PARTISAN REVIEW
489
of what it is to be alive - very high. It was set in our infancy"–
powers which are irregular, vast and unpropped, as well as, or because,
unpolicied:
This poem
if we shall call it that,
or concert of one
divided among himself, this earthward gesture .
..
this free floating of one
opening his arms into the attitude
of flight, as he obeys the necessity and falls.
Four years after his latest inventions, and two years after his even
later inventory of them
[Selected Poems
1968], A. R. Ammons pub–
lished
Uplands,
three dozen lyrical pieces concerned with initiations,
submissions to motion, giving way, getting started. And now, hard upon
Uplands,
appears
Briefings: Poems Small
&
Easy.
Small and easy! Ever
since his deprecating "Foreword" to his first book
[Ommateum
1955],
and his embarrassed asides braided right into his adding-machine epyllion
[Tape for the Turn of the Year
1965], it has been evident that Ammons
is a great craftsman, a gorgeous artist in his poems, but an erratic stage
director or prompter from the wings. "'I'hat he calls "small and easy"
may not be anything of the kind, and need not be called anything
at
all. He is ever uneasy, this poet of what David Kalstone once identified
as subversive bravado, as he walks his way into "song's improvident /
center / lost in the green bush"; and like Ammons we shall be at a loss
to say much that is to the point about his genre, about his poetics, though
the affinities are there, the spectral precursors and the a posteriori
spooks - Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, then Pound, Williams, Stevens.
It
is not to the
point
that we are to speak, anyway, as Ammons keeps
telling us - rather it is out of muddle and even mud that we get what
matters; it is out of chaos that cosmos comes:
between life and me obtrude
no symbolic forms:
grant me no mission
. . .
leave me in this black rich country
uncertainty, labor, fear: do not
steal the rewards of my mortality.
We are, then, to be at a loss with Ammons, and happy to be there, for
it is only when losses are permitted, invited even, that there are possi–
bilities invoked. In the poem called, crucially, "Poetics," Ammons admits
how he goes about making, precisely, by leaving off as much as by
inventing, by finding:
