Most writers cultivate their ability to satisfy expectations. A. R. Ammons is a notable exception. Through his defiance, he hopes to make us question the assumptions behind—our ideal of Good Poetry and to join with him in creating new, provisionally more satisfying standards. Then, in the next poem, or in the next book of poems, the process of denial and revision begins afresh: or, as Ammons succinctly puts the matter at the end of "Corsons Inlet," "tomorrow a new walk is a new walk."

Not all readers are comfortable with this responsibility. David Young, for example, complains that Ammons does not always provide us with the verbal richesse traditionally

Perhaps the verse essay is a respectable and legitimate genre, but I wish it wouldn't be confused with lyric poetry; if you order bourbon and get ginger-ale because someone thinks they are roughly the same thing, you have a right to protest. ["Language: The Poet as Master and Servant," in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young, 1980]

The central metaphor in this passage is revealing. It implies that the relationship between audience and author is a fundamentally commercial one. Readers like Mr. Young know what they want from poems; the writer should be smart enough either to want the same things, or at least to pretend that he does; the writer then hands over the bourbon to his patrons and hopes for his critical gratuity.

This strikes me as precisely the relationship between writer and reader that Ammons has been questioning for thirty-five years. In a 1973 interview with David Grossvogel [in Diacritics 3 (Winter 1973)], Ammons' profession of interest in John Ashbery's poems underscores his own aesthetic principles:

I respect [Ashbery] very much as a courageous man who has not thought to himself "What is most likely to succeed?" Which is what most of the poets that I don't respect ask first.

Ammons does, of course, ultimately wish to please his readers. Like Roland Barthes, he perceives the relationship between text and reader as an erotic one:

Take a boy and a girl, they see each other. It's like the first line of a poem. It either sets up an immediate attraction so you want to know more, or it doesn't. If the attraction is there, what happens? The two people manage somehow to get close to each other and what happens next?—not silence but an outbreak of dialogue whereby they try to sense where the other person is…. [Interview, Diacritics]

But lovers often please us most by telling us things that we initially did not want to hear, and that we come to see as beautiful only through their efforts. That is, poets don't sell us anything but manage to engender it in our deepest, best selves. And just as we change, they change, and we must all try to rekindle that love in ever-various ways.

Young shows an unwillingness to entertain Ammons' notion of the shifting, recriprocal relationship between poet and reader; he assumes that Ammons, especially in his longer poems, is either too stupid or too untalented to provide verbal flourishes for our edification. Denis Donoghue has a different problem with Ammons' work, but it also hinges upon a reluctance to question the customary relationship between author and audience. Donoghue chastises Ammons for being insufficiently concerned with other human beings in his poems:

He protests that he is concerned with Nature, including human nature, but he rarely makes me feel that he cares much about any human nature but his own. His poetry is rural in the sense that you can walk for miles in it without meeting anyone; so the dramatic sense of life never appears. Ammons could write his poetry if there were nothing in the world but mountains, winds, weather, birds, fish, sand dunes, beaches, and a poet accustomed to living in his art alone. ["Ammons and the Lesser Celandine," Parnassus 3 (Spring-Summer 1975)]

Donoghue is wrong as well as uncharitable here, for such a world would also be devoid of readers. For Ammons, the essential humanity of poems lies not within them but between them and their audience. That is, his poems rarely dramatize relationships between persons, but rather present speakers who are surrogates or adversaries for the reader. The resulting tension between the voice in the poem and the reader's response to it becomes the poem's social being—which often incorporates the isolation of the speaker within it. Thus, the typical Ammons poem is at once alienated and in quest of the social completion that is available only through the reading process.

Critics like Harold Bloom, despite their maddening jargon, posit an active, creative reader: a concept that helps them to realize and to enjoy the many tasks that Ammons sets before them. My chief reservation about Bloom's commentaries, apart from their prolixity, is their tendency to pursue theoretical points at the expense of the poems themselves. (Bloom would call my position a canonization of "weak misreading," but that is another matter.) Because Bloom's theory is, in general, much closer to the spirit of Ammons' work than more traditional theories of interpretation are, it produces some rich, persuasive readings. Yet it also produces excesses like the following:

As I read the most recent Ammons [Bloom is writing in 1973] I keep remembering fragments out of Emerson's Journals (not because Ammons browses in them, but because his Lurianic misprision of Emerson operates most fiercely when he has not read the ancestral sage). ["Emerson and Ammons: A Coda," Diacritics 3 (Winter 1973)]

If one practices this sort of intertextuality-run-wild—an influence is strongest when it isn't there—then there is no longer the dialog that Ammons envisions between poet and reader. Instead, the reader has taken over the whole show.

