SOURCE: "Stanzas, Organic Myth, and the Metaformalism of A. R. Ammons," in American Literature, Vol. 59, No. 4, December, 1987, pp. 513-27.

[Cushman is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he attempts to define the structural principle of Ammons's verse, focusing on such features as stanza shape and length, typography, and linguistic patterns.]

In his long poem "The Ridge Farm" (1983), A. R. Ammons continues his persistent meditation on poetic form:

don't think we don't
know one breaks
form open because he fears
its bearing in on him …
and one hugs form because
he fears dissolution, openness,
we know, we know:
one needs stanza to take
sharp interest in and
one interest the stanza
down the road to the wilderness:

This passage uses the word "form" in suggestive ways. Unlike the "completed, external form" Ammons renounces in the "Foreword" to Ommateum (1955), where "external" suggests nonorganic rigidity and "completed" implies the kind of autotelic closure Charles Olson, among others, was lobbying against when Ammons wrote his first poems, "form" in the later poem both repels and attracts. In a characteristic gesture, the passage opens with Ammons' version of epanalepsis, an enjambed line which begins and ends with the same word: "don't think we don't." Here this self-enclosing pattern, one Ammons uses in different ways throughout his work, is revealed by the conventions of Ammons' lineation rather than by the unaided contours of his syntax. In this opening line, Ammons breaks his syntax against a line in order to discover a buried repetition, one to which the syntactic pattern alone would not normally call attention. If "one breaks/ form open because he fears" it, one also breaks form, such as the form of a syntactic pattern, in order to reveal other hidden structures.

The humor implicit in this passage arises from its deliberate self-betrayal. While the passage extols the stanza, it builds no stanzas, although other parts of "The Ridge Farm" do. In fact, the passage neither breaks nor hugs form in any remarkable way. Ammons casts this passage in the familiar shape of a left-justified stichic column, the lines of which fall mostly between the lengths of traditional trimeters and tetrameters. In his Collected Poems (1972), this shape appears only twice among poems written between 1951 and 1955 ("Chaos Staggered" and "Bees Stopped"), but with the poems written between 1966 and 1971, grouped mostly in Uplands (1970) and Briefings (1971), it becomes, along with the tercet, one of his dominant visual patterns. At least once in the passage, the faint trace of an iambic sequence becomes audible:

Because Ammons is a self-proclaimed "free-versite" [The Snow Poems], an occasional iambic string may seem like a simple accident of language, inhering in the structure of English. But to argue this is a bit naive, since iambic forms can be broken, and usually are by Ammons, as easily as they can be constructed. Furthermore, this particular iambic eddy corresponds neatly to an expression of formal claustrophobia.

At its best, the breaking of form establishes a principle of "uneasy pleasures" ["The Ridge Farm"]. The poet breaks in order to remake in order to break again. The flight from form is constant and the refuge in form temporary. Behind the ironic humor of Ammons' know-it-all voice and his stanza-less advertisement for the stanza lies a deep confusion, confusion that vexes not only this passage but also the entire poem "The Ridge Farm" and much of the thirty-year work which precedes it. The confusion is about the relationship of polarities, specifically the polarity of form and formlessness.

The blending, or "confusion" in its radical sense, of form and formlessness is especially evident in Ammons' use of stanzas. More often than not, his stanzas do not satisfy Paul Fussell's requirement that "in poems written in fixed or nonce stanzas separate and different shapes should embody separate and different things" ["Poetic Meter and Poetic Form," revised edition, 1979]. In other words, Ammons' stanzas have little or no logical integrity, an integrity Fussell includes among his "principles of excellence in stanzaic forms." Furthermore, since they have no such integrity, they do not satisfy another of Fussell's requirements that they, like a particular meter, "should give the illusion of having arisen intrinsically and subtly from within the uniqueness of the poetic occasion." Since Ammons' stanzas make no attempt to give this illusion, but in fact often seek to dismantle it, Fussell would say they are not organically part of his poems.

