PN Review News is proud to republish a remarkable 1997 interview that Mark Dow conducted with the poet A.R. Ammons.

"Isn't that something, if that's true?": An Interview with A.R. Ammons

In 1997, shortly after the publication of Glare (and four years before his death), A.R. Ammons read from his work at New York University. At the end of one poem, the audience burst into applause.  Ammons looked up with a big smile.  He seemed surprised and said, "I'm immensely encouraged."

A week before the reading, I had sent him a fax at Cornell University to request an interview. I didn't expect much.  He looked unfriendly in the author photo on his books, and in many of the poems he seemed to be warding off readers.  He responded the next day (by fax), inviting me to meet him at his hotel.  He was friendly and open, and he was generous with his time.

We spoke in his room (#309) at the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan on October 31, 1997, the day after his reading at NYU.  Ammons sat on the edge of the bed, and I sat on a chair, my tape recorder on the nightstand.  Across the room, his wife Phyllis spoke to Joanna Hudson, a filmmaker who was making a video of Ammons's poem "Easter Morning."

A couple of months later, Ammons replied to my short thank-you note with a note that asked: "Did you get anything worthwhile on your tape?"  All these years later, it occurs to me that he was probably really asking.

A slightly different version of this transcript first appeared in Pequod #43 (2000).

*
Your editor at W.W. Norton, Gerald Howard, said in his introduction at the reading last night that he had excised some of the raunchier stuff from Glare.

There were no excisions. I made one concession at the end of one passage. I think that the very last two or three lines of the whole poem, I changed somewhat, and instead of saying something like "shoving your penis into a pussy," I said, "drive a stake (or something) into the marshland." He's kind of prudish, I'm afraid, whereas I'm not. I think it maybe improved the poem, because it would have been too direct, I think, to say it the other way.

[Note: The lines in the uncorrected proof copy of Glare are: "to sing is . . . / to dive the prick into the sodden wetness" In the published book, this reads as: " . . . to dive the stave into marshy passageways"]

Did the editing rub you the wrong way?

Well, I must make it absolutely clear that the poem is not revised by the editors, and never has been. They never make any changes in the manuscript. That, I think, is the important point.

Okay. I wanted to ask you about "Birthday Poem to My Wife," which appeared in the New Yorker recently [October 20/27, 1997], and which you read last night. In what sense was it a poem to her? Did you actually give it to her after you wrote it?

For her birthday, I got her a fifty-dollar bouquet, and when it arrived along, she said she didn't like it because she doesn't care for flowers that much. And anyhow, other flowers had arrived from other people. So I figured I would write her a poem instead. I brought it with me -- the very first draft. I know that that won't show on tape [laughing] . . . I wrote this in the office, and it's exactly the same. I wrote it in three minutes' time. Except you see I had a little trouble at the end [words are crossed out] . . .

So that's just on your office stationary there, dated August '97 --

That's right. I rarely write at the office, but I sat down just before going down to the coffee shop and just whisked this off, and you know, I've heard from people all over the country that they like the poem.

It's a beautiful poem. The reason I asked you the question is that it seems to me that in your work there's a central tension between isolation and connection to others.

Even in the first poem, in 1947 [i.e. to his wife on her birthday, which he also read the night before], it was about separation.

Right, that poem itself is about separation. And in your work, you've written that you want to write poems that no one could or would want to read. I'm thinking of "Summer Place" and of Sphere. But you also said, in an interview around 1990, that you were interested in beginning to travel around and meet some of the readers of your poems.

Yes. Well, you know one changes as one goes through life. And sometimes for the better. Sometimes not. But I had some physical trouble in '89, I had a heart attack, and in '90, a bypass. And after that, for some reason or other, I felt more in need of going to see people. I had refused readings for twenty-five years and it felt -- what is the word? -- it felt as if I were being frugal with other people somehow. . . . and also, with the drugs they gave me, they gave me some drug called Tenormin, it slows down your system and your heart rate. It was much easier for me to read, 'cause I used to get very scared before readings, and I still get a little bit tense, but not very. And a little tension helps to give a reading. I think I was too relaxed last night. I was just saying the words rather than reading the --

You seemed very much in your element.

Did I? Well, I've done better [laughs].

Well, I guess the question about poetry that's in the question I was trying to ask you before is: what kind of communication do you consider a poem to be?

Well, you know, you can be working from a perfectly direct, real feeling for your wife, and be aware at the same time that you're writing a poem. So there 's a kind of division there. One doesn't invalidate the other. But you don't just say exactly what you would say to your wife if you were standing in front of her. You make a poem that somehow or other tries to communicate not what you're saying but what you're feeling, and by what you're saying reveal what you're feeling. So it's artificial and absolutely sincere at the same time.

