Kevin McGuirk

Department of English
University of Waterloo
kmcguirk@watarts.uwatxerloo.ca

 

             I'm glad the emphasis these days
is off dying beautifully and more on light-minded 
  living with 
the real things--soap, spray-ons, soda, paper 
  towels, etc.
            (Ammons, Sphere 55)

It was when my little brother, who was two and 
a half years younger than I, died at eighteen 
months.  My mother some days later found his 
footprint in the yard and tried to build 
something over it to keep the wind from 
blowing it away.  That's the most powerful 
image I've ever known.
            (Ammons, in interview, Walsh 117)

 
This essay is about a problem in the work of A.R. Ammons, a problem worth study because it also concerns the reading of the postmodern in poetry. The problem is this: what are we to make of the contemporary lyric’s continuing advertisement of presence when postmodernism elsewhere celebrates surface, difference, and alterity? In Ammons’s writings, these conflicting and incommensurable epistemologies and ontologies engage one another, creating a space for thinking about this problem even if, or rather because, Ammons himself leaves the issue undecided. From the mid-60s to the early ’70s, after Ammons published a number of mid-length poems outlining a poetics of process–“Corsons Inlet” is the best-known–the body of his poetry divides between what John Ashbery called in his review of the Collected Poems (1972) a “swarming profusion” (59) of lyrics and a half dozen long poems culminating in Sphere: the Form of a Motion (1974). Ammons is an obsessively dialectical thinker, so the handiest way to account for this divide is to say that the two modes are complementary, much as high/low, center/periphery, one/many are complementary figures of thought throughout his work. But interesting continuities and discontinuities are revealed when we line up these modes, which I’ll call post-romantic lyric and postmodern long poem, not against Ammons’s own thematics but against various discourses of postwar culture, including the poetic. To begin with, while discussions of postmodernism in poetry have typically exercised an opposition between the lyric and varieties of “anti-absorptive” modes (life/long poem, “poet’s prose,” collage, etc.), Ammons has been working both sides of the opposition without any apparent sense of inappropriateness or debility.¹ His critics, however, (led by Bloom and Vendler) have busied themselves almost entirely with the lyrics and a set of traditional questions associated with poetry (crisis of the self, mind-nature relations, poetic language), while a few isolatos (Wolfe, Jarraway) have belatedly addressed the different operational procedures of the longer poems. Though he won the National Book Award for Garbage in 1993, Ammons criticism hasn’t been conspicuous lately because, I suspect, his celebrity of the ’70s identified him with an early postmodernism that seems safely humanistic compared to subsequent developments in both the theory and practice of the postmodern.² As I read it, literary critics of the ’70s could find in the lyrics a reflection of their own ambivalence between a will to idealization, precariously articulated in lyric epiphanies, and an emerging imperative to politicize, deconstruct, or otherwise materialize privilege of all kinds. His lyrics embodied a growing tension within criticism between “experience” and “discourse.³

 

I begin by looking at the lyrics in relation to a persistent bias in American poetics against formal and epistemological closure in favour of open-ended longer poems, proposing that Ammons’s proliferating lyrics ultimately constitute a kind of ongoing environment, a long poem rather than a collection of “works.” The lyrics typically entertain then deny the lure of epiphanic closure that defines post-romantic lyric, promoting a repeated unmaking rather than the development of a body of work. I go on to consider affinities between the long poems and popular modes examined not in literary criticism but in some recent work in cultural studies. I refer to what Margaret Morse calls an “ontology of everyday distraction” (193) epitomized by television, and banality, a term whose deployment in cultural studies has been examined by Meaghan Morris. Whether the contemporary long poem feeds off or into the mainstream of postwar popular culture, the literally ambi-valent term banality speaks to much postmodern poetic practice in its various transactions with the newly interesting phenomenon of noise.⁴ Cybernetics, the science of information as a signal-to-noise ratio, speaks to postmodern epistemologies, Ammons’s own thinking, and the growth of media environments in the postwar U.S., and I draw on it to address the problem of presence. The interest of Ammons’s writing of this period, then, is not just literary, or even literary-theoretical, but broadly cultural. I conclude by setting these terms against those of a later elegy, with its centering and re-membering procedures.

 

The difference I’m concerned with might be further defined on one side by an aesthetic practice of the self based on privileged, inward experience, and on the other by a more discursive and exteriorizing mode. It’s the difference between classical values like contemplation, subjective depth or verticality (metaphor), transcendental knowing–with poetry serving as a defense of subjectivity against objective circumstance (Koethe 72, 75)–and postmodern “values” like distraction, horizontality (metonymy), and materialist understanding.⁵ This suggests that something more than generic difference defines the terrain of Ammons’s work. If the “manyness” of his lyrics produces a long poem manqué, then the divide lies not between the long poems and lyrics but between those together on the one hand and the autotelic “works”–the anthology pieces, the major poems that have won Ammons’s place in what Jed Rasula calls “the poetry wax museum”–on the other.⁶ But maybe Rasula’s phrase is too reductive applied here. In thinking about the noise of the long poems, and of the postmodern long poem generally, their rejection of gestures towards depth and containment of meaning, I’m brought up short by the gesture of the poet’s mother on the death of his younger brother, and by his own delayed poem of grief, “Easter Morning” (1981). The problem, again, is this: to preserve or restore the imprint of lost others (including the natural world) we have built lyric poems;⁷ but the lyric poem, which is by definition anti-banal since it is structured by privileged moments, appears to have been disqualified as a vehicle of the postmodern. So what do we do that is both poetic and postmodern with grief like the poet’s mother’s or the poet’s own?⁸