Ammons' stanzas appear to challenge the Romantic myth of organicism, particularly its boldly hyperbolic American versions initiated by Whitman. As John Hollander comments on the fulfillment of Emersonian prophecy in "The Poet" by Leaves of Grass, "Organic form is to be the emblem, then, of the authenticity of the text, although the precise nature of the form is not made clear" [Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd edition, 1985]. In fact, the vexingly imprecise nature of what poetic form has to do to be considered "organic" harasses many discussions. Is organicism a condition the poem aspires to in its imaginative movement but not necessarily in its prosody? in its prosody only? in both? Donald Wesling's definition of organic form, which echoes Fussell's emphasis on "illusion," is helpfully clear and usefully concise: "This, or the illusion of it, is what the successful poem has when it justifies the arbitrariness of its technique; and what the failed poem lacks, when its technique seems obtrusively imposed…. I would define organic form as convention in its innovative guise" [The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity, 1980]. Although Wesling singles out rhyme to stand for technique and convention, one would assume that other techniques and conventions, of genre (lyric, dramatic, narrative), type (song, monologue, dream), and prosody, would also work with this definition.

In Ammons' poetry, the myth of organicism, which his seemingly arbitrary stanzas appear to reject, in fact embodies itself in subtle and complex ways, although Hyatt Waggoner is not alone in taking Ammons' organicism at face-value: "Ammons, like most of his best contemporaries, has moved all the way toward practicing the theory announced in 'The Poet' and elaborated in 'Poetry and Imagination"' ["On A. R. Ammons," in Contemporary Poetry in America, edited by Robert Boyers, 1974]. But for someone who "has moved all the way" toward practicing Emersonian theory, Ammons has much to say on the subject of artifice and artificiality in poetry, and in his poetry in particular. In Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), for example, he states baldly: "poetry is art & is/ artificial: but it/ realizes reality's/ potentials." In "Extremes and Moderations," he adds:

And in "Hibernaculum," he ponders artifice in the context of the promotion of art over nature which Oscar Wilde preaches, for example, in his essay "The Decay of Lying."

Predictably, Ammons' only explicit commentary on organicism comes in the course of a poem, the long "Essay on Poetics," originally published in 1970. The earliest of the longer poems which use the long-line tercet ("Hibernaculum," Sphere, and "Summer Place" are the others), "Essay on Poetics" maintains a relentless loyalty to its own stanzaic regularity, even as it interpolates into various stanzas three shorter poems, three long quotations from scientific texts, and one column of words. After each of these interruptions, the respective stanzas pick up where they left off, often in the middle of lines. Apparently a meditation on the nature of the lyric versus its own longer "linear mode," Ammons' "Essay" at one point reads Williams' dictum "no ideas but in things" into various alternatives: '"no things but in ideas,'/ 'no ideas but in ideas,' and 'no things but in things.'" This revision of the famous refrain of Paterson leads to an extended figuring of different poetic modes in terms of the stages of water flowing, as it goes from snow-melt to brook-rapids, to slow river, and finally to sea:

Both the word "measure" and the image of a river running to the sea suggest that the dialogue with Williams and Paterson continues throughout this section. [In A. R. Ammons, 1978] Alan Holder contends that here Ammons is pointing up "the inadequacy of William Carlos Williams' famous prescription for the poet." Certainly, Ammons is examining that prescription critically ("one thing/ always to keep in mind is that there are a number of possibilities"); yet in the adoption of Williams' image of the river running to the sea, an image which despite his own brooks and falls he does not use often, Ammons may also be making his pact with Williams, who in his own way challenges the organicist label too often applied to him.