Although Ammons' manners are too good to call Bloom specifically to task for this critical imperialism, he has commented upon the excesses of contemporary criticism in general:

Certain levels [of poems] are discussable. That is what bothers me so much about some of the French critics, as I understand them. They have arrived at the point where there is no text. It's impossible that there should be an author; it's inconceivable that there could be an audience. Now it just won't work, because human life and human organisms go right on. [Interview, Diacritics]

In his helpful study of Ammons' work [A. R. Ammons, 1978], Alan Holder sets up groups of "polar clusters" to indicate the extremes "between which Ammons' sensibility oscillates":

The list suggests that Ammons habitually concerns himself with provisional, informing tensions rather than with gem-like lyrics or narratives. To Holder's clusters I would add "author: readers" or "assertion: syntheses." Perhaps we should remember the littoral landscape of so many of Ammons' poems in the late 50's and early 60's. In metapoetic terms, the ocean becomes the author, shaping the land of the reader that both receives and deflects. The text of each poem is a point upon the vital, ever-changing periphery whose broadest outlines I shall now attempt to chart.

The world of A. R. Ammons' first poems is forbidding: often desert, usually hostile, always disorienting. Many readers who enjoy the more conversational later poems are baffled by the hermetic incantations of Ommateum:

[T]he poetry is personal but abstract, intense but distanced. Taken as a whole, the volume is attenuated and unduly strange, coming to us from too far away. [Holder, A. R. Ammons]

Robert Morgan sums up the spirit of the early work more sympathetically:

The Ommateum poems occur in remote points of desert and mind, which is their difficulty and purity. The later poems create a sense of space more accessible and easier to recognize. Their landscape is often the more life-promoting sea shore and marshes. ["The Compound Vision of A. R. Ammons' Early Poems," Epoch 22 (Spring 1973)]

The paradox of Ammons' earliest work is that it insistently asks the reader to identify with the poet's radical isolation, thereby qualifying that isolation in the reader's mind as it is qualified nowhere on the page. The world ommateum refers to the compound eye of an insect; if we extend the metaphor implied by the title of the book, Ammons himself becomes the insect, and the speaker of each poem is a fragment of the eye which is the I. The typical speaker in Ommateum is alienated from other human beings, from the landscape, and often from his own body:

Even the refuge of language itself is flimsy:

The pieces of my voice have been thrown
away I said turning to the hedgerows
and hidden ditches
Where do the pieces of
my voice lie scattered
("Rack")

In his first book Ammons shows us, but rarely tells us, that the poem is the last, unassailable point of contact between human beings. Gestures of farewell dominate in Ommateum, yet the book goes on: the speaker dissolves into the night wind ("So I Said I Am Ezra"); he "Walk[s] out of the world" after seeing Jews burned alive ("In Strasbourg in 1349"); he disappears into the well of the inexpressible ("Turning a Moment to Say So Long"); he perishes while waiting for the resolving chord of divine unity ("I Struck a Diminished Seventh"); he disappears into the mushroom clouds above a leveled city ("Dropping Eyelids Among the Aerial Ash"). Yet he is magically resurrected, if not rescued, again and again in ways that are possible only in the transforming imaginations of writer and reader.

Ammons begins Ommateum with an assertion of unity: he adopts the voice of the prophet Ezra. But the world around him denies his gesture:

So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice

And ultimately the speaker himself follows suit:

As a word too much repeated
falls out of being
so I Ezra went out into the night
like a drift of sand

Ammons goes on to become the Ancient Mariner of his own book, appearing and dissolving in different scenes, compulsively counting the many grains of his being that have been winnowed by the wind of life-in-death.

