2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Beyond these two selections, Glare also includes in section fourteen a long tale about Sam Elliott and his family, “a destitute widower” who . . . lived in a shack on our farm for a time with his children . . . . . . we had nothing: they had less
In section 54, we hear the four stanzas of the song “my father used to sing” of “old molly hare / whacha doin there,” and in section 74 we catch more of his voice:
COURTESY OF THE AMMONS ESTATE AND THE OVERCASH-WRIGHT LITERARY COLLECTION, A.R. AMMONS PAPERS (COLLECTION #1096), ECU JOYNER LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
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. . . my father used to say
way in which The Complete Poems also facilitates the study of Ammons as a North Carolina writer through a very different lens, at the other end of the state: his connection to the “Black Mountain” school of poetry associated with the latter years of Black Mountain College, near Asheville. Much good criticism is currently mapping Ammons among the various postwar tribes of the New American Poetry (the title of a groundbreaking poetry anthology published in 1960), including the Beats, the New York School, and the poets associated with Black Mountain, such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan.5 Although Ammons’s declaration in Glare that “I identify with no sort or kind” is an important truth about his career and his very independent sense of vocation, another truth well-documented in The Complete Poems is that he kept close watch on his contemporaries and produced a body of work that offers complex filiations with many of these peers. In the long poem “Summer Place,” written in 1975 and published in The Hudson Review in 1977 (but not collected in book form until Brink Road in 1996), Ammons casts an eye on how he might travel “in the radiantly inaccessible regions with Ashbery” and another eye on “Adrienne,” who “is going to give me the sullen, if understanding and / patient, eye.” This section of the poem offers additional shout-outs to his contemporaries James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard, and John Hollander. But the contemporary both with and against whom
with a cunning air “if the dog hadn’t stopped to shit, he’d have cotched the rabbit” my father when he was being winky-wise liked to say cotched . . .
Section 63 provides a snapshot of how sixty years ago, I used to hear every Sunday that Jesus was coming: the preacher wasn’t specific but said it could be any hour or minute . . .
In Section 82, childhood religion is still institutional (“when I was ten about I was called up // to the altar of the Pentecostal Fire-Baptized / Holiness Church to be saved”), but in Section 88 Ammons stages his collision with doctrine domestically, in a marvelous tableau of himself and his two sisters in the kitchen “dancing and singing and speaking / in tongues like the big old women at Sunday // meeting.” His mother shuts down that hullaballoo with the warning that “mocking the Holy Ghost was an unpardonable // sin.” In Section 53, it is his grandmother (“this is my / grandmother poem”) who shuts down a private hullabaloo: “so here I am fist-diddling in the / poot-shanty when my grandmother // appears at the door – surprise!” But I leave these Columbus County matters to the biographers. I want to turn instead to an important ABOVE Untitled (watercolor on paper and foam core, 23.5x17.5)
by A.R. Ammons
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Donald Allen, ed. The New American Poetry (Grove, 1960).