612
my disturbing, skinny speech
declaring
the cosmos.
PAUL ZWEIG
Elsewhere the processes of thought and feeling themselves are made into cata–
racts of imagery. The inner world becomes not a space, as in much poetry of
the 1960s, but a sinuous energy, as in "Landscape With Figures":
When I
go
back of my head
down the cervical well, roots
branch
thinning, figuring
into flesh
and flesh
glimmers with man-old fires
and ghosts
hollowing up into mind
cry from ancient narrowing
needle-like caves:
A. R. Ammons is an excellent poet. His
Collected Poems
resembles a flood
of scrap and pieces mingled with finely wrought object. The power of the
flood is blurred but it is governed by a vision which imposes itself and, gradu–
ally convinces, not as an argument, which Ammonsmanages with only moder–
ate skill, but as a lived clarity; and that, finally, is much more rare and precious.
Clearly, a poet refuses the dominant language of his time at his peril.
Often those poets who succeed create a new language, as Allen Ginsberg did
when he wrote
Howl
amid the overpolished tones of the 1950s. At first glance
Ammons too seems to be a maverick, working vigorously against the limitations
of the plain style, making a case in his work for a new intricacy of conception.
Yet his best poems are closer to the plain style than one might think. It is when
one hears William Carlos Williams in the background of his voice that the
poems work clearly and solidly, not when one hears Hopkins or Stevens. Like
so many other poets of the 1960s, Ammons's strengths and limitations derive
from his flight into immediacy, his unwillingness
to
work with or against the
limiting framework of culture and tradition. In this sense, of course, Ammons
is extraordinarily American. But the impul e to reinvent all language, and all
thought, falls short in his work. What survives is Ammons's version of the
dream which is at the heart of so much recent poetry: the anticultural, Rous–
seauean dream of a purer, more articulate nature.
