1This essay examines the late poetry of A. R. Ammons (1926-2001) through the lens of exhaustion, understood as the result of old age, late capitalism, and ecological catastrophe. From Garbage (1993) to his posthumously published Bosh and Flapdoodle (2005), Ammons relentlessly—though in no way uniformly—exposed the aging body of the poet together with its increasing irrelevance in the eyes of a capitalist economy, relaying a postmodern injunction to manage similarly aging bodies as cumbersome waste. Whether (and how) he laid the groundwork for what might be viewed as a late style or, perhaps more accurately, as I will argue, an old-age style, will be the central inquiry of this essay, with a focus on Ammons’s last book, a collection of sixty-eight titled lyrics that appeared five decades after his first book of poems, Ommateum, with Doxology (1955).
- 1 See Lawrence Samuel’s opening statement in Aging in America: “Although much has been understandably (...)
- 2 Katz is particularly interested in “the emergence of cultural aging and its problematical ‘positive (...)
2Late-life creativity as a category has fostered a growing body of work in the field of critical aging studies, which operates within the medical humanities at the intersection of the cultural and the biomedical.1 By examining Ammons’s poems in light of late style criticism, critical gerontology, and age studies, I hope to show that Ammons’s performance of late style is postmodern rather than neo-Romantic, thus aligning with recent reappraisals of his work (e.g. Epstein; McRae). By highlighting certain features of Ammons’s late-life style—his embrace of the zany, his search for lyrical flatness and, ultimately, his exposure of the exhausting labor of living in the face of death—this essay wishes to open up new avenues of reflection on American poetry and literary old age, further exploring what sociologist Stephen Katz, in his landmark study Cultural Aging: Life Course, Lifestyle, and Senior Worlds (2005), identifies as postmodern ways of “living in time” (19).2
3Against Romantic constructs of a late style geared toward lyrical epiphany and metaphysical transcendence, Ammons in his late work claimed that the time had come for him to “[try] to write [his] flattest poem, now” (Ammons, 1993 14). Drawing on Calista McRae’s analysis in Lyric as Comedy (2020) of Ammons’s poetry as indulging in a form of “Comic Badness” (83), I will argue that Ammons experiments with lyrical flatness in an attempt to exit without style, deliberately thwarting expectations of making a good last impression, thus running against the grain of some of his most famous predecessors—Walt Whitman’s effusive goodbyes, W. B. Yeats’s self-affirming last poems, Wallace Stevens’s hieratic late minimalism. In what might be viewed as a kind of self-unfashioning, Ammons’s late poems become increasingly erratic, embracing the lyric I’s cognitive mess to the point where, as McRae argues, “it becomes difficult to draw the line between signal and noise” (101).
4Until recently, Ammons was kept out of the narrative of postmodernism. Andrew Epstein, in Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (2016), then made a compelling case for reexamining his poetry alongside the work of American poets customarily viewed as postmodern, thus reversing the tendency and facilitating a recovery of Ammons’s work as postmodern by emphasizing his experimental poetics of the everyday:
[…] the tendency to tag Ammons as a neo-romantic nature poet, and the poet’s own lack of social affiliations with poetic groups and movements, has obscured his connections to avantgarde poetics, postmodernist writing, and other currents in postwar avantgarde poetry and art. It does seem rather absurd that Ammons—author of works like the experimental Tape for the Turn of the Year […]—has been all but absent from discussions of the experimental poetic tradition. (111-112)
5Why has Ammons’s poetry mostly remained unacknowledged as part of the canon of postmodern American literature? Epstein’s proposed explanation falls along two lines: first, Ammons’s style evolved over time, gradually shifting from neo-romantic to postmodernist over the course of several decades, so that anyone familiar with the early Ammons might legitimately construe his work outside the canon of postmodernism. Second, Ammons’s radical embrace of the everyday, while bearing “an instructive family resemblance to many works more commonly deemed avant-garde” (Epstein 38), also remained within the perimeter of white, middle-class, male, heterosexual, family life (38, 111, 146), once again obscuring his connections with the experimental work of Frank O’Hara, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Claudia Rankine, or Hoa Nguyen. In other words, Epstein’s reading of Ammons alongside these poets lays the groundwork for a reevaluation of late Ammons (not early Ammons) as decidedly postmodernist—thus calling for an exploration of his old-age style as a postmodern take on “late style.”