 

Substance and motion

 

We might advance the task of articulating the difference in Ammons’s work, this generic divide–comparing, say, “Dark Song” (“Sorrow how… deep / it is”),⁹ a lyric singled out by Denis Donoghue for approval, and certain blandly speculative passages of the very lengthy “Hibernaculum”–by suggesting that it is like the difference “between regret and assay” (Lyotard 80). If Ammons’s poetry manifests a traditionally lyric self regardless of whether one views him as a postmodern and American epistemologist–centrifugal rather then centripetal in his discursive movements, decentered and relational in his forms (“riding horseback between / the obscure beginning and the unformulated conclusion” [“Essay” 35]), a poet pursuing logics shared with television–“Easter Morning” (SP 106-08). The poet returns to his homeplace to “stand on the stump / of a child…. whether myself or my brother,” a deep subjectivity constituted through the work of elegy. This return finds some resonance in the popcult-romanticism of the recovery movement, with its portrait of the “inner child” and its project to recover wholeness for the self cut off from itself in childhood.¹⁰ In this context, regret is clearly the term of retrospection and centering (lyric), assay the term of onwardness and expansion (long poem). Regret demands psychologistic understanding; it proposes metaphorical relations with otherness, a selfhood structured by a correspondence between the living, in-process social self and an authentic deep self. Assay is the mode of a fluid, unmoored subject, constructed from the multiple and shifting discourses accumulated through its life “experience.” Its self-structuring relations are metonymic, proposing contiguities rather than identities. The subject has access to no correspondent, transcendently present other, within or without.

 

Ammons has made motion his master trope, a concept linked neatly with assay, with ’60s “open” form and quasi-organic notions of process, epistemologies of relational knowledge like cybernetics, as well as the ontology of distraction Morse identifies with TV. Kenneth Burke’s observation that “a key strategy in Western materialism has been the reduction of consciousness to ‘motion'” (506) is suggestive here. He links motion with science (correlations and processes) and substance with human relations (“the ‘is’ of being” [505]). For any discourse observing the implications of such a strategy, depth–the dimension of subjectivity addressed both in the recovery movement and in the elegy–is a certain casualty. Yet the condition of postmodernity includes both a defining gesture and its retraction: both the travels of the virtual subject in the information age (the latest phase of Western materialism) and the drama of the inner child that reconstitutes romantic pathos.¹¹

 

Ammons’s brother’s death at eighteen months, when Ammons was four years old, is the signal biographical event in his work, though it appears only twice in the whole ouevre: first in the later pages of Sphere when he compares “the long, empty, freezing gulfs of / darkness” with the gulf that opened “when / the younger brother sickened and then moved no more” (72-73), and finally in “Easter Morning.” I would claim that this event organizes the swarming profusion of his work around something like a repressed content, so that a negative psychodrama can be read throughout.¹² While Ammons’s materialist strategies (“what is saving” [Sphere 34, 41] is transposed to “can we make a home of motion” [76]) are productive of many, as Ammons himself would say, “interesting” configurings of the relations of mind and nature, they do not account for the deep subjectivity produced by the special form of regret called grief. It is as if neither the force of motion, nor the imperatives of a postmodern epistemology, can de-realize the stubborn substance of self, the “child” arrested in unresolved grief.

 

Lyric?

 

At one point in “Hibernaculum,” Ammons itemizes the cost of a recent repair job on his car, noting that “one thing interesting / is that Ned’s Corners Station is at 909 Hanshaw Road / and I’m at 606 Hanshaw Road: that’s configuration” (75). Helen Vendler complains of this passage: “Only if you think it is, is it configuration, and for all Ammons’s jauntiness, he carries this Wordsworthian notion of everything adding up to an extreme” (Vendler 75). As her further remarks on the exemplary sanity of Wordsworth indicate,¹³ configuration for her is unreflexively psychologistic and conventionally romantic: the subject is the deep centre to which all experience is referred. Hence, her privileging of Ammons’s lyrics.