Sure, but more generally, what is it about communication in a poem that is different than what we're doing right now? I guess it's another way of saying, why write the poem?

The poem includes more than what it's saying. It includes the behavior of itself. That is, it's a poem that uses a lot of unnecessary words, or it's a poem that's highly concentrated and kind of clipped in its speech. All these things imply kinds of value and behavior, plus misbehavior -- misbehavior can be very revealing, as well as behavior. Supposing in a poem -- or supposing in real life, it's a hundred degrees outside and somebody comes in and says, "Chilly, isn't it?" Well, you can't go by what he said. You have to go by the circumstance, and his behavior and so forth. He means the exact opposite of what he's saying. Well, a poem sets up a context of behavior that enables you to read what is really meant. And that's why you can't just say something. You see my behavior now? You don't see that when you just record the speech, but I have gestures, and changes of tone, and all this gets into the poem, and is part of what it says. You know how when someone you know is coming down the hall, let's say, and kind of . . . shambles, and you recognize immediately before the person gets there who it is? Poems are the same way.

Let me ask you what I think is a related question. You've said that Baptist hymns that you heard and sang as a child have been a big influence on your writing.

Yes.

And that when you did attend church in North Carolina, you attended a Pentecostal church.

Yes.

What is your take on the phenomena of possession by the Holy Spirit and of speaking in tongues, on the experience itself as distinct from the dogma attached to it?

I've never myself felt possessed and never spoke in tongues. But I've witnessed it. Sometimes people would get up and address the audience in the church in a language that could not be understood. All the gestures of sense, the nodding of the head and so forth, were there, as if they were making sense . . . Well, I think all those things are also translatable into scientific or psychological language, you know, catatonia and all kinds of possessions like that are possible, and it's just that in the church, and especially in a Pentecostal church, the intensity of hell and heaven becomes so great that people lose the sense of themselves, I think, and just become concentrated in this possession. But I don't understand it, I mean I just witnessed it --

Do you remember your first impression of it, when you witnessed it?

I took it to be perfectly normal. Because that's the way others did, that's the way my parents and others did, that this is the presence of the Lord among us.
When I say the hymns were a kind of center to me, or a home, that's still true emotionally. But you know, I'm an absolute agnostic. I don't believe any of that -- stuff. But I still feel the feelings, if that makes any difference.

And so what does that mean, to feel those feelings --

I don't know. I don't know. I play the piano a little bit. I play Mozart, mostly. But occasionally I play hymns. And I feel that immediately as being the real me. That's where I come from, that's who I am. But Mozart is the person I respect, and love -- well, I don't disrespect the other, either. I just put it in its own place. And also, by the way, the content of much of my poetry is not different from the content in those hymns. There's a hymn that begins, "Oh they tell me of a land far beyond the sky/Oh they tell me of a home far away" -- that's all over my poetry, that kind of transcendence, sense of a distant home, a spiritual home.
But there's no astronomical reasons for this [laughing]. They haven't found any of those places, Hubbel hasn't photographed any of those places.
But you know, if much of our religious sentiment comes from, what I believe, the hierarchy that we've already established in our secular relations -- as in corporations or universities, where you have figures of authority -- and they take on a kind of symbolic value, become over-determined with energy of all the people they represent, and so there's a kind of glow, or awe, about them. Well if you extend that up, above the periphery of the earth itself into the sky, then you have the same father sitting at the top of this hierarchy, but now he's no longer corporeal because he's above us. So I think, as primates, we're always looking for or recognizing that our order and meaning depend largely on the structure of this hierarchy. And at the top is a glowing figure that is the king exponentially risen to the highest realm. What do you think of that?

Beautiful.

Isn't that something, if that's true? That could justify all this religious feeling in the absence of any evidence to support it, of a religious kind.

This reminds me of the structure in your poems, of the spirals rising --

Absolutely. And to the top, where everything is represented by nothing, because it's all been assimilated into a radiance, it's just energy, at the highest level.

At the other end of that, in terms of the language itself that you're using, form is obviously important to you at every level --

Form and the disturbance of form.

Form and the disturbance of form. Okay.

Yes.

But you don't seem to be interested in using the traditional forms of English poetry. In "Pray without Ceasing," you wrote, "The motions/by which/I move/manifest/merely a deeper congruence/where the structures are." What I'm wondering is whether you feel that you're working within the language in such a way that you're distilling some aspect of it -- other than the meter, for example, which was the aspect distilled by traditional English poetry. Does my question make sense?

