[No Title]

» kinbotek - Ammons is actually a great poet, despite Thadine's lackluster a

Ammons is actually a great poet, despite Thadine's lackluster advocacy. (I don't doubt her enthusiasm, only her competence.) His voice is both unmistakeably his own and flexible enough to range from the sublime to the scatological. There are good essays on his work by Harold Bloom, Richard Howard, and Helen Vendler-- I'm not putting forth any of these as the last word, or even as a necessary intro, but there's nothing as damaging in a first encounter with a good poet than bad prose. Where to begin? Why not . . . here. Snowflakes do not have "succinct life spans." They are evanescent, a word you may dislike because it's latinate, but so is "succinct," whereas "evanescent" is precise and "succinct" is not. Pick up a decent dictionary and look at the etymologies. (Poets often care about words enough to do this sort of thing, and the exercise will sometimes open up a line or a phrase that was before merely puzzling.) I don't even know how to deal with "life spans"-- The point being, this is not a interpretation, or an insight, just a cozy debasement of Ammons's language into vaguely jargony greeting-card sentiment. And so on, *ad infitum*-- a phrase which is generally used to indicate iteration rather than perpetuity, just as "repetitious" is the wrong word to use when you think, as I assume Thadine thinks, that the repetition is more resonant and masterful than it is boring and monotonous. (Oh, Thadine, I know, you can come back at me and claim, as Humpty Dumpty protested to Alice, that the words mean what you want them to mean, and what could I say then? except that I can recognize *glory* when I see it.) Maybe it would be better to hold Ammons's poem up against some relevant models and inheritors, instead of just listing the accomplishments anyone could turn up with a web search? (T. S. Eliot seems like an almost random choice for a poet exmplary in his use of punctuation.) Just a few observations on "The City Limits" that spring to mind: "When you consider" is an echo and tranformation of the opening of one of the greatest and best-known English sonnets, Milton's "When I consider how my light is spent"-- and that poem ends with gestures of standing and waiting that might bear comparison; it is also a recasting of the Roman poet Lucretius' formulaic mode of address to the reader, an allusion that is even more relevant when you consider the affinity between the kinds of attention to the natural world both poets urge; and Wallace Stevens's "The Snow-Man" offers a "man stand[ing] and look[ing] about" that would be an excellent point of comparison for anyone interesting in teasing this poem apart.

Anyway, before Thadine's done too much damage to Ammons's appeal for prospective readers, I hope anyone who's clicked on this will wipe those soggy sentences from his or her memory, before going to a bookshop or a library and picking up copies of the _Selected Poems_ and, let's say, _Garbage_. Having got through those, the gentle reader might come back to TF; but if this doesn't, on reacquaintance, seem like a ludicrously lousy preface to the work, I can only hope he or she will turn to something like needlepoint or pottery.

-- posted by kinbotek

Permalink Print Discussion Join the latest discussions

» kinbotek - just a few corrections

That should have been "nothing is more damaging than" or "nothing is as damaging as," my apologies: I must've written it one way or the other and then slipped up in the act of changing my mind. Take your pick.

Also, Thadine used the word "repetitive," not "repititious," but my point stands-- if anything, it's an even balder error of idiomatic usage on her part.

-- posted by kinbotek

Permalink Print Discussion Join the latest discussions