 

Cary Wolfe offers a brilliant counter-reading of Ammons’s long poems in relation to information theory, but he relies on a simplistic representation of Ammons as an anti-lyric writer who has moved beyond the “talking wind and mountains” of the “early” poems, a glancing allusion that seems a willful distortion. When Ammons makes mountains talk he’s obviously playing an ironic game, not naively committing a pathetic fallacy:

 

I was going along a dusty highroad
when the mountain
across the way
turned me to its silence:
oh I said how come
I don't know your
massive symmetry and rest:
nevertheless, said the mountain,
would you want
to be
lodged here with
a changeless prospect, risen
to an unalterable view:
so I went on
counting my numberless fingers. (SP 55)

 

This lyric is practically an allegory of Wolfe’s own argument that Ammons works with a new organic which “opens outward, is centrifugal rather than the centripetal ‘innate’ form of Coleridge” (80). The lyrics, then, do not propose to “add up,” to use Vendler’s phrase (that is metaphor’s job). Indeed, when the poet begins to count, he discovers that his fingers are “numberless”: numberless are the indices, or counters, for a world the configurations of which are numberless.

 

Any (lyric) investment in singular meaning, then, is quickly withdrawn to keep poetic discourse truly current. As a gesture in language, each lyric is a kind of violation that threatens both reality, language, and performer with stasis by proposing a literal carrying-over (meta-phor) from one to the other. Thus not recovery, but “abandonment,” Ammons declares,

 

is the only terrible health and a return to 
   bits, re-trials 
of lofty configurations ("Essay" 32-33)

 

What is salient about Ammons’s lyrics is not the climb to unitary perspective, but the act of withdrawal and unmaking: he posits only a center where “nothing at all gets, / nothing gets / caught at all” (“Center” SP 52). Lyric, then, may be conceptualized as a trial: an assay compatible with the longer “assayistic” poems.

 

Motion?

 

I want to complicate this claim by considering a few notions from Stephen Fredman’s books on “poet’s prose” and the “grounding” of American poetry. Lyric has never been well-theorized in American poetics, and Fredman’s brief for poetries evolving on the margins of verse culture, and indeed of verse itself, does not take up genre as a category of reading. Fredman elaborates the ways in which American poets, lacking the cultural grounding European writing took for granted, have been compelled to write into the open, on the one hand, and to practice various provisional, idiosyncratic, and paradoxical authorizing activities in the place of that grounding, on the other. These remain, however, compensations for the defining act of American poetry, which is abandonment.¹⁴ Not to abandon, it is implied, produces a groundedness something like “false consciousness,” or something like mere regret: the refusal both of abandonment and of the peculiar grounding activities described by Fredman.

 

Lyric makes a strange object for these tendencies. With modernity, lyric lost its rhetorical ground in occasion (see Bender and Wellberry), establishing a primary deixis in the empty “I” of the poet, a “shifter,” which is void of specific referential content. And it is perhaps because of this groundlessness and the pathos of that defining but empty “I” that post-romantic lyric has actively and anxiously presumed and affirmed “presence” as normative, repressing its rhetorical character and severing its connection to positive cultural work in favour of retrospective, “regretful” inward vision.

 

This begins to explain why writing like Ammons’s, which would seem to be in a line with the poets read in Fredman’s books in its ambivalent, nervous committment to abandonment, is absent from such studies. The difference from those poets springs in part from the choice of a master concept, motion, that is, on the one hand, radically physical, and on the other, entirely abstract and metaphorical. In other words, oscillating between the concrete and the abstract, Ammons eschews easy affirmations of presence but also the more difficult, mediate, rhetorical activity of culture. In deploying a concept like motion, which comes from the vocabulary of physics, Ammons cannot produce complex, rhetorical frameworks for cultural practice. The problem is displayed most clearly in “Cascadilla Falls.” “Thinking” the motions of the universe (“800 mph earth spin, the 190-million-mile yearly / displacement around the sun, / the overriding / grand / haul / of the galaxy”) “into” the merest “handsized stone” which he picks up by the creek, the poet experiences by proxy the vertiginous effects of a universe in motion, effects which leave him “shelterless.” So, he concludes,

 

I turned
to the sky and stood still:
oh 
I do 
not know where I am going
that I can live my life 
by this single creek.  (SP 62)

 

In the dedication to the long poem Sphere, Ammons suggests that nature offers correspondences to the words “tree” and “rock” but not to the human word “longing” (5): the world is not present to desire. The dialectic represented in “Cascadilla Falls is between absolute motion that destabilizes the psyche, and the stabilizing, self-constructing gesture of apostrophe, a rhetorical move typical of post-romantic lyric that grounds the empty “I” by setting it in relationship with some naturalized concrete externality (the sky).¹⁵

 

Given such poles as the only possible “grounds,” the lyric can be nothing more than a trial, turning and turning from a ground rejected as false to a vertiginous groundlessness and back to a momentary ground; from violation to abandonment to “re-trials of lofty configuration.” Without a ground, unable to posit the last word of a metaphor that breaks across linguistic barriers, the poet writes assay after assay, each a gesture of assertion and abandonment at once. The problem is that such a pattern may amount to mere turning and turning–lyric as tropism. In the long poem “Essay on Poetics,” Ammons calls the procedure that makes “whole” lyrics repeatable a “mechanism,” since “wholeness… is a condition of existence” (30-31), not essence (Wolfe 81). Does such a procedure simply produce, in Meaghan Morris’s paraphrase of Baudrillard, a “vast banality machine” (21)? Here we come to a crux in Ammons’s practice: once you reject essence, and you accept mechanism, you court the banality of the mass producing machine. Turning and turning may simply massage and exacerbate the essential pathos and alienation of the lyric poem’s “I.”

