ModPo

Find a bio and links to other A.R. Ammons poems here.

I have a life 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 old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, its convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how hes shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles who
were the rumored fathers of cousins
who whispered of them as of great, if
troubled, presences, and school

teachers, just about everybody older
(and some younger) collected in one place
waiting, particularly, but not for
me, mother and father there, too, and others
close, close as burrowing
under skin, all in the graveyard
assembled, done for, the world they
used to wield, have trouble and joy
in, gone

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, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
cant get by, but the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a flurry and
now, I say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry, now it cant come
back with help or helpful asides, now
we all buy the bitter
incompletions, pick up the knots of
horror, silently raving, and go on
crashing into empty ends not
completions, not rondures the fullness
has come into and spent itself from

I stand on the stump
of a child, whether myself
or my little brother who died, and
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
for me it is the dearest and the worst,
it is life nearest to life which is
life lost: it is my place where
I must stand and fail,
calling attention with tears
to the branches not lofting
boughs into space, to the barren
air that holds the world that was my world

though the incompletions
(& completions) burn out
standing in the flash high-burn
momentary structure of ash, still it
is a picture-book, letter-perfect
Easter morning: I have been for a
walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook
works without flashing in an abundant
tranquility: the birds are lively with
voice: I saw something I had
never seen before: two great birds,
maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked
and headed, came from the south oaring
the great wings steadily; they went
directly over me, high up, and kept on
due north: but then one bird,
the one behind, veered a little to the
left and the other bird kept on seeming
not to notice for a minute: the first
began to circle as if looking for
something, coasting, resting its wings
on the down side of some of the circles:
the other bird came back and they both
circled, looking perhaps for a draft;
they turned a few more times, possibly
risingat least, clearly resting
then flew on falling into distance till
they broke across the local bush and
trees: 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: a dance sacred as the sap in
the trees, permanent in its descriptions
as the ripples round the brooks
ripplestone: fresh as this particular
flood of burn breaking across us now
from the sun.

I hope some may join in offering their thoughts on Susan Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. To read the post, click here.

Excerpt from the post:

In choosing her texts, Howe unravels constructions imposed by traditional narrative to set words free:

I wanted to transplant words onto paper with soil sticking to their roots—to go to meet a narrative’s fate by immediate access to its concrete totality of singular interjections, crucified spellings, abbreviations, irrational apprehensions, collective identities, palavers, kicks, cordials, comforts. I wanted jerky and tedious details to oratorically bloom and bear fruit as if they had been set at liberty or ransomed by angels.

True to her word, the opening lines of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time appear as an inscription that blooms and bears its fruit in sound:

from seaweed said nor repossess rest
scape esaid

• I’m sharing a poem published in this issue of Rattle Magazine. The ‘concept’ is deceptively simple. The poet takes a piece of prose that repeats one noun several times, since it is the subject noun in the article. Then he substitutes a different noun, “poetry,” in each instance. While this doesn’t seem terribly brilliant the first time you read the poem, when you get to the last line, whamo!

  Pasteurization
  by Michael Meyerhofer

  Poetry keeps wine and milk from spoiling
  and has prevented countless deaths
  since its invention in 1892. It works

  by heating substances to just a bit
  below the boiling point-not enough
  to curdle but still hot enough to kill off

  most of the bacteria that can hurt you.
  Some health nuts blame poetry for disease,
  saying a natural vocabulary is better,

  though modern doctors disagree.
  Other foods saved by poetry include juice,
  syrup, vinegar, and canned foods.

  Poetry was invented by Louis Pasteur
  who lost three children to typhoid.
  While working on a vaccine for rabies,

  he once impressed onlookers
  by extracting saliva from a crazed dog
  without armoring his hands.

  He also made a vaccine for anthrax
  though some accuse him of plagiarism.
  The poetry process involves lots

  of pipes and vats and rapid cooling.
  Poetry doesn’t seem all that complicated
  to us, more like common sense,

  but our ancestors didn’t have it
  which is why so many of them died,
  young and beautiful and always afraid.

  #

Today we are releasing PoemTalk episode #60, a discussion of Clark Coolidge’s “Blues for Alice” (based on the Charlie Parker standard of the same name) with Maria Damon, Brian Reed, and Craig Dworkin.

PoemTalk in Jacket2 magazine: link

PoemTalk at the Poetry Foundation: link

The Paris Review ran a very nice article recently about ModPo: link. And the Paris Review‘s Facebook page ran a photo of me and Kristen and Molly: link.