6Although I will be limiting my investigation of Ammons’s old-age style henceforth to his comparatively underexamined last book Bosh and Flapdoodle—“a remarkably coherent manuscript,” as acknowledged by Robert M. West, editor of The Collected Poems of A. R. Ammons (Ammons, 2017 986)—I must add that his concern with the debilitating effects of aging on his writing, coupled with a desire to watch out for and record possible signs of a cognitive and physical decline up to the slightest unsavory detail, came to the fore as early as Garbage, which arguably marks the beginning of his late period. Partly composed in the late 1980s, Garbage came out in 1993 when Ammons was sixty-seven years old. A postmodern long poem that explores the “trashfulness” of everything, it immediately proclaims that
garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking […]
(Ammons, 1993 18)
7The book’s two-line dedication “to the bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers, / wordsmiths—the transfigurers, restorers” (Ammons 1993 7, emphasis in the original) explicitly pairs the work of scavenging microorganisms with the work of “wordsmiths,” called upon to transfigure and restore what others routinely discard. Ammons’s decision to make way for waste in his writing, not least by refusing to draw the line between valuable and disposable verbal matter, is often said to have originated in his experiment with a thin roll of adding-machine paper, which he used to type his long poem-diary Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965) during the winter of 1963 (Ammons 1963-1964), continuously adding (never subtracting) his daily thoughts onto the narrow strip of flimsy paper until he reached the end of the (sc)roll.
8The teaching position Ammons held at Cornell University from 1964 almost up until his death in 2001 finally afforded him the material conditions to write every day. But it also raised new questions about the end(s) of poetry. Sure enough in Garbage (which came out some twenty years after Tape), the insidious voices of “Creepy little creepers” ask, “what do you / mean teaching school (teaching poetry and // poetry writing and wasting your time […]” Ammons, 1993 13, emphasis in the original). Poetry as a waste—of time, energy, words—became key to Ammons’s late-life writing, as articulated in the following lines from the same book: “a waste of words, a flattened-down, smoothed-over / mesa of styrofoam verbiage; since words were // introduced here things have gone poorly for the / planet […]” (Ammons, 1993 74).
9The flattening-down recounted here (words “flattened-down, smoothed-over” into a flat area or “mesa” [1993 74]) is imagined though the crushing and squelching of matter under the wheels of “the newly-started bulldozer,” busily “smoothing and packing down: / flattening” (1993 35). A radical shift from the circular, rotating motions at the core of Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974), for instance, the drive toward flatness in Ammons’s late work becomes one of the overarching metaphors of late capitalism’s implacable exhaustion of the planet as well as its human and nonhuman inhabitants.
10In the next book, Brink Road (1996), “garbage” does not merely point to the material waste that accumulates, utterly redesigning urban as well as rural landscapes across the United States—which the last poem, “Summer Place,” actually offers to rename “The Republic of Barrels of Trash”: “we could / now be entering the centennial year of The United States of / Barreling Trash” (2017 445). It also draws attention to the mechanisms that transform some people into disposable bodies or social waste—among them poor people (“migrant workers,” “strung-out guitar pickers” [445]), but also old people, supposedly enjoying the good life (“retired persons: little old / ladies floated up in Florida, no husband, no home, / no children who want them, and not enough to eat […]” [445]). Ammons’s use of irony throughout, not least in the reported speech segment “‘pretty soon the people on welfare gone / be richer than working people’” (where the expected “gonna” is revised into “gone” followed by a line break, further highlighting a collective fantasy to disencumber American society of “the people on welfare” [445]).
11From its opening, Garbage examines a life lived outside the workforce when so much depends on Social Security:
since SS’s enough money (I hope) to live
from now on on [sic] in elegance and simplicity—
or, maybe, just simplicity—why shouldn’t I
at my age (63) concentrate on chucking the
advancements and rehearsing the sweetnesses of
leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways:
(Ammons, 1993 13-14)
- 3 Ammons served in the Navy as a very young man during World War II (and was able to go to university (...)
