, garbage never lies................

It impressively contines on like this for 15 pages.

At the risk of boring my readers, I’m going to spend another week on A. R. Ammons. Which is partly because of his being one of my favorite poets, but also because his 1993 National Book Award winner, Garbage, is so much different from the style of poetry he is known for.

Garbage is an epic length long poem (or epic length ‘ramble’– which I’m sure Ammons would not find pejorative) that is divided up into 18 sections, originally composed on adding tape as one run-on sentence and then later divided into enjambed couplets to provide a final shape to the work. The book is about, you guessed it, garbage. Specifically, the garbage of mankind at the end of the twentieth century. Of course, that is just the premise to initiate the poem. From Ammons’ scrutinizing analysis of garbage, he extends a narrative voice into lingual playfulness and plaintive humor to address such issues as aging, the futility of modern mankind’s accomplishments, the role of art in culture, the powerful meaning (and/or meaninglessness) of language, philosophical notions towards how to live a happy life and, as always, good old fashioned sentimentality.

While Ammons is generally not known for long lines and epic length works, after getting into his poetry a person will find Garabage is quite similar to the rest of his work. His poetry is often simply a documentative mapping of thought, as it maneuvers and morphs into various realms of experience and understanding, whether this be the seashore, as documented in one of his most famous poems, Corsons Inlet, or heaping, filthy, wondrous piles of garbage. Poet Richard Howard:

"Ammons is our Lucretius, swerving and sideswiping his way into the nature of things, through domestic doldrums, cardinals and quince bushes, fields of sidereal force, out into what he so accurately calls 'joy's surviving radiance.'"

And how does Ammons enter into ‘joy’s surviving radiance’? While Ammons sounds philosophical at times, his conclusions are fleeting and not meant to last, destined for only a momentary worth. What does last is the celebration of the infinitude of thought and language, its ongoing shaping into forms and newer forms, of the momentous energy itself that makes it go go go, that feeds off, from and within itself, existing for its own sake and where a continual re-birthing of radiance can be found:

.........................................there is a mound,

too, in the poet’s mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and

shaped into new turns and clusters, the mind
strengthened by what it strengthens: for

where but in the very asshole of comedown is
redemption; as where but brought low, where

but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we
discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:

where but in the arrangements love crawls us
through, not a thing left in our self-display

unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of
new routes......................

Mike over at the always enjoyable Annotated Margins was kind enough to include me with a blogging award post and now I’m passing it forward. And his timing was good because I was thinking about writing a more personal post here soon. Reason for that is because I’ve gained a number of new readers over this past year, so I thought it was time to say ‘hello’. So anyway, with this post I am supposed to list seven things about myself and then identify seven other bloggers who deserve to receive the award as well.

Seven things about myself:

1. I hope to be a centenarian. Although, through moderate health habits rather than anything extreme or ascetic. As an example, I run but only about three and a half miles three times a week. That seems to be enough to keep me in shape. So why run more? Its all about living a balanced life.

2. While I enter into some dark and heavy areas in my blog, out and about I’m easy going and light. More about that. While I’m drawn to dramatic intensity in the arts, my overall relation with life is more Zen based. This would seem to be a contradiction, but somehow it works for me.

3. I live with two old cats named Jack and Flipper. Jack, being a lazy lap cat, helps me with many of the posts on this blog. I also have a massive skunk that lives underneath my back porch that I spot once in a while at night. Other critters in my urban/suburban yard include raccoons, hawks, owls, rabbits, mice, possum and chipmunks.

4. While I vote standard left in all elections, at a broader level I’m tending more towards free market anarchism. What won me over to the idea is the decentralization of power (economic, moral, military). It’s easy to believe that there has to be such things as countries and governments, because they have always been around, but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way. Although, I don’t think the delegitamization of government can really occur until technology solves are energy problem. If we still require non-renewable natural resources, ownership of land by a broad power is almost inevitable, maybe even necessary.

5. I now live in the same city I grew up in. I know, how quaint. But honestly, I’ve learned to really enjoy Grand Rapids. As well as Michigan on a whole because of its climate-- snow throughout the winter, lots of green in the summer, flowers in the spring and rich colors in autumn. Perfect.

6. I’m afraid of the dark…… but only in that transition period between daytime and nighttime. Is it because humans are diurnal? Once its fully night though, I think its kind of cool.

7. I’ll probably watch the Academy Awards tonight, for no other reason than to have something on while I iron my shirts. Here’s a picture of me watching TV last Fall, when I wasn't ironing my shirts:

OK, now to pass the award on to seven other bloggers. I’m going to specifically mention blogs that I’ve only started to just read in the past year or so:

1. Gurldoggie: for understanding that the arts and street culture work quite well with one another, as they always have.

2. Wuthering Expectations: for the consistent delving into specific periods and genres of world literature.

3. Indifferent Eye: for capturing the details within the otherwise fleeting moments of the modern urban environment.

4. Bare Feet and Long Nightgowns: for showing how with artistic language, sometimes less can say more.

5. Tommaso Gervasutti: for the open sharing of original poetry and general thoughts concerning.

6. Slow Muse: for professional level writing about the arts without the need for an annual subscription fee.

7. Rose City Reader: for the ongoing and never ending book reviews and suggestions.

If any of these fine bloggers wish to participate, here are the rules for the continuation of the award:

A: Copy the award to your blog.
B: Link to the person who gave you the award.
C: Write 7 interesting things about yourself.
D: Chose 7 other blogs to give this award to.
E: Link to their blogs.
F: Leave them a comment saying you have given them an award.

