Ammons' Ommatium

 A.R. Ammons isn't what I'd normally describe as a "visionary" in the way you'd call Blake or Whitman visionary-- the term has a connotation of almost delirious freedom to it, a sense of the poet's work belonging totally to itself, as independent from context as a plateau or a grizzly bear or whatever. A naive formulation of the idea, I guess, but it's the sense that I get reading those two poets, while Ammons (sort of like Gary Snyder) brings a zen-like control and restraint to his poetry. If Whitman is being bowled over by the waterfall, then Ammons is the focused appreciation of a lone drop. "The Story," for example, in its entirety from Brink Road:

"Oblivion keeps the caterpillar bright."

It has a haiku-like economy that's really striking, and even in his longer works there's the sense that every single syllable has a real heft to it.

Recently I read Norton's 2006 reprinting of ommateum with Doxology, Ammons' first collection, out of print since 1955. There's vintage Ammons right off the bat, mixing dictions, in this case theological and taxonomical: a Doxology is a kind of praise song, and an ommateum is the kind of compound eye some insects have. It's an apt title (as well as one that's fun to say and makes you feel like a real fancy brilliant guy), as the collection is most striking when it diverges from what you'd expected from Ammons, mixing in generous parts Whitman and Blake, a Whitmanesque song of praise to the natural world focused through a perspective as gorgeously alien and inscrutable as Blake's densest material. 

According to the introduction, Ammons wrote it hot on the heels of a Whitman binge, and it shows-- there's a broader scope and feeling of surrender (or not? More of an offering up of the speaker, maybe) to nature ("The grass miracles have kept me down all autumn," or , as well as a use of prophetic, mystic-ish diction that does sort of remind me of Blake in its inscrutable and yet somehow complete-feeling esoteric cosmology. Here are the 16th and then the very first sections of "Doxology," which show-case both of these features nicely:

"Coming to Sumer and the tamarisks on the river

I Ezra with unsettling love

rifled the mud and wattle huts

for recent mournings

with gold leaves

and lapis lazuli beads

in the neat braids loosening from the skull

Looking through the wattles to the sun

I said

It has rained some here in this place

unless snow falls heavily in the hills

to do this

The floor was smooth with silt

and river weeds hanging grey

on the bent reeds spoke saying

Everything is here as you can see

Firing the huts

I abandoned the unprofitable poor

unequal even in the bone

to disrespect

and casual with certainty

watched an eagle wing as I went

to kind and priest."

"So I said I am Ezra

and the wind whipped my throat

gaming for the sounds of my voice

I listened to the wind

go over my head and up into the night

Turning to the sea I said

I am Ezra

but there were no echoes from the waves

The words were swallowed up

in the voice of the surf

or leaping over the swells

lost themselves oceanward

Over the bleached and broken fields

I moved my feet and turning from the wind

that ripped sheets of sand

from the beach and threw them

like seamists across the dunes

swayed as if the wind were taking me away

and said

I am Ezra

As a word too much repeated

falls out of being

so I Ezra went out into the night

like a drift of sand

and splashed among the windy oats

that clutch the dunes

of unremembered seas"

The voice here strikes me as so different from the Ammons I was familiar-- it was really a pleasant shock to read this collection. You can see that his control over diction and line is already pretty much aces here-- occasionally he'll go for a slightly over-the-top flourish ("Oh I said in the mistral of bleached/ and naked thought/ blood like a catalyst is evil's baptismal need"... well ok), and you'll be reminded that this is definitely the work of a young guy.

However, over all its a strikingly unexpected and fresh side of Ammon, a wilder, more wild-eyed side, that he remained proud of despite it's long unavailability. 

P.S. The introduction also notes how unfamiliar with the contemporary poetry scene of the time Ammons was, and goes so far as to describe the collection as "outsider art". I don't know about that, but it definitely feels somehow outside of its period (calling up Blake again), with a corresponding sense of barren loneliness to it. I guess if I wanted to be corny (I sort of do) I'd say that if Whitman wrote about Emerson's America, Ammons here writes about Leone's or perhaps McCarthy's, a deceptively blank and harsh landscape, a dry and enervating beauty (Ammons conflates, at times, the landscapes of New Mexico and the ancient Middle East in disconcerting and wonderful ways). If spaghetti Western poetry could be a thing, this would be it.