12First introduced into the poem with the acronym “SS” for Social Security (itself an abbreviation for the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program) reactivates the horror of dependency that defines so much of the late twentieth-century United States ethos by obliquely conjuring up the Nazi history of organized extermination, coincidentally initiated by the SS (or Schutzstaffel) against those then deemed a burden on German society.3
13The tone, however, remains light and sprightly, as the lyric I celebrates “the sweetnesses” (again, with so many s) “of leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways” even as a life of “elegance and simplicity” is swiftly chucked for a life of “just simplicity.” What follows is a comic to-do list, a gleeful inventory of wellness tips for the soon-to-be-old, designed to shepherd a fast-growing population of aging Americans blissfully into the fold of model elderly citizenry—as suggested by the following lines, whose speaker agrees at last he needs “to find out, now, about medicare/medicaid, / national osteoporosis week, gadabout tours, // hearing loss, homesharing programs” (Ammons, 1993 14).
14What exactly does it mean to grow “Old in the Country of the Young” as Lawrence Samuel puts it in his cultural history of “Aging in America” (11)? How does one write of old age in a country that remains “perhaps the most youth-oriented culture in history” (Samuel 2), where aging bodies hardly matter, and the elderly are construed as socially, economically, and politically inept? These questions, I argue, are central to Ammons’s poems from Garbage onward. Rather than coming together consistently as a “late style”—a fraught notion too often evocative of an epiphanic mode enmeshed in a search for ultimate, definitive truths—Ammons’s late-life poems give shape to what I prefer to call an old-age style, not just because they happened to be written when (or soon after) Ammons reached the age of retirement (an administrative criterion that defines “old age” merely with regard to the law), but because they relentlessly question the meaning of aging in America.
- 4 Both McMullan and Edward Said’s On Late Style (2006) featured prominently in my earlier work on lat (...)
15I am borrowing the distinction between Spätstil and Alterstil, i.e. “late style” and “old-age style,” from Gordon McMullan, who has repeatedly called for a strict decoupling of these notions. McMullan’s consistent critique of late style as one of the last Romantic myths informs and inflects much of the present argument,4 first through his brilliant analysis in Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing, followed by his interdisciplinary reappraisal of “late style” as an art historical as well as literary concept too often treated as self-evident (McMullan and Smiles) and, most recently, through the fruitful dialogue that he and David Amigoni spearheaded between literature and gerontology. Because late style is routinely—often hastily—used to depict the achievement of artists who, while in the proximity of death, were not old (e.g. Mozart, Keats), I will relinquish it in favor of a “late-life style” or “old-age style,” both of which break with the mythology of Romantic lateness.
- 5 See his explanation in “The Literature of Exhaustion”: “By ‘exhaustion,’ I […] mean […] the used-up (...)
16Ammons’s preoccupation with waste as part of his late-life writing strongly resonates with John Barth’s definition of “exhaustion” as the “used-upness of certain forms” (Barth 64),5 thus solidly anchoring him within a tradition of postmodern American writers who also connected lateness with waste—think, for instance, of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), which came out just a few years after Garbage. In both works, the overbearing presence of material/social waste embodies what Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, calls “the mood of end-dominated crisis” characteristic of the late twentieth century (98). By challenging waste’s ascribed functions as the obverse of economic, epistemological, and literary value, Ammons fully entered a conversation with his postmodernist contemporaries, inventing in the process a form of lyrical exhaustion that tests the limits of lyricism (by positing its obsolescence in the postmodern age) yet also embraces exhaustion as a lyrical object (by deploying comic strategies in the face of obsolescence).
- 6 Despite recent forays into the field of old age from the perspective of women’s studies (see, in pa (...)
- 7 “But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and (...)
17When W. B. Yeats, at the beginning of “Sailing to Byzantium,” complained that “That is no country for old men” (217)—a line later reclaimed by Cormac McCarthy for the title of his 2005 novel—he was revisiting a topos of male aging6 as exiled from the sensuousness of youth (“The young / In one another’s arms,” “Caught in that sensual music” [217]) that would, rather unexpectedly, flourish again in Edward Said’s provocative redefinition of “late style” as a counterrhythm that is primarily agonistic.7 Ammons’s last collection, Bosh and Flapdoodle, also addresses old age as a kind of exile, from both the self and others; yet instead of weaving a well-honed narrative of poetic old age as either unfairly estranged or blissfully accepting of its own demise, it undertakes to register the daily thoughts and distractions of a mind exercising its will to record a shrinking “acre of green grass” (Yeats 346).