 

Romantic lyric is a naive or even paranoid investment strategy based on a theory of scarcity, not plenitude, of meaning. With his long poems–pure expenditure–Ammons appears to reject that model; when capital’s kept out of circulation, there’s no cash flow. Yet he keeps going back to the bank, only to withdraw with his left hand every investment in lyric meaning made with his right–to keep meaning current. What’s the point of that currency? Motion? The lyric “work” is a sound investment, bound to increase the capital of a poetic career (as the anthologies suggest). But “Easter Morning” shouldn’t be accounted for as simply capital (psychic or poetic), ballast against a wave of paranoia. It appears in the economy of Ammons’s poetry as a singular confrontation with the existential scarcity proposed by death. One might speculate that this return of depth, like the return of the repressed, is inevitable in such an insistently dispersed and impersonal poetics as Ammons has pursued. But how can grief, with its powerful subjectivizing force, be articulated within Ammons’s hyper-dynamic of grounding and abandonment?

 

Banality

 

I want to start to answer this question with another question. Does Ammons qualify as what Morris calls “a distracted media baby” of the postliterate world? More questions follow. Can a media baby be a lyric poet? Can banality be “poetic”? “I’m glad,” Ammons confides in Sphere,

 

             the emphasis these days 
is off dying beautifully and more on 
   light-minded living with 
the real things--soap, spray-ons, soda, paper 
   towels, etc.

 

–though, he adds, “I expect to die in terror” (55). In “Hibernaculum” he discovers an exemplum in what “somebody said” “the other night on Hee-Haw” (101). Ammons exploits postmodern vernaculars not for images for poetry, in Yeats’s phrase, but demonstrations of knowledge and value. More to my point, though, is the ontology of the form of television–the epitome, for Morse, of a new “ontology of distraction.” TV presentation is segmented, but moves so rapidly that it leaves the impression of flow rather than step by step movement. In motion, the distracted subject, surfing channels, or simply following shifts between program and commercial, takes in data from various planes of representation as his horizon of sensory comprehension expands, contracts, leaps, dawdles, etc. The colon is the dominant form of punctuation in all Ammons’s poetry, but in the longer poems the absence of marked points of rest enacts and typifies the ontology of the work.¹⁶ The poems shift rapidly in their attentions, breaking at any colon without the kinds of formal signaling (stanza break) normative in post-romantic texts. The horizon of attention expands and contracts at the poet’s whim, or at points of distraction, his attention caught by something else. It’s clear that Ammons’s longer poems elaborate an ontology of everyday distraction, rather than, say, classic and humanistic value like contemplation. Ammons might well be aiming to refit poetry for the list that forms Morse’s subtitle: “The Freeway, the Mall, [Poetry], and Television.” For TV as for poetry, “the problem is,” in Ammons’s words, “how / to keep shape and flow” (“Summer Session” 17).

 

Speaking more generally, the long poem aspires to exist in a manner much like that of what we call the media, changing all its absorbed contents into second-order phenomena. Wolfe’s essay on Ammons is important in its elaboration of Ammons’s use of cybernetics, particularly in his poems’ treatment of nature not as primary otherness but as information. Cybernetics describes a relational and formal universe; meaning is differential, existing in the spaces between objects, or between words and words, or words and referents. Such a relation constitutes a redundancy. Information then is not substantial. “All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints–is noise, the only possible source of new patterns” (Bateson 410). If, according to a cybernetic model, meaning depends on a signal-to-noise ratio, in the modern context what becomes important in art is not the elimination of stray material (noise) in the process of shaping the art-object; instead, it is art’s repeated transactions with noise, the only source of the new. In these terms, the contrasting assumption of romantic lyric poetic is that meaning is immanent within an arrangement of signals. When Vendler, a lyric critic, suggests in reference to Ammons’s long poems that “Never has there been a poetry so sublimely above the possible appetite of its potential readers” (76), this is to say, there’s too much noise. In Poe’s romantic view, the long makes no sense because it’s mostly noise; only its lyrical moments–moments with very high signal-to-noise ratio–can properly be called poetry. Letting in low-level material, the accidental, the misfits, and moving without apparent narrative intention breaks the repetitive signal of the anti-banal lyric, and poetry cedes itself to the entropic tendency in discourse towards banality.¹⁷

 

As Meaghan Morris notes, “banality” is a classic term of dismissal for popular forms, which has recently has taken on an odd double valence or literal ambivalence in some recent writing in cultural studies. Such ambivalence is crucial to the experience of reading postmodern long poems generally, and particulary a striking feature of Ammons’s work. Its anti-absorptive qualities, interestingly, come not from radical formal strategies employed, for example, by Language writers, but from the banality and seeming disorder or noisiness of its progress. The poems seem merely to accumulate. The banal is the common, the everyday: on the one hand, the wellspring both of post-romantic poetic value and of political value for cultural studies; on the other, merely the dull and ubiquitous, the disorganized–noise. In Ammons I think it’s important to understand banality as a kind of stylistic limit-point, much like periphery stands metonymically for the limit-point of thought. Both are played dialectically off centres. Both contribute to an environment of surfeit, of an excess of bytes of information. The poem, then, is a media rather than a linear progression, a totality or sphere lying alongside the other totality called the world. Given that the world is, for Ammons, a kind of popular (banal, common) culture, we read the poem, like the world, like TV, not from start to conclusion, but cut in and out at various indeterminate places, distractedly or purposefully.