Well, I'm not sure. I'll just make an answer, and you can correct the way I go. I read English poetry, so I know it's there. I know what it sounds like, and how it's put together, you know, to a certain extent. Who knows everything? But I was there. And so I know what meter is. I know that meter is a measure. It's not a measure of itself. It's a measure of something else, called motion. Motion sometimes develops into rhythms, or suasions, or recognizable configurations. This is all much below the tick-tock of meter of any kind, see. Well, my interest has been not to impose so much metrical structures as to dig down into the eruptions from underneath, of motions that accompany our knowledges. Our cognitions come in certain movements like this, and that's what interests me.
I also have been very much persuaded by Milton's note to Paradise Lost. Have you read that, the note on prosody? He says that true English does not speak in these late fashions introduced from Italy and France of tinkling rhymes and little fastidious rhythms, that this is unworthy of English, which comes as a kind of mock-heroic or heroic measure. I agree with that. I think that a lot of traditional verse tinkles too much. It jingles and tinkles too much to suit me. I would rather be in touch with a deeper function. Now this may be just talk, I don't know, but it's an attempt to get at a disposition I have. Where it comes from I'm not sure, but it's definitely my disposition.

It seems, in other words, that there are aspects of language that we can distill even if we can't name what it is we're distilling.

That's right. In my poem Sphere, John Nims wrote to me that he and his class were trying to figure out how long the line was, was it a hexameter or septameter or what. And that was part of my fascination with it, that it went past the pentameter into some cloudy area of God-knows-what, and then it would keep varying on that, you know, as it went. But I have a good respect, a healthy respect, for Frost's statement that you want an external as well as an internal form. I don't know just when you lose that and when you gain it, but it's worth thinking about. The external form limits the outside, you see. You may have some kind of deep arisings -- but do they just expand into everywhere, or is there some place where they take shape and become identifiable? Did that make any sense?

Is there any particular writer in the history of English whose use of form made a particular impression on you?

[Long pause.] Well, the Bible, you know, has many kinds of form, and I think I was very strongly influenced by Old Testament rhythms, as in Ecclesiastes and other books. And then there was Whitman, and Milton -- Milton in Samson Agonistes -- so there were plenty of ancient precursors. I mean I wasn't doing anything new, I think I was just doing it myself, my way, the way it felt to me.

I'm struck by how many poets articulate their sense of their own invention of a new kind of rhythm or meter, even though in many cases -- for example, I've never really understood what Williams's concept of --

The variable foot? I think I know. But I may be wrong. The triplet constructions, you mean?

Right.

It seems to me that variability has to have one thing: a constant. And it seems to me that the constant in those poems is actually metronomic, just like a ticking on a piano in which you could play several keys, or two, in this tick. So I think if you start motioning your hand up and down this way, as you read those lines, you will find that it's almost metronomic, beat by line, beat by line . . . But he never understood it himself. He had a sheet of paper he gave me when -- you know I knew him -- he gave me this sheet of paper about the variable foot, didn't make a grain of sense [laughs].
Are we done?

Can we have a couple more minutes?

Okay.

I wanted to ask you about John Ashbery.

What about him?

You've said, "I find myself greatly challenged by Mr. Ashbery."

Well, he comes from a kind of different point on the communication scale from mine. I love his work. I respect it because it is challenging and different. I've always, however, been suspicious of representing the difficulty of life by a difficult line. I've always been afraid, as with Ezra Pound, that once you clear up the difficulty, there may be nobody home underneath. I have always admired the difficulty that exists at the root of simplicity. When you have been as clear as you can, and you come to the endpoint, you're into something more difficult than you can manage. But it's perfectly clear how you got there. I feel that this is true of Mr. Mozart, where you have a clear surface, with an inexhaustible, indefinable groundwork. That's why I admire him. Mr. Ashbery, I think, is going to turn out to be clear, as time goes by, people will learn how to read him, and that's what's challenging to me.

The learning how to read him?

No, that he was able, willing, to enter into a poetics of that kind, with the faith, I presume, that it will be found humorous, ridiculous, outrageous, meaningful, and all those things eventually, and I think it will. Okay?

Thanks very much.

Is there another question that you can wrap right up with? Good questions. I hope I didn't give a good answer.

You hope you didn't?

[Laughs.] There are no good answers.

Well, I was going to ask you a question at the end here, but it seems too big of a question to end with.

What's the question?

You've talked a lot about how poetry should hopefully teach us how to live. And I was going to ask if you might reflect a little bit on how poetry has taught you how to live.

I don't know whether it goes that far. I think it gives you models to contemplate. Each poem represents a kind of behavior. And my question finally about any poem is, what way of life does this poem seem to be recommending? Does it recommend to you that you misbehave and tear things up, you could say the way Mr. Ashbery does? Misbehavior, in other words, could be the right behavior. But those are all questions you have to ask yourself. And each poem becomes a model of inquiry . . . What I object to is in classes when what a poem is saying is as far as you go with it. But you got to ask, what is the poem being? What is it behaving? How is it acting? It's an action, not a statement.
Okay?

Do you want a chance to edit this transcript before I send it out?

No, sir.