18Typically, Ammons’s self-portrayal, in “Spew”, as “an old mule” that has been recently “turned out / to pasture” (2005 117) is comic, rather than tragic: retirement is indeed viewed as a form of exile (as underlined by the line break, aptly placed after “out”); yet the mule/poet is pictured “standing / up, however rickety, however far down the reach / to the little feed” (this time the line break marks the tentative, slowed motion of an aging body) (2005 117). Ammons does not tap into the pathos of Yeats’s “dying animal” imagery (218), which Philip Roth used as a title for his 2001 novel investigating old age and the crisis of masculinity: despite its “little feed” and “skimpy thoughts,” the mule—a positive animal throughout Ammons’s poetry, most often associated with his rural childhood in North Carolina—is still very much alive (as emphasized by the double concessive “however”).
19Reaching “far down […] to the little feed,” the poetic persona we encounter in Bosh and Flapdoodle seeks neither elevation nor humiliation: it is busy measuring up the distance between willpower and waning energies. Its endeavor is literally down-to-earth (or pragmatic), proceeding with caution, one step at a time, without forethought or hindsight, as depicted in another poem from the same collection, entitled “Widespread Implications,” which again gauges the daily physical implications of old age: “How sweetly now like a boy I dawdle by ditches, / broken rocky brooks that clear streams through / the golden leaves: the light so bright […]” (2005 109), the poem begins, in mock-self-congratulatory fashion; then again: “how like a sail set out from harbor // hitting the winds I flounder this way and that” (109). The aging poet is one whose bodily moves are somewhat erratic (see “dawdle” and “flounder”) but that does not preclude the intense sensuousness of his walk into the woods (see, for instance, the long vocalic sounds in “clear streams” and “bright” / “light” [l. 2, 3]), even as the repeated consonantal /b/ /r/ /k/ sequence in “broken rocky brooks” (l. 2) conveys the treacherousness of such river crossings lined with “scarlet screaming vines” (l. 4). In fact, the poem collapses (rather than reinforces) the opposition between boyhood and senescence since both are made equally comic, thanks to the opening’s strongly alliterative “dawdle by ditches” (l. 1).
- 8 Gilbert compellingly argues that “the walk functions as more than metaphor in many of Ammons’s poem (...)
20Sweet is not cute, however. Ammons’s elderly poetic persona ventures into that walk at great peril, both to himself and to his poetry. Indeed if “The Poem Is a Walk” (Ammons, 1968 114) and his poems are walk poems (Gilbert),8 what happens when the poet dawdles and flounders? In “Nip Sipper,” the speaker humorously insists that a poet should lose their footing, or rhythmic balance, only through inebriation—not through the debilitating effects of old age. As a result, the poem presents itself as a mock-aphoristic single sentence broken into a series of brief, hiccupped lines suggestive of either shortness of breath or intoxication—a comic reversal of (typically sober) famous last words: “If you / stagger it // ought not / to be // just because / you’re old” (2005 116, smaller font in the original).
21While much of the momentum gathered in Yeats’s high-intensity last poems serves to reaffirm the dignity of “An old man’s eagle’s mind” (Yeats 347), late Ammons revels in the little indignities of old age (as evidenced by the previously quoted poem), pledging to “be there […] when competence stumbles and / reveals its dirty underclothes” (2005 151). In other words, Bosh and Flapdoodle casually tracks an exhausted body and mind, jotting down the not-so-interesting, certainly never heroic, “skimpy thoughts” of an aging, white, middle-class male who just so happened to make a living from writing and for whom, as a result, poetry is one of many daily habits confirmed by decades of rehearsal.
- 9 The “Note of appreciation” by John Ammons, placed at the beginning of Bosh and Flapdoodle between t (...)
- 10 A rather baffling choice at the time, the phrase nonetheless proclaimed Whitman’s preference for th (...)