We're getting close people, getting close........

No. 15

Having been interstellar
....and in the treble clef

by great expense of
....climbing mountains
....lighting crucible fires
in the catacombs

....among the hunted
and the trapped in tiers
....seeking the distallate
....answering direct
the draft of earthless air

he turned in himself
....helplessly as in sleep

and went out into the growth of rains
....and when the rains
....taking him
had gone away in spring

....no one knew
that he had ever flown
....he was no less
....no more known
to stones he left a stone

--from Ommateum, with Doxology; A. R. Ammons

From what has become the definitive A. R. Ammons interview (Manhattan Review, Fall, 1980):

PF: The appearance of your poems on the page seems important. Does this translate into reading out loud, or is it primarily a visual experience?

Ammons: I’ve done a good many kinds of experiments, right? Some of them look like purposely regular stanzas and some don’t. In some, the indentations correspond from stanza to stanza, the same line by line. But in some of them there is the random. I usually feel that I don’t have anything to say of my own until I have tripped the regular world, until I have thrown the Western mind itself somehow off, and I think that’s what those—if I began to write a sonnet, for example, I think I would be stultified and silenced by that form, because it’s my nature to want to trip that form out of existence as a way of making room for myself to speak and act.

I think I feel the same kind of sociological confrontation with things like capital letters and periods, because that belongs to the world I want to dismiss. So I think by the indentation and other devices, I try to throw the expected response out of line and then, it seems to me, I can come through with my own way of saying what I have to say.

By the way, what I’ve just said is just an attempt at this point to give an explanation for something I did without thinking. It seems to me that the thing a writer must be faithful to is what he feels like doing, through he doesn’t yet know why. He feels like doing it, right, and later on perhaps he or someone else—it won’t need necessarily be the poet—can find out whether or not he was answering to something accurate within himself or the world around him when he did that.

It was when my little brother, who was two and a half years younger than I, died at eighteen months. My mother some days later found his footprints in the yard and tried to build something over it to keep the wind from blowing it away. That's the most powerful image I've ever known.

--A. R. Ammons

Smoke came out of the angel's ears
......the axels
....of slow handwheels of grief
and under white lids of its eyes
bulged tears of purple light
Watching the agony diffuse in
......shapeless loss
I interposed a harp
....The atmosphere possessed it eagerly
and the angel
saying prayers for the things of time

let its fingers drop and burn
the lyric strings provoking wonder

Grief sounded like an ocean rose
......in bright clothes
and the fire
breaking out on the limbs rising
caught up the branching wings
..in a flurry of ascent
Taking a bow I shot transfixing
the angel midair
all miracle hanging fire
....on rafters of the sky

--from No. 28, Ommateum, with Doxology

A. R. Ammons was one of the first poet that I began reading, enjoyably. His mode generally is with shorter lines that could be seen as derivatives of more formal meter, which has a way of propelling the poems forward in a tightly enjambed energy that draws attention to his blend-specific diction, where both folk and educated speech are mixed with phraseology derived from the natural sciences (Ammons originally studied biology). For content, I’ll admit that I’m not up to snuff on his later works, but his early and mid works often focused upon the tracking of thought through the processes and images found within the natural world, and in most particular, how that thought pertains to the inevitability of loss. At times Ammons sounds scientific and philosophical, but raw emotion typically provides his backdrop.

Ommateum, with Doxology was Ammons’ first book, which he self published at the age of 29 in 1955. Original copies are now worth thousands of dollars to rare book collectors, but in 2008 the collection was republished, and what a wildly fun collection it is. The first section, Ommateum, refers to the multiple lenses that make up the eyes of insects, suggesting the numerous angles of thought that can be found within the poems. However, in contrast, there is a consistent dramatic voice speaking the poems from a character named Ezra, whom Ammons described as “wiry, evaporated, leathern, a desert creature, much soul and bone, little flesh.” And a consistent theme is Ezra’s battle and eventual reconciliation with the ruthless impermanency brought about by wind and the natural world, which causes an almost epic feel to the poems, as though there is great tormenting adventure and story going on between each of the poems. The poems then maybe read as momentary epiphanies and dramatic asides for Ezra. And then in the second section, Doxology (which is one longer poem in three movements), a broader, more expansive view occurs, as though a praise which awaits after the travails of Ezra.

Perhaps a sign of a great collection of poetry is not just the enjoyment of the poems on the pages, but their crafted assembly having their own artistic effect as well. A comparison maybe made with graphic novels. It certainly works wonderfully in this collection and has the earmarks of a book that was written from pure, fanciful imagination. Meaning, you get the sense that Ammons knew what total effect he was going for in this book and is probably about all he concerned himself with when putting it together. Appropriately, some critics have suggested that Ommateum, with Doxology could be seen as an “outsider work” as it was written without much acknowledgment (deference) to what was going on in the world of established poetry at the time. And, initially, critics at the time it was first published had negative things to say about it. However, it now is considered one of Ammons’ best and makes for a great example towards just how exciting, innovative and engaging a book of poems can be. Publishers take note.