 

Such dispersed, formal, and uninsistent epistemologies offer advantages over humanist ones–most obviously their mimesis of contemporary forms of noise and banality–but they beg the question of how to comprehend the insistent, focused experience of a beloved other’s death. In a recent issue of Cultural Critique on “The Politics of Systems,” Wolfe argues for the adequacy of cybernetics as a posthumanist epistemology, basing his position mainly on the second-order cybernetics of Varela and Maturana. But the final emphasis of his discussion is a trenchant critique of those writers’ humanistic plea for an ethic of love. Wolfe reads this plea as a call for ethics to do the work of politics and a disavowal of the “internal limit” of the subject psychoanalytically conceived, a disavowal born of “the need to repress the Thing at the heart of the subject” (65). The Thing in the modern west, Wolfe notes, is the animal. Death, our limit, I would add, is the sign of our animal nature. This argument, I think, has some bearing on the practice of elegy.

 

Elegy

 

Wolfe quotes Zizek on “this internal impossibility of the Other, of the ‘substance.’ The subject,” Zizek writes,

 

is a paradoxical entity which is so to speak its own negative, i.e. which persists only insofar as its full realization is blocked--the fully realized subject would be no longer subject but substance." (qtd. in Wolfe 64-65)

 

What drives post-romantic elegy, if not most post-romantic culture, is the desire for substance, for substantial union with nature, self, other–a crossing over, achieved symbolically through metaphor. But the elegiac subject is contradictory: it’s the poignancy of encountering the blockage and longing to overcome it that produces its peculiar character. Varela’s invocation of Buddhist compassion, situated beyond desire, is, for one thing, a gesture against the continuing waste of romantic selfhood trapped in that stasis. (If this is transcendence, it’s a paradoxical one since its goal, having nothing to do with a romantic crisis of the self but with continuing biological co-existence, is entirely pragmatic.)

 

In Zizek’s terms, what cybernetics proposes is difference at every level as a proliferated form of blockage. There is no place of oneness to get to; indeed, there is no “inside” and “outside,” self and other, only differentiation. This seems, however, inadequate to address the grief arising from the death of an other since it brackets not only what is experienced as singular and focused, but also the centering and holding force of romantic subjectivity more generally. Varela’s gesture, like Ammons’s elegy, might in fact be an inevitable eruption of the informal in cybernetics’ formalized universe, a gesture determined not by theorized intellection but by the notion of subjectivity most readily available to its maker. Indeed, in Ammons’s case, romantic subjectivity kicks in as the poetic default mode in the face of a crisis his poetics cannot account for.¹⁸

 

Elegy, unlike merely elegiac lyric, of which “Dark Song” is an example, responds to an occasion. (Generically, the elegist confronts the limit of the occasion, and produces a subjectivity in relation to it). Death, then, offers a paradoxical occasion to modern poets, the one event that cannot be gainsaid by western technology, epistemology, or aesthetics. “Easter Morning” is not just an elegy, however, but a poem of the “adult child.” Ammons returns to the spot where his brother died and where, he suggests, some aspect of his own emotional development was arrested. It is a return above all to his childhood place and a return to a life enmeshed in familial and communal rites and relations, material that’s absent from his typical work.¹⁹ “I have a life,” he begins, “that did not become,”

 

that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow or grow old but dwell on

 

As we discover, if Ammons returns to an actual ground, the family culture there is literally dead since they are “all in the graveyard, / assembled, done for, the world they / used to wield, have trouble and joy / in, gone.” And in the absence of human collectivity, of a “world,” he is compelled to enact a different, lyric form of mourning. Here the formal play of the long poems and proliferating lyrics gives way to a conventional lyric discourse of re-membering:

 

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
..................................
the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred

 

The stalled deep self so remote from most of Ammons’s work is precisely what he has been unable to abandon and what he regrets. If Ammons comes home to address this resistance of the re-membering subject, is it then the case that “abandonment” is not, after all, the “only terrible health”? If the poetry is a displaced form of subjectivation, a means to integrate all that’s given into a world of meaning, his brother’s death and his own arrested self are hidden correlates of his own subjectivity because they cannot fit into the “objective” world he has discursively created. The arrested inner child is projected as the stubborn substance of self, the positive to which the adult subject is Zizek’s paradoxical negative.