22As might be expected from a book of poems whose title doubly gestures toward nonsense—pairing the monosyllabic “bosh” (originally a Turkish word meaning “empty” or “worthless”) with the mock-flamboyant “flapdoodle” (a variant of “flamdoodle” and “flummadiddle” evocative of a rather ineffectual flapping cum doodling)—Bosh and Flapdoodle deliberately embraces colloquial diction and often accommodates a sense of self-parodic vernacular radically at odds with the aphoristic, truth-bearing language customarily associated with swan-song writing. Mark Ford kindly calls it “unpromising” (n. p.), others decline to comment. Yet the chosen title (since, according to John Ammons, both the order of the poems and the title of the book were his father’s)9 is reminiscent of Whitman who, at the ever-receding end of Leaves of Grass, signed off his life’s work by using the then-unknown, now-naturalized idiom “So Long!” as the title to his final poem (Whitman 609).10
- 11 “This long poem [Glare] refuses sentiment, illusion, consolation […]. Glare is not radiance and con (...)
23While the title to Ammons’s last book recalls the equally dismissive Garbage (which begged the question, “is a poem about garbage garbage” [1993 30]), its tone is noticeably at variance with the titles of the two main collections that came in between, Brink Road (1996) and Glare (1997), both of which sound vaguely threatening as they embrace uncomfortable, if not downright dangerous positions (on the brink, under a glare), as Bonnie Costello underlines.11 Bosh and Flapdoodle is not interested in “the widening gyre” of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (Yeats 210) or its prophetic grammar; it favors diminutive swirls instead—“air-whorls […] made out of nothing” (2005 14), “small twists of the season’s / first snowflakes” (2005 15). Breaking once and for all with the style of high modernism, Ammons’s last book abolishes any sense of gravitas in its performance of lateness, embracing what I have come to see as a deliberate attempt to exit without style.
24With Bosh and Flapdoodle as his “definitive carte visite [sic] to the coming generations” (Whitman 656), Ammons was actually endorsing what Calista McRae in Lyric as Comedy (2020) has aptly named his “Comic Badness” (83), namely a performance akin to the codes of stand-up comedy, where the poet/comedian exposes himself on the page/stage and undertakes to turn his everyday quirks into laughing matter, not always successfully. Based on the trope of the commedia-dell’arte senex or foolish old man, Ammons’s comedy of old age proves to be a comic performance of lateness wherein he repeatedly exposes the exhausting labor of living in the face of death.
25Sianne Ngai’s category of “the zany” as articulated in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2015)—whose subtitle I am revisiting in this section on “zany, boring, gross”—is particularly fruitful here, as it ties together comedy, the laboring body, and postmodernity, all of which are key to the old-age style developed by Ammons in Bosh and Flapdoodle. While Ngai sees each of the three categories she investigates as exemplifying a “seismic” change (21) toward a postmodern aesthetics privileging the trivial, she singles out the zany as uniquely conveying a sense of “excessively strenuous but unproductive exertion”:
[…] the zany, the interesting, and the cute are undeniably trivial. In contrast to the moral and theological resonances of the beautiful and the sublime and the powerfully uplifting and shattering emotions of the sublime and the disgusting, each of these aesthetic experiences revolves around a kind of inconsequentiality: the low, often hard-to-register flicker of affect accompanying our recognition of minor differences from a norm, in the case of the interesting; physical diminutiveness and vulnerability, in the case of the cute; and the flailing helplessness of excessively strenuous but unproductive exertion (and unfocused rage), in the case of the zany. (Ngai 18)
26Zaniness as defined by Ngai sheds light on what, in the context of Ammons’s last book, I am referring to as “lyrical exhaustion.” The notion of “exhaustion,” which I believe is central to the poetics of Bosh and Flapdoodle, is different from the related notions of “fatigue” and “weariness,” although all three register an intensity or acuteness superior to mere “tiredness”; it is also more capacious than the newly ubiquitous “burnout,” although both can be read as symptoms of late capitalism’s impact on public health. Interestingly, “exhaustion” reads like a semantic palindrome both backward and forward: backward as referring to a state of the subject (that of being exhausted, or emptied of, energy, strength, or stamina) and forward, as referring to an action pressed upon an object (that of exhausting or emptying something, or someone, of energy or strength—in chemistry, exhaustion refers to “any process, such as percolation, whereby the active constituents of a drug are removed in solution, leaving it exhausted” [“exhaustion,” 3.c.]). Crucially when one thinks back to the collection’s perplexing title, exhaustion is first and foremost the process of “emptying of contents” (1.a.). Read in this light, Ammons’s choice of combining “bosh!” with “flapdoodle!” (both of which point to an “empty” content) foregrounds exhaustion as process. While exhaustion as process may involve a commendable quest for exhaustivity rather than exemplarity (as in opting for an “Exhaustive enumeration or treatment” [OED 4.]), it also strikes a more sinister note when understood as “draining (anything) of valuable properties; the condition of being so drained” (3.b.) as part of the ecocidal logic of extractivism. That an utter depletion of vital (human as well as nonhuman) energies is constantly on the horizon appears in many of Ammons’s late-life poems, under the guise of a sagging interest in worldly things (as will be explored in the next section, on “Boring”).