The wind games for the sounds of the speaker in "So I Said I Am Ezra," suggesting the bewildering multiplicity of voice and vision throughtout Ommateum. Patterns of imagery are begun in one poem and transmuted in the next; the sea oats of the Ezra poem become the rye and oatgrains of "The Sap Is Gone Out of the Trees" while the "unremembered seas" of the first poem become the memories of the land of the speaker's birth in the next. Such patterns occur over and over again in Ommateum, the most thoroughly Heraclitean book of this Heraclitean poet.

Death is both the dissolution and the unity of Ommateum. Mortality eventually becomes "This Black Rich Country" at the end of the 1951-1955 section of the Collected Poems. The shifting perspectives, ambiguous line-divisions, and broken images of Ommateum, however disorienting, do not preclude the poet's resurrection on the next page. To enjoy Ammons' early work, a reader must be willing to embrace this rapid, paradoxical shifting, to become its flux, to see, at least provisionally, through the compound eye of Ommateum to the I beyond.

Although Ommateum is a book of dislocations—in time, place, syntax, and patterns of imagery—in tone it is all of a very dark piece. But in the rest of the 1971 Collected Poems a new Ammons emerges. His tone is often playful, and as various as his many voices. His language becomes more conversational and more accessible. Frederick Buell summarizes these new tendencies:

Most immediately striking in the poetry dated in the Collected Poems between 1956 and 1966 is the great variety of voices and lyric selves that Ammons has created. Sly or serious inquirer, chanter, celebrant, country skeptic, diarist, observer, reasoner: the speakers range in utterance from the formal, hortatory, or celebrative Whitmanian chanter of songs to the wry, ironic doubter of prophecy.

['"To Be Quiet in the Hands of the Marvelous': The Poetry of A. R. Ammons," Iowa Review, Winter, 1977]

Ammons largely abandons his desert landscapes and becomes more interested in field, forest, river and seashore. The inner and outer weather in his poems appropriately becomes more temperate and more changeable. Ammons now implies that all emotions, somber and glorious, joyful and humble, deserve equal consideration as psychic forces, and that the mind must celebrate its changes. Richard Howard notes astutely that "it is only in Ammons that I find all three moments—the changing from, the changing, and the changing to—exalted equally" [Alone with America, enlarged edition, 1980].

Ammons' relationship with the reader undergoes an equally dramatic change in this period. No longer is the speaker an isolated seer, hoping for the empathy that he seems unable to extend to anyone else. Now he frequently addresses the reader in the second person; this rhetoric gives the poems of the late 50's and early 60's an explicitly social dimension absent from Ommateum. For example, Ammons begins "Risks and Possibilities" with a garland for the reader:

The Ommateum poems renounce the everyday world and its rhetorical gestures, but Ammons' impulse five or ten years later is to "honor a going thing" ("Mechanism"). The farewells of the early poems have become arrivals and returns. "Hymn" begins with a perception similar to the one that dominates Ommateum:

But in its second stanza, the poem makes an assertion more characteristic of the newer Ammons:

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

This acceptance of what Richard Wilbur calls "the things of this world" is the most substantial difference between the first book and the half-dozen that follow it. Ammons' "things" are characteristically smaller or larger than Wilbur's, however, and Ammons never has the certainty of vision that is the center of Wilbur's art. Indeed, in a 1968 essay, "A Poem Is a Walk," Ammons suggests that the perception of poetry should be a battle against such certainty:

Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterwards have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of over-simplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life.

But uncertainty does not preclude education, and Ammons frequently employs a lecturing tone in the middle of his Collected Poems. "Bridge," for example, begins with the enigmatic advice that "A tea garden shows you how." As we adopt the identity of the "you" in the poem and become Ammons' pupil, we enjoy the midafternoon sun and watch "lovers and single people" walk over a steep, small bridge arcing above a pond's narrowest point. As the people ascend the bridge, their reflections seem to go deeper into the pond, "where bridge and mirrorbridge merge at the bank." Then they descend on the other side, "returning their images to themselves" as they disappear into a grove of trees that "screens them into isolations of love or loneliness." At this point, the speaker invites us to imagine the spirit making a similar ascent and descent on the "bridge of consciousness." As in Frost's "Birches," this mental journey is good both going and coming back, but especially coming back:

The reintegration into the world that took place silently between poems in Ommateum now is occuring within the poems themselves. Poet and reader have become fellow observers, fellow walkers—even if, like the objects and reflections in "Bridge," they never wholly meet in the water of the text.

