~90
I look for the forms
things want to come as
RICHARD HOWARD
from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will unfold:
not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mme but ours.
The search is for a poetic incarnation, but it is also an abandonment
of the search, a hope of poetic disincarnation, a way of overcoming by
literally
undergoing
the separate self. In this, Ammons's energies are
dedicated concurrently with those of Adrienne Rich, of Galway Kinnell,
though Ammons has more affinities with the former's sense that what
we change
from
engrosses what we change
to;
and he has more affini–
ties with Kinnell's chthonic identifications, his trust that there will be
"no foothold higher than the ground." It is only in Ammons, though,
that I find all three moments - the changing from, the changing, and
the changing to - exalted equally. Only Ammons, I think, of all Amer–
ican poets today, has - when he is not diverted into his hip asides–
the capacity to endow the moment of loss, the moment of metamorpho–
sis and the moment of release with an equal light, "the blue oblitera–
tion of radiance."
Indeed the three moments are what Ammons calls, in his account–
ing for events, for outcomes, for irreversible exits and recurrences alike,
ambiance, salience, radiance. These are his three favorite words for the
phenomenon signified (there is a place ), then for the phenomenon
abandoned (the place can be left ), then for the phenomenon sanctified
(only loss reveals what the reward was to be). It is no accident, except
insofar as everything in Ammons is literally an accident, a falling-to,
a befalling, it is no accident that the greatest poem in this latest book
is the last, and neither small nor easy, the cross-titled poem "The City
Limits," which begins its 18-line single sentence "When you consider
the radiance" and ends with the acknowledgment that each thing is
merely what it is, and all that can be transcended is our desire for
each thing to be more than what it is, so that for such a consideration
of the losses of being, the very being of loss, "fear lit by the breadth of
such calmly turns to praise." It is all there in Ammons - the fear and
the light, the calm and the breadth, the turning and the praise, and
that is why he is a great poet.
Richard Howard