27Treading the fine line between work and leisure, comedy and horror, the lightness of being and the burden of living, the lyric I in Bosh and Flapdoodle exposes its own bodily and cognitive exertion, turning it into an abject spectacle that is both utterly entertaining and distressing. “For all their playfulness and commitment to fun,” Ngai notes, “the zany’s characters give the impression of needing to labor excessively hard to produce our laughter, straining themselves to the point of endangering […] themselves [and] those around them” (10). Ammons’s “lyrical exhaustion” plays out not just in the zany, but also in the boring and the gross, since all three stage lyricism as a somewhat exhausted (or “used-up”) form; yet at the same time, his (mostly comic) exploration of exhausted forms of lyricism in Bosh and Flapdoodle demonstrates his continued interest in exhaustion as a source of—and paradoxical reactivation of—lyricism in poetry.
- 12 Jane Bennett’s insightful comments on doodling as enabling a loosening up of creativity in the open (...)
28This “ludic yet noticeably stressful style” (Ngai 8) characteristic of the postmodern zany according to Ngai encapsulates much of the singularity of Bosh and Flapdoodle, as it grapples with inconsequentiality in a manner at once playful and stressful. Although wordplay is hardly a distinctive feature of Ammons’s late style, an increasing number of titles in his last book exhibit failed puns—palindromes, spoonerisms, and other letter games that on the whole fall flat, precisely because they appear as the result of great cognitive exertion and part of the (abject) spectacle of exhaustion. One such example is the title of the second poem, the laboriously playful “Reverse Reserve and You Have Reverse” (2005 15), whose epanaleptic construction mimics going back or “revers[ing]” to square one, thus conveying a sense of pointless energy discharge. At stake too, of course, is the act of re-versing, or rehearsing existing verse, as equally ineffectual. Similarly, the title “Dishes and Dashes” (2005 98) brings together through paronomasia the labor of everyday living (doing the dishes) and that of everyday writing (inserting dashes into sentences): soon after typing up the phrase “could fill up with clouds,” the poetic persona briefly pauses to consider the interchangeable letters of cloud and could before juxtaposing them in a parenthesis that leads nowhere—more doodle12 than poetry: “something glassy as the sky, that / could fill up with clouds (cloud and could)” (2005 98, my emphases).
29Examining Ammons’s last book through the lens of the zany thus aligns with McRae’s masterful reading of “Ammons’s performance of ineptness” as “tak[ing] shape as unabashed garrulity, as discourse that does not always resemble poetry” (82). Trying hard not “to diadem the brain” (Ammons, 2005 14), i.e. to celebrate only its most glorious moments, Ammons instead documents bouts of cognitive dismay and disorienting “mental static” (McRae 102) as also worthy of attention. “Ammons gets at the mess of cognition,” McRae notes (102), which is why his “mature style […] is a form of deliberate ineptness” (103). In line with McRae’s analysis, I suggest that the question of cognitive impairment is embedded within Ammons’s old-age poems as a way to redefine lyricism not as a site of power and authority but, rather, of vulnerability.
30Ngai’s analysis of the reader response to the zany also illuminates the reception of Bosh and Flapdoodle, which came after disappointing reviews of Glare at a time when Ammons felt his readers had lost interest (Gilbert quoted in Ammons, 2017 986). She notes that
there is something strained, desperate, and precarious about the zany that immediately activates the spectator’s desire for distance. In fact, what is most striking about zaniness is how the image of dangerously strenuous activity it projects often seems designed to block sympathy or identification as a subjective response. (Ngai 8)
31A testament to his readers’ perplexed response to a zany late style is the following comment by Helen