This new convenant is most playfully clear in "Coon Song." The poem begins as the speaker watches a raccoon fall from a tree and lands in front of some hounds. Just as we're ready for the bloody dismemberment to occur, the speaker interrupts the story with some "uh, philosophy":

Then the speaker both whets our curiosity and delays its satisfaction by presenting the coon's death in graphic but hypothetical terms;

At this point, Ammons incorporates the reader into the poem directly, and raises the fundamental issue in the relationship between author and audience, the issue of power:

In this remarkable passage, Ammons suggests that in conventional narrative the writer is the slave of the reader's expectations. He must, like Samuel Johnson's playwright, please to live. But Ammons is trying to give poetry its thirteenth amendment. With the phrase "I am no slave that I/ should entertain you," Ammons deftly turns the poem's title into a racial pun. The poet who renounces his slavery is singing "Coon Song"; we should also remember that "coon songs" were a staple of the record industry at the turn of the century.

Of course, readers are ultimately the slaves of their expectations as well. Once Ammons forces us to admit that our hunger for narrative closure makes us long for the poetcoon's death—once we recognize the "sloppy silt" of our conventional expectations—then the wily beast paws more dust into our eyes and reverses the reversal:

When we've barely finished acknowledging our lust for blood and certainly, Ammons makes us acknowledge our guilt for rejoicing in the disappearance of the hounds. We may have switched from sadism to sentimentality, but Ammons wants us to see that both are conventional poses that he wishes to avoid. To acknowledge the shattering of the order that he himself has helped to create, the poet violates his customary pattern of line indentations.

If Ammons has not purged us of our preconceptions, he at least has encouraged us to recognize them for what they are. We never find out what "really happens" to that raccoon; but if we don't like leaving the possibilities open, we can provide our own closure while the poet takes time off to count. Thus, the poem is a collaborative enterprise in which the reader has the responsibility to listen to the poet, but not the duty to obey him. Similarly, the pet takes into account the reader's expectations but feels free to subvert them. We have, in short, an interpretive game whose rules lie somewhere between the ones posited by David Young and Harold Bloom in the passages quoted at the beginning of this essay.

The "two philosophies" at the end of the poem are not "spheres roll, cubes stay put," because both statements imply a similar fatalism. Rather, the second philosophy is to be provided by the reader while Ammons counts:

At first glance, the last stanza might seem a non sequitur as well as a solecism. Once again, Ammons violates the pattern of indentation that he has established, just as the streetwise colloquialism violates the rural setting of the poem. Yet these lines remind us of the digression in the second stanza ("Dostoevsky would think/ it important if the coon/ could choose"), and in doing so underscore an important difference between poetry and experience. There need be no practical constraints upon our choices as writers or readers: we are free to make our own chains. Ammons chooses to address us, just as we choose to read his poem, so the adversarial relationship between the I and the you is only one part of a deeper community of concerns. After upbraiding us for our imagined shortcomings throughout the poem, Ammons playfully embraces us in the last three lines: the slave who refused to entertain us has become the friend who does entertain us. This new relationship is mysterious, subversive, erotic, and just plain fun.

In more stately poems such as "Expressions of Sea Level," the text can become the interface between writer and reader as it explores the interaction between ocean and land. In Richard Howard's fortuitous phrase, Ammons is "a littoralist of the imagination" [Alone with America], for he believes that both world and mind are most vital at their outer edges, where they are at the point of becoming something or someone else. Here, the possibilities and the dangers of change are greatest:

The poet, like the sea, finds expression and completion only on the periphery, only in contact with the other. Such contact can be observed but not explained or even entirely understood. The ocean-as-poet "erodes and/ builds" the land-as-reader in a never-ending meeting that can be both destructive ("shattered") and illuminating ("light").

The Ammons of the 1960's usually seems comfortable with the social dimension of his art. Yet on occasion he feels nostalgia for his earlier, more difficult work:

The fall from the isolation of the Ommateum poems "into the/ odor and warmth/ of others" seems problematic here. At the end of the 1970's, Ammons will shinny up that lonely tree once more in writing one of the most baffling works of his career, The Snow Poems.