 

“Easter Morning” is striking, singular–and it is poetically terminal because the re-membered world serves Ammons as a metaphorical passage back out to the parallel world of objective natural forms, not a cultural or familial enstructuring he has to negotiate. Curiously, it’s also more psychologistic: catharsis is transposed by an aesthetic practice of the self using nature as a transcendent, metaphorical double of that self. The poem clarifies the relations of the dual inner child, “myself or my brother,” leaving the home space for inhabitation by the dead. But it “abandons” only by investing the self metaphorically in enduring natural (permanent not provisional) forms like the flight paths of birds the poet observes this Easter morning: the birds move apart, then together, promising reconciliation for himself and his brother:

 

      it was a sight of bountiful
majesty and integrity: the having
patterns and routes, breaking
from them to explore other patterns or
better ways to routes, and then the
return

 

The elegy defends the subject against objective circumstances (Koethe) by positing something greater (more bountiful, majestic, and integrated) than those circumstances with which the self is then identified–by revealing, in other words, a correspondence, a substance for the human word, “longing.” understanding rather than a means to cultural engagement. In poetry, the right metaphor makes it all “add up.”

 

Ammons’s poetry proposes two healths, two fatalities: the fatality of death (and the solace of the elegiac “work”); and “the only terrible health” of banality, which is, in Baudrillard’s sense, a continuing fatality. In the first, the object is the subject’s mirror; it has a certain fatefulness about it, the “inevitability” of the art work: it’s an end, even when, like “Corsons Inlet,” like “Easter Morning,” it declares continuance. In the second, the object is not the subject’s mirror and so the poet must abandon both the object and the poem of the object. The long poem cuts and extends. The lyric as repeatable trial, unlike the lyric as “work,” evades lyric fatality; it’s not a stay against confusion but a moving target, a subject conducting evasive maneuvers. “Easter Morning” promises to resolve the problem of the whole work, but it does so only by being incommensurable with it.

 

Notes

 

I would like to acknowledge the support of a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which helped me get this essay in motion several years ago.

 

1. A signal instance of such discussion is Marjorie Perloff’s essay, “Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric,” which endorses postmodernism in poetry in explictly anti-lyric terms. “Postmodernism in poetry,” she writes,

 

begins in the urge to return those materials so rigidly excluded--political, ethical, historical, philosophical--to the domain of poetry, which is to say that the Romantic lyric, the poem as expression of a moment of absolute insight, of emotion crystallized into timeless patterns, gives way to a poetry that can, once again, accommodate narrative and didacticism, the serious and the comic, verse and prose. (180-81)

 

More recently, Hank Lazer noted in a review-essay on a clutch of critical books (1990) that the thrust of postmodern criticism would appear to demand the elimination or the radical refiguring of the lyric.

 

The issue of what postmodernism in poetry is remains, of course, a complex one. I should make clear from the outset that I do not address the apparent gulf between postmodernism as it’s discussed in academic circles and postmodernism as it’s discussed in “the writing community”–meaning a group of writers, usually identified as poets, from Jackson Mac Low to Ron Silliman. In this essay, I’m interested neither in a postmodernist program, nor in the ways in which a poet’s articulated postmodernism (such as Silliman’s) relates to that poet’s work. Rather, I’m interested in the ways in which Ammons work registers or exemplifies features of a more general discursive field that includes popular culture, cultural studies, (now) mainstream theories of the postmodern, post-romantic lyric poetry, and academic literary criticism, as well as poetic departures from humanistic representationalism–especially of the self in lyric. Unlike many postmodern writers, Ammons remains a lyric poet; his commitment to a materialist poetics is not radical. See for example, Patrick Deane on Ammons’s early long poem “Tape for the Turn of the Year” (1965), which starts as a materialist exercise (writing a poem on a roll of adding machine tape) and ends by making of the material a figure for a transcendent condition. What I set out here, then, is Ammons’s undecideable relation to two orientations, an undecideability often present in mainstream discussions of the postmodern, and absent from discussions by avant-garde writers committed to materialist, anti-humanist procedures. (This difference may explain in part why there’s almost no dialogue across the gulf and indeed why only writers and critics conversant with the work of Mac Low et al. appear to be aware of the gulf–though the increasing visibility of Language writing will increase awareness on the side of the mainstream).

 

2. See, for example, Charles Altieri’s early essay on “immanentist” poetics in Boundary 2, later revised as the introduction to Enlarging the Temple (1978).

 

3. I’m invoking Altieri’s formulation in his 1980 essay on poetry and poetics of the ’70s, “From Experience to Discourse.”

 

4. Since the ’60s noise has been theorized in discourses drawing on cybernetics, but also in works as various as Jacques Attali’s Noise: the Political Economy of Music and Public Enemy’s rap “Bring the Noise.”

 

5. Iain Chambers describes the difference helpfully in slightly different terms:

 

Official culture, preserved in art galleries, museums, and university courses, demands cultivated tastes and a formally imparted knowledge. It demands moments of attention that are separated from the run of daily life. Popular culture, meanwhile, mobilizes the tactile, the incidental, the transitory, the expendable; the visceral. It does not involve an abstract aesthetic research amongst privileged objects of attention, but invokes mobile orders or sense, taste and desire. Popular culture is not appreciated through the apparatus of contemplation; but as Walter Benjamin once put it, through 'distracted reception.' The 'public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.' (12)

 

See Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

 

6. I would include here “Corsons Inlet,” “The City Limits,” “The Arc Inside and Out,” “For Harold Bloom,” and “Easter Morning.”

 

7. As Jan Zwicky puts it, “Lyric springs from the desire to recapture the intuited wholeness of the non-linguistic world, to heal the slash in the mind that is the capacity for language.” The recognition of the impossibility of that fulfillment “is the source of lyric’s poignancy” (230).

 

8. In 1985 Peter Sacks summarized the obstacles placed before elegy in the postmodern context:

 

Although the paradoxical "presence" in language of absent things has been renewed with unprecedented force in recent years, this renewal has been marked by a disconcerting tendency to deprive literature of much of that combination of strength and pathos so characteristically stressed by Wordsworth. For recent critics have not only undermined assumptions about the presentational powers of language, they have diminished the subjective pathos that attends those absences which the use of language may seek to redress or appease. (xi)

 

9.

Sorrow how high it is
that no wall holds it
back: deep

it is that no dam undermines
it: wide that it
comes on as up a strand

multiple and relentless:
the young that are
beautiful must die: the

old, departing,
can confer
nothing.  (Corsons Inlet 9)

 

10. See Jed Rasula’s interesting discussion of the coincident dominance of the workshop lyric and emergence in the late 1970s of various self-help theories and associations, including the notion of the “inner child” (421-25).

 

11. On this contradiction see Andrew Ross’s related discussion, “New Age Technoculture”:

 

There is a world of difference between the sort of holistic, or completist sense of identity espoused in New Age, and the sort of fragmentary identity that intellectual fractions in this society have become accustomed to talking about.... And I agree that the liberatory fantasies of many postmodern theorists... have little in common with the utopian fantasies of groups with less cultural capital--fantasies that are solidly tied to the hunger for completion, or self-transcendence. (554)

 

There’s little in common between Ammons’s positions as well. His work should be generally characterized as postmodern: it rejects the romantic project to “save the phenomenon” called the self. If it is to sustain a human subject this must be done according to materialist (or “scientific”) criteria rather than humanist accounts of experience. “What is saving,” he asks in Sphere (34, 41), then transposes the question to a materialist register: “can we make a home of motion” (76). But he oscillates between the two formulations; questions of motion frequently get transposed back into the “saving” mode which is, I think, the default mode for post-romantic poetry.

 

12. Ammons alludes to his brother’s death in various interviews, but see especially the statement, “`I Couldn’t Wait to Say the Word'” (1982), collected in Set in Motion. He notes that after his brother’s death,

 

I must have felt guilty for living and also endangered, as the only one left to be next. Mourning the loss of life, in life and in death, has been the undercurrent of much of my verse and accounts for tone of constraint that my attempts at wit, prolixity, and transcendence merely underscore. (35)

 

13. “In Wordsworth,” Vendler writes, “it sounds rather saner”:

 

                        How strange, that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e'er have born a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself?  (Vendler 75)

 

14. Fredman takes this term from an essay by Stanley Cavell on Emerson and Thoreau though he doesn’t cite the resonant concluding passage in which Cavell contrasts Heidegger’s notion of poetic “dwelling” with the ideology implicit in the work of the Americans:

 

The substantive disagreement with Heidegger, shared by Emerson and Thoreau, is that the achievement of the human requires not inhabitation and settlement but abandonment, leaving. Then everything depends upon your realization of abandonment. For the significance of leaving lies in its discovery that you have settled something, that you have felt enthusiastically what there is to abandon yourself to, that you can treat the others there are as those to whom the inhabitation of the world can now be left. (138)

 

The enthusiasm of abandonment is the antidote to the despair of groundlessness. It ensures the work of assay.

 

15. In poetry, the crisis of subjectivity appears in the ungrounded poet’s attempts to constitute himself according to his own lights resulting in a neurotic oscillation between power and pathos. Positing tradition is a complex form of resistance to the vertigo realized by romanticism and conventionally resisted by apostrophe. Eliot’s famous insistence on impersonality is a polemical refusal of this dialectic (a dialectic which later became characteristically American), a refusal supported by the (European) tradition he projected through his career. Tradition functions like a scientific paradigm that allows “normal science” to be carried on; it “saves the phenomena”–poetry–and allows normal poetry (and criticism) to be carried on.

 

16. Wolfe explains this difference usefully in terms of the difference between analogue and digital representation.

 

17. Nature in this scheme suffers a kind of de-realization–no longer the transcendent medium for romantic disourse, not a metaphorical site whose remove from language enables poetic metaphor-making–becoming a series or web of changing relations which we know only as information. It, too, depending on our own knowledge and interpetive abilities, maintains a signal-to-noise ratio; but all encounters are contextualized by noise. Knowledge is not a matter of making other same, but a temporalized process or exchange taking place in a context that is partially known (signal) and partially not-known (noise). The long poem, ongoing, seems the only mode adequate to representing or participating in a cybernetic universe.

 

It is essential to note that a full account of cybernetics would demonstrate its links with practical strategies of government and industry. As its etymology indicates, cybernetics is about steering, about control. Specifically, it proposes strategies for maintaining control in open environments. I don’t have scope to show how a poem like Sphere diverges from “Essay on Poetics” as a cybernetic poem/system. Enough to say here that it finally emphasizes steering as it proceeds from the “sexual basis of all things” (first line of the poem) and local and mortal contexts to the motion of planet earth through the universe, ending with a rather totalizing anti-banal epiphany: “we’re ourselves: we’re sailing.” In its deliberate attempt to “be” a sphere the poem confuses being and representing, thus it ends on a point above rather than in the world, imagining a totality rather than ceaselessly producing one. Problems arise in Sphere for two reasons. First, cybernetic steering reaches a kind of outer limit of systems, and looks back at totality: the earth viewed as a metaphor for “human life,” a figure of extreme pathos: the earth as the inner child of humanity. Second, the void encountered beyond the earth-system recalls for Ammons the more personal void created by his brother’s death, an absolute event that refuses to “turn” along with the troping/turning of Motion. See McGuirk, “A.R. Ammons and the Whole Earth” for a more complete discussion of these questions. Cultural Critique 37 (Fall 1997): 131-58.

 

18. It might be said simply, that grief produces depth. A locus for this is Joyce’s “The Dead,” in which Gretta’s greater depth and superiority of character are significantly linked to her grief for Michael Furey. Her grief is the correlate of her deep self, hidden from Gabriel till the final scene of the story because it has not been assimilated into the world of meaning in which she lives. Its effect is to produce this subterranean world.

 

19. John Bradshaw, one of the best-know recovery theorists, writes in Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (1990) that mourning

 

is the only way to heal the hole in the cup of your soul. Since we cannot go back in time and be children and get our needs met from our very own parents, we must grieve the loss of our childhood self and our childhood dependency needs. (211-12)

Works Cited

 

• Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960’s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell UP, 1979.
• —. “From Experience to Discourse: American Poetry and Poetics in the Seventies.” Contemporary Literature 21.2 (Spring 1980): 191-224.
• —. “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern Poetics.” boundary 21.3 (Spring 1973): 605-42.
• Ammons, A.R. Corson’s Inlet. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1965.
• —. “Essay on Poetics.” Selected Longer Poems. New York: Norton, 1980. 30-54.
• —. “Extremes and Moderations.” Selected Longer Poems 55-66.
• —. “Hibernaculum.” Selected Longer Poems 67-104.
• —. Selected Poems: Expanded Edition. New York: Norton, 1986.
• —. Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, & Dialogues. Ed. Zofia Burr. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.
• —. Sphere: the Form of a Motion. New York: Norton, 1974.
• —. “Summer Session.” Selected Longer Poems 16-29.
• Ashbery, John. “In the American Grain.” Bloom 57-62.
• Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. 1977. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
• Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972.
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• Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-51.
• Bernstein, Charles. “Artifice of Absorption.” A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 9-89.
• Bloom, Harold, ed. A.R. Ammons. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
• Bradshaw, John. Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. New York: Bantam, 1990.
• Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. 503-17.
• Cavell, Stanley. “Thinking of Emerson.” 1978. The Senses of Walden. Expanded edition. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981. 123-38.
• Chambers, Iain. Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience. London: Methuen, 1986.
• Deane, Patrick. “Justified Radicalism: A.R. Ammons with a Glance at John Cage.” PLL 28.2 (Spring 1992): 206-22.
• Donoghue, Dennis. “More Poetry than Poems.” The New York Times Book Review 6 Sept. 1981: 5.
• Fredman, Stephen. The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993.
• —. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. 1983. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.
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• Lazer, Hank. “The Politics of Form and Poetry’s Other Subjects: Reading Contemporary American Poetry.” American Literary History 2 (Fall 1990): 503-27.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Mellencamp, Patricia, ed. Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
• Morse, Margaret. “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television.” Mellencamp 193-221.
• Morris, Meaghan. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” Mellencamp 14-43.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric.” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. New York: Cambridge UP, 1985. 172-200.
• Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1996.
• Ross, Andrew. “New Age Technoculture.” Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg et al. London: Routledge, 1992. 531-55.
• Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.
• Vendler, Helen. “Ammons.” Bloom 73-80.
• Walsh, William. “An Interview with A.R. Ammons.” Michigan Quarterly Review. 28.1 (Winter 1989): 105-17.
• Wolfe, Cary. “In Search of Post-Humanist Theory: The Second-Order Cybernetics of Maturana and Varela.” Cultural Critique (Spring 1995): 33-70.
• —. “Symbol Plural: The Later Long Poems of A.R. Ammons.” Contemporary Literature 30.1 (Spring 1989): 78-94.
• Zwicky, Jan. Lyric Philosophy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.