As Henry Sayre has argued convincingly, Williams' "notoriously inadequate explanations of the so-called variable foot are most usefully seen as efforts to defend as organic what through the 1940s and 1950s is more and more evidently a formally mechanical and arbitrary practice" [The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams, 1983]. Like Williams, Ammons invents a three-line stanza that is mechanical (in Schlegel's sense of the word), arbitrary, and artificial. But unlike Williams, Ammons does not try to defend that artificiality with a rhetoric of traditional organicism. Instead, the exact opposite is true. He challenges the rhetoric of traditional organicism and flaunts the artificiality of his form. The challenge to organicism, or more precisely, literary organicism, comes near the end of "Essay on Poetics" in a long passage which begins

In his "consideration of the adequacy of the transcendental/vegetative analogy," Ammons demystifies the literary rhetoric of organicism by confronting it with scientific literalism. As this passage argues, it is naive to think that a particular tree realizes itself according to innate individual laws. In fact, what is innate in a particular tree is not its own uniqueness, but quite the opposite, its pre-ordained genetic code, which nature protects against "haphazard change." The uniqueness of a given tree, then, results when its genetic "print-out" is modified from outside by "the bleak periphery of possibility," which includes "variables of weather,/ soil, etc."

Ammons' revised organicism has important implications for his poetics. If a tree develops according to a code that is genetically pre-ordained, and a given tree varies only according to local external modifications, then a truly organic poem is one that figuratively does the same. A truly organic poem reflects both the predetermination of structures it cannot change and the local variation of those structures where other conditions modify them. In Wesling's terms, Ammons' poem justifies the arbitrariness of its stanzaic regularity by letting that arbitrariness stand for predetermination, the poetic analogue of a locked-in genetic code. Each stanza is a print-out of the predetermined pattern; and yet, like a given tree, a given stanza varies according to local effects, effects, in its case, of syntax, diction, rhythm, enjambment, and typography. Subsequently, Animons multiplies organic analogies by quoting passages of prose, as Williams does in Paterson. One passage celebrates "a good worm," which has "developed segmentation or reduplication of parts, permitting increase in size with completely coordinated function," an apt self-description of "Essay on Poetics." Another passage describes "the molecular bricks out of which living matter is made," adding that "a mere random pile of such bricks does not make a living structure, any more than a mere pile of real bricks makes a house." By analogy, this statement also describes Ammons' own poem, as its stanzas are the brickshaped blocks that attempt to build a living structure instead of a mere pile.

"Essay on Poetics" provides a key to Ammons's formal intentions, especially in those poems which seem at first to organize themselves arbitrarily around regular typographic patterns, such as stanzas or indentations. In those poems, short and long, arbitrary regularity is the artifice by means of which Ammons, as he explains in Tape, "realizes reality's/ potentials." Although what nature predetermines for a white oak evolves through a series of favorable mutations, and so is not arbitrary in the way the selection of a stanza shape may be arbitrary, the stanza shape nevertheless represents the given, whether it be the organic given of a genetic pattern, the mental given of binary concepts, the linguistic given of modern American English, or the literary given of poetic tradition. One does not invent these; one inherits them. When Ammons closes "Hibernaculum" with the outrageously flippant stanza

he tweaks the noses of both the traditional formalist for whom the stanza is necessarily a metrical and auditory reality, never merely a typographic one, and the naive organicist who believes that a poem should never compromise content in order to fulfill the demands of a predetermined form. But beneath the humor lies more serious meaning. Disciple of Socrates, military leader, and historian, Xenophon presides over the close of "Hibernaculum" as a representative of the accumulated weight of a philosophical, historical, and literary past. His Oeconomicus, undoubtedly a model for the chapter "Economy" in Thoreau's Walden, casts Socrates in a dialogue on household management and married life, two subjects the domestically hibernating Ammons contemplates in "Hibernaculum" and elsewhere. In its casual way, Ammons' final stanza is about demands and expectations generated by the past, demands and expectations he did not create but still must meet. These exert a pressure on him which, no matter how much he may wish to believe otherwise, shapes his utterances.

"Extremes and Moderations," which falls between "Essay on Poetics" and "Hibernaculum" in the 1966-1971 section of Collected Poems, opens and closes with remarks on its own four line stanza, unique among Ammons' longer poems. The introduction of the stanza again recalls Wesling's formulation that successful organicism involves the justification of arbitrary technique:

constructing the stanza is not in my case exceedingly
difficult, variably invariable, permitting maximum change
within maximum stability, the flow-breaking four-liner, lattice

of the satisfactory fall, grid seepage, currents distracted
to side flow, multiple laterals that at some extreme spill
a shelf, ease back, hit the jolt of the central impulse:

The admission that the construction of stanzas "is not in my case exceedingly difficult" anticipates the end of "Hibernaculum" in its unabashed acknowledgment of an artificiality which neither the traditional formalist nor the conventional organicist could justify. Meanwhile, the description of the stanza as "variably invariable" continues the argument from "Essay on Poetics," abstracting it from the realm of white oaks and genetic printouts, yet preserving the conjunction of general predetermination with specific modification. Although "variably invariable" takes the rhetorical shape of oxymoron, Ammons' version of organicism demonstrates the necessary congruity of the variable and invariable. Images of water flowing through the stanza, "the flow-breaking four-liner, lattice/ of the satisfactory fall, grid seepage, currents distracted/ to side flow," prefigure images of form in Sphere (1974). In both poems, Ammons' images of flowing water recall the etymological meaning of "rhythm" (Greek rein: to flow), while his images of the stanza as "lattice," "grid," "log the stream flows against," and "mesh" describe the phenomenology of verse structure in new terms.

Etymologically, a "stanza" is a stopping-place, a place to stand. The word suggests a phenomenology of writing and reading that involves a series of stops between which one crosses white space or silence to get to the next stop. More recently in poetic tradition, occasional enjambment between stanzas may vary the stop-and-go pattern; yet such enjambment remains exceptional in most verse and should remain exceptional, according to those, such as Paul Fussell, who place high value on stanzaic integrity. The stanzaic repetition of stops and starts reflects the origin of stanzas in the strophic divisions of song, divisions which allow a singer to sing new verses to a recycled tune. As verse becomes more removed from its historical origins in song, structures that originated asauditory modes become increasingly visual. In Ammons' stanzas the removal from auditory origins is complete, his various images of the stanza implying a different model for writing and reading. Instead of a phenomenology of stopping and going, his stanzas generate one of speeding and slowing. If going ever stops, it stops only partially with a colon, and even then it stops much less than it continues.

The speeding and slowing of perpetual going, the presentation of some resistance or channel that flow must overcome or follow, revises another Romantic metaphor, that of the Aeolian harp. Although that image runs on wind and Ammons' on water, they share the fiction of an essential passivity. For Shelley in "Ode to the West Wind," the desire for inspiration leads to the petition "Make me thy lyre," while for Coleridge in "The Eolian Harp," the image prompts him to ask whether "all of animated nature," himself included, "Be but organic Harps diversely framed" over which "sweeps/ Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/ At once the Soul of each, and God of all?"

At the close of "Extremes and Moderations," written about the time that, as Harold Bloom points out [in "A. R. Ammons: 'When You Consider the Radiance,'" The Ringers in the Tower, 1971] "the motions of water … replaced the earlier guiding movements of wind" in Ammons' poetry, the Romantic metaphor surfaces in final remarks on the stanza:

Punning on the Latin for wind (ventus), Ammons describes his ventilating stanza as both a device for passively letting the world breeze through and for venting his prophetic anger over our use and abuses of nature. Whether he describes the stanza in terms of wind or water, it remains his typographic version of the Romantic harp. In each case, the image of sweeping over, or breezing through, functions to naturalize poetic artifice. If the poetic imagination simply presents itself in the form of a harp or stanza to be acted upon by a wind or a stream, then that imagination cannot be held responsible for what results. The burden of structuring the poem shifts away from the poet, so that, at least in Ammons' case, he escapes having to account fully for his form. Whereas Ammons' revision of organicism allows him to justify arbitrariness by redefining "organic" in terms of scientific literalism, his version of the Aeolian harp allows him to do so by trivializing his own role as maker of "harmless/ devices."

Nowhere in Ammons's work have issues of form and formlessness, arbitrariness and organicism, poet as artificer and poet as innocent bystander, caused more disagreement and more misunderstanding than in The Snow Poems (1977) [in American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present, revised edition, 1984]. Waggoner pronounces the volume "a thick book of dull, tired poems that prompt us to wonder, does Ammons write too much?" The Snow Poems appeared too late for consideration by Holder, which is unfortunate, since the ways in which his judgments differ from Waggoner's represent a larger critical disagreement over Ammons' work. (Waggoner applauds Tape for the Turn of the Year, calling it "good Emerson," but doesn't "much like" "Summer Session." Holder ranks "Summer Session" "among Ammons' most interesting poems," while in Tape he finds "egregious examples of the imitative fallacy," "verbal doodling," and tastelessness.) Amidst a swirl of negative reviews, such as Hayden Carruth's ("a dull, dull book") [The New York Times Book Review, [September 25, 1977]), Bloom has remained determinedly silent, while Helen Vendler has given the book limited but sympathetic attention: "Ammons has delineated that landscape and that climate [of Ithaca, New York] for good and all, with an Emersonian wintriness of voice diluting the ebullience he inherited from Williams" [Part of Nature, Part of US, 1980].

But most interesting is the reappraisal of The Snow Poems made by Michael McFee after the appearance of A Coast of Trees (1981) signaled Ammons' return to the short lyric. Although McFee blusters a bit too much against what he calls the "popular critical pacifier, as manufactured by Bloom and others, … that Ammons had come into the world to fulfill the Romantic Transcendental heritage, to realize the promise of Organic Form" ["A. R. Ammons and The Snow Poems Reconsidered," Chicago Review, 33, No. 1 (1981)], he does settle down to make two significant points. The first is that "as Ammons became more prominent, the form of his poetry became more conservative, taking on a more orderly and regular appearance." The second is that "the heart of The Snow Poems" is "Ammons' deep anti-formalism." Both of these assertions need re-examination, but they do serve to focus attention and lead toward conclusion.

When McFee argues that Ammons' form becomes more conservative as it takes on the orderly and regular appearance of uniform stanzas, he makes two mistakes. The first is that he reduces poetic form to mere format, or the typographic shape of a poem on the page. Williams often veered dangerously close to the same error, sometimes even committing it, but Ammons never does. For him, "form" is far too large and suggestive a term to let itself be contained within the boundaries of a stanza shape. Any account of his poetic forms must also reckon with rich phonetic configurations, syntactic patterns, rhetorical figures, and occasional metricality, as well as with the larger contours of his characteristic meditative habits. The second mistake is that McFee uses the unhelpful term "conservative" to describe what he apparently believes to be Ammons' devoted guardianship of the traditional stanza. If indeed he does believe that Ammons' stanzas imply an uncritical acceptance of at least one aspect of prosodie tradition, he is badly mistaken. In Ammons' hands, the stanza format is an instrument of humor, parody, playfulness, figuration, self-description, and poetic revision. The irreverent liberties he takes with his stanzas should disabuse us of any notion that his growing fame has caused him to think twice about formal experimentalism. As Ammons' more recent work has shown, especially "The Ridge Farm," he can take or leave the stanza with no trouble at all.

But McFee's second statement, that the heart of The SnowPoems is a deep anti-formalism, reveals a crucial misunderstanding of Ammons' poetic program. To support his contention, McFee quotes part of the poem "One at One with his Desire":

A full reading of this passage requires placement in its immediate context, but even without that context, McFee's reading is hard to justify: "He endorses the 'hellish paradise' susceptible to shit and wind change, not the artificial order of a stanza." Yes, a break will humble the stanzaic compulsion to repeat and rescue Ammons from the fear of overbearing form he expresses in "The Ridge Farm." But the subsequent lines about form consuming, eliminating, and extracting must not be misread to mean only that form constructs "inflexible structures which drain the elixir vitae of motion." The sequence of consumption, elimination, and extraction also suggests the digestive processes of an organism. In other words, although form may threaten to assume a Frankenstein-like autonomy, and so must be humbled if creator is to retain control over creation, still that form does have a life of its own. In fact, "the form/ that extracts of the elixir from/ the passages of change" performs a kind of alchemy, as it rescues from the rush of impermanence and dissolution a precious essence which remains. When this passage joins with a long one preceding it, the full complexity and pathos of Ammons' ambivalence toward his stanza, and toward abstractions of form it represents, emerges. This important passage, too long to quote in full, begins

and ends

This is not the voice of one who hates form. Instead, it is the deep, moving confession of a man who realizes that he has been shut out from rooms where life goes on immediately and unconsciously, shut out from the places where his desire can be fulfilled. As a result, the rooms that stanzas build, and the poems for which they stand as synecdoches, doches, provide the only places for him to dwell. He is fully, radically disillusioned about the "numb pale/ paradise!" form encloses, its drug-like power that makes erasure bliss, or the misery "the uneasy" use it to cover. This last phrase recalls the "uneasy pleasures" Ammons identifies in "The Ridge Farm." But he sees no alternative. Life may be preferable to form, but form is the dark consolation of lifelessness. Against the background of these stark choices, the familiar figure of epanalepsis, "desire still has to desire," looms with uncanny power. Like the line McFee quotes, "form forms the form," in which repetition threatens to hollow "form" of its substance and meaning, this self-enclosed, self-mirroring line figures both the entrapment of desire and the poetic self-consciousness that gives desire form, if not fulfillment. Ammons gives the repetition of "desire" a twist, as he uses the word first as a noun and second as an infinitive, binding a state or condition to the process which generates it. These nuances may not be much, but they are "so much more than nothing."

This hugging of form for preservation, consolation, and in a displaced, deflected, uneasy way, pleasure, makes for its own peculiar formalism. Admittedly, Ammons cannot be considered a formalist in the same strictly limited sense in which his contemporaries Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, James Merrill, and Howard Nemerov can. As he says in "A Note on Prosody" [Poetry, 102 (1963)], "the box-like structure of rhymed, measured verse is pretty well shot" in his verse, and so are his credentials as a traditional prosodist. But what McFee identifies as "antiformalism" in The Snow Poems is in reality something else. It is the "strong antivisionary current flowing in Ammons' poetry," to which Waggoner calls our attention [in American Visionary Poetry, 1982]. Similarly, McFee's suggestion that some have rejected The Snow Poems for its lack of stanzaic regularity is questionable. The end of the twentieth century is far too late in the history of American poetry to squabble about whether or not traditional prosody should rule, but it is never too late to question whether the proper business of the poet is simple notation or transforming vision. Those who reject The Snow Poems—and I am not one—object to its antivisionary overinclusiveness, not its alleged antiformalism.

Ammons, then, cannot be considered a formalist, in the usual sense of the term, but neither can he be dismissed as an antiformalist. His need of some form of form remains too acute, his explicit considerations of form too insistent. Instead, Ammons' work embodies a kind of metaformalism. In the same way that Stevens produced a metapoetry about poetry, Ammons has produced and continues to produce poetic forms about themselves, their own phenomenological power, and their own ontological significance. In this way, he resembles Williams, especially the Williams of the often self-descriptive Paterson. But unlike Williams, whose poems also struggle to engage the world of people and history, in its many social, political, and economic phases, a struggle which sometimes burdens his fictions of form, Ammons has meditated on form to the exclusion of these other concerns. Such exclusion betokens aloofness, but for him aloofness is not so much a conscious choice as a condition he wakes to find himself in. Through poetic form, and the poetic fictions it generates, he struggles to reattach himself, first to the larger capabilities of the human mind, second to the natural world which preceded and remains separate from him, and third to whatever else, beyond these, is available.