The Snow Poems is easily the most controversial of Ammons' many books. Hayden Carruth's assesment of it is typical:

In spite of a bright, attractive technique, which could be used perfectly well in real poems, and in spite of lyric parts that remind us of earlier work, The Snow Poems is a dull, dull book.

["Reader Participation Invited," The New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1977]

[In "Book Reviews: The Snow Poems and The Selected Poems 1951-1977" The Georgia Review 32 (Winter 1978)] Peter Stitt bluntly refers to "the disaster of The Snow Poems" while praising the earlier lyrics.

There's no denying that it is a strange and often maddening book—292 pages of whistling in the slush. When I first read it, my response was similar to another critic's reaction to Tape for the Turn of the Year, Ammons' most idiosyncratic work of the 1960's: "not so much a poem as the ground of a poem, the dark backing of a mirror out of which all brightness may, as a condition, come" [Howard, Alone with America].

But after rereading The Snow Poems (twice!), I have come to regard it not as a notebook in verse but as a measured, finished work which, oddly enough, encourages us to wonder whether the "finish" of poetry is a kind of death-worship.

The book begins with the aging poet's guilt and resentment:

by the time
a poem is the world
the author is
out of town
pushing fifty—
("Words of Comfort")

As the poems accumulate, the melting and reappearance of their snow is reminiscent of the dissolution and reappearance of the self in Ommateum. The desert has been replaced by a seemingly endless Ithaca winter dragging on into spring, and the atmosphere of the new book is less rarefied than what we find in the early poems. Yet the obsession with death, alienation, and discontinuity is remarkably similar.

The individual poems often end with abrupt shifts in voice, tone, and subject. In the critical lingo of our time, The Snow Poems contains a strong deconstructive impulse that Ammons has expressed more directly in other forums. He states in a 1978 interview with Cynthia Haythe that "All I mean to do [in my poems] is to overturn the Western mind!" [Contemporary Literature 21 (1980)]. He goes onto explain his preference for appreciation over analysis:

… I have a very strong attachment to readers. Now on the other hand, if you live in a university community, you constantly hear things being explained. It gets to the point where it looks as if the explanation is going to replace the reality.

The Snow Poems could be subtitled "A Diatribe Against Explanations." It contains spoofs of the spirit behind academic literary criticism:

I do not care what anybody
thinks of anything, really:
that is to say, I have not
found the flavor of orange
juice diminished or increased
by this or that approach to
Heidegger or Harmonium: I
believe the constituency of
water has remained constant
since the Pleides:
I don't think that any
attitude I take to spider webs
will faze flies: have you seen
Stanley Fish in the flesh:
("You Think of the Sun That It")

Things and feelings are ultimately stronger than ideas. All the poems in The Snow Poems have their first lines as their titles; Ammons tries to avoid even the appearance of the overarching orders that his commentators so inordinately prize.

The entire book is aggressively fragmentary, and therein (perhaps) lies its purpose. X. J. Kennedy's appraisal of the earlier Tape is relevant here:

It is as if [Ammons] were trying to prove how much dull junk his barge can triumphantly float.

["Translations from the American," The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1973]

But in The Snow Poems, Ammons is out to sink the barge, not just to test it. He seems to be asking the following question: Whatlies before or beyond or after the lyric experience that both poets and readers worship? "Hard Lard," for example, contains the following reminiscence:

As the poet listens to snow fall on the windowpanes, he willingly supplies the "do" that is absent from his earlier work. Do also deserves its due, he implies. Although the urge to purify in lyric poetry may please our nostrils, it can also impoverish the mind's soil.

In the next stanza of "Hard Lard," Ammons recalls pulling up a small maple tree that was growing too close to his garage. For purely practical reasons, the tree had to go. But there is no practical imperative in poetry. We can have the purple do and the tree next to the garage if we wish. And if we lose something in the process, we gain something also.

In The Snow Poems, Ammons often subverts the lyric impulse behind his earlier, shorter poems by showing how random thoughts (especially sexual and scatological ones) occur at the most inopportune moments—even, great heavens, while we're writing poems. "Poetry Is the Smallest" has the strangest ending of any work celebrating poetry's ability to number the streaks of the tulip:

Throughout The Snow Poems, Ammons is making jokes: juxtaposing philosophy with flatulence, NFL games with High Culture, the sublime with the absurd, in order to make us question our very classification. He is establishing a new periphery here—the one that lies between sense and surprise—to replace the beaches of his earlier lyrics as the locus of imaginative activity. Ammons writes like a man who is afraid of selling out to the glorified version of himself created by the literary establishment. By 1977, he is determined to flaunt his warts.

The contrapuntal technique of The Snow Poems echoes this whimsically aggressive nose-thumbing. Two stanzas develop side by side, irreconcilable yet (somehow, we want to trust) part of the same whole. "[A]rrange these words so that they make/ sense," Ammons tells us in "Hard Fist"; this is the battle cry to the reader throughout the book.

As long as we take this challenge in the right spirit, and don't insist upon our "sense" of the poem being unique and determinate, then there's no problem. We can let the ideas, images, and emotions of The Snow Poems accumulate and dissolve, just as the snow does in the many passages involving the weather. It's only when we wish to freeze The Snow Poems permanently in our minds—when we become pedants eager to make "the explanation replace the reality"—that we feel uneasy:

So the poet becomes a befuddled befuddler, one of whose most important tasks is to reveal our blind confidence in the too-easy orders of the lyric impulse, just as "Coon Song" revealed our blind confidence in narrative momentum. The poet seeks not closure, but an openness that can sometimes include closure:

poetry operates, not to deny
the abstraction or the
particular and not to diminish
the distance between them but
to hold in relation the
widest play between them
("A Seventeen Morning")

The Snow Poems contains a mixture of insults and apologies, neither to be taken entirely seriously, for seriousness is one of the most insidious of the lyric closures that we must resist:

may a fart pule brow billows
about your earlobes
…..
I am not wise
please forgive for writing
("Quilted Spreads")

But just as the author of Ommateum finally comes to question his own questioning, so does the author of The Snow Poems occasionally wonder whether he's gone too far:

I suppose I've
worried too much
abut the outbreak
of destructive
clarification
("As for Fame I've Had It")

The dominant tendency of The Snow Poems, however, is to eschew this single vision and to concentrate instead upon trying "to/ murmur, stammer, swear, and/ sing on the edges of or around/ or deep into the unspeakable …" ("I'm Unwilling"). The final poem of the book gives us perhaps the best advice for considering it as a whole. "They Say It Snowed" is a lyric encapsulation of this often anti-lyrical work. Here, the snow that covers the rest of the book gives way to its memory, as the book itself recedes into the reader's own past. Ammons is outside his home, cleaning up after the profligate "lord of volition," the cruising teenagers who pass by on Hanshaw Road:

Ammons, assuming the role of homeowner and lyric poet, is busy tidying up the excesses of others. If we have been tempted to become impatient with the author of The Snow Poems, just as he is tempted to become impatient with those teenagers, we should also remember the value of raw vitality—something that doesn't get through the gate at garden parties or in lyric poems.

The reader and writer walk off into the future at poem's end. Ammons tells us that he will catch up on his correspondence; then, after he has already given us nearly 300 pages of poems, he offers to send us not one letter, but several:

how many

should I
put you
down for

The poem's final word, "we(l)come," contains a greeting within its insistence upon sexuality and the future. Writer and reader are never finished; the world is never exhausted.

I am intrigued by The Snow Poems, but in the end, I must say that my reaction to it is much like my reaction to John Ashbery's work: I find it more enjoyable to talk about than to read. I am glad Ammons has written the book, but I hope that he doesn't write it again; a little deconstruction (as any reader of recent literary theory will attest) can go a long way. Ammons may be right in saying that the lyric impulse is incomplete, but it is the kind of incompleteness that I think poetry ultimately needs.

Ammons has renewed his alliance with change in the early 1980's. His new journey seems to be toward silence, as Helen Vendler notes in her review of the 1982 volume, Worldly Hopes:

The short poems here are more of Ammons' experiments in the minimal. The question is how few words can make a poem, and how densely can a few words be made to resonate. ["Spheres and Ragged Edges," Poetry, October, 1982]

If The Snow Poems is insistently garrulous, insistently more inclusive and therefore more diffuse that the poetry to which we are accustomed, Worldly Hopes (like the earlier Briefings) is just as insistently exlusive, inviting extensions rather than consolidations from the reader. Once again, Ammons has changed the focal length and the field of vision in his work.

His 1981 volume, A Coast of Trees, is the lyrical midpoint between his macrocosmic and his microcosmic extremes. The book begins with the "thesis" of The Snow Poems: all orders, however tentative, are ultimately false, and we must embrace the particular, the absence (hole) of order if we are to find the wholeness and holiness of the world:

how are we to find holiness,
our engines of declaration put aside,
helplessness our first offer and sacrifice,
except that having given up all mechanisms of
approach, having accepted a shambles of
non-enterprise, we know a unity
approach divided, a composure past
sight: then, with nothing, we turn
to the cleared particular …
("Coast of Trees")

But this poem is within the realm of lyric assertion as it qualifies assertions of unity. In "Continuing," one of the most moving poems in the new book, the fiftyish poet tries to discover "the accumulation/ of fifty seasons" of leaves beneath a tree, but he can discern only two:

… under that
sand or rocksoil already mixed
with the meal or grist:
is this, I said to the mountain,
what becomes of things:
well, the mountain said,
one mourns the dead but who
can mourn those the dead mourned

Here, the elegiac tone of The Snow Poems is reunited with the lyric impulse. "White Dwarf" presents us with an image of the poet that will become the aesthetic center of his next book:

As I grow older
arcs swollen inside
now and then fall
back, collapsing, into
forming walls:
the temperature shoots
up with what I am not
and am: from
multiplicities, dark
knots, twanging twists,
structures come into sight,
chief of these
a blade of fire only now
so late, so sharp and standing,
burning confusion up.

This vision of the aging poet seems close to the "old man's eagle mind" that we find in Yeats' last poems. But Ammons' rag and bone shop of the heart is less rhetorically heightened. He sees his earlier works not as a collection of circus animals but as the balloons of "Breaking Out":

… they are all let loose
yellow, red, blue, thin-skinned, tough
and let go they have put me down
I was an earth thing all along
my feet are catching in the brush

Worldly Hopes is a book of small motions: squirrels in trees, a leaf in the wind, a shrub rising when the ice is kicked from it, a hermit lark singing. Ammons gives us his new aesthetic in "Progress Report":

Now I'm
into things
so small
when I
say boo
I disappear

Assertions of Ammons' kinship with Emerson have become commonplace; many critics note, usually with praise, his tendency to become on occasion the "transparent eyeball" of Nature: "I am nothing," Emerson tells us; "I see all." This is clearly the spirit behind poems such as "Spruce Woods":

It's so still
today that a

dipping bough means
a squirrel has gone through.

Ammons' long poems tend to operate in a Heideggerean universe: Die sprache spricht; language itself is the foreground. That is how The Snow Poems achieves many of its disquieting effects. But the Ammons of Worldly Hopes tries to shake us up in a different way: here, das ding spricht, as Husserl and Williams say that it should, and Ammons eagerly follows his own line of sight, phenomenological pencil in hand. Ammons' new short poems encourage the reader to say boo and disappear along with him, to abandon momentarily the ego's labyrinth of language.

Ammons seems to draw strength from the extremes of his art. I am not entirely comfortable with either his smallest poems or his largest ones. Yet I see that without these poles, the marvelous, informing tension between concentration and expansiveness might not exist in poems such as "Expressions of Sea Level," "Coon Song" "Corsons Inlet," "The City Limits," and "Easter Morning."

And my experience with the long works has expanded my notion of what poetry can be. Donald Davie has had a similar response:

Whatever the opposite of an ideal reader is, I ought to have been that thing as far as [Sphere] is concerned. How could I be anything but exasperated by it, profoundly distrustful, sure I was being bamboozled, sure I was being threatened? And how is it, then, that I was on the contrary enraptured? Have I gone soft in the head? … No. I am as suspicious as ever I was of Ammons' initial assumptions and governing preoccupations … And yet I can't refuse the evidence of my senses and my feelings…. [The New York Review of Books March 6, 1975]

Like Davie, I am a formalist at heart, and I share some of his skepticism along with much of his enchantment. After reading Ammons' work, I still feel that a form of my own choosing liberates me from a confusion that is not of my own choosing. But Ammons has given me the black rich country of another point of view; I have chosen to walk with him in it, and I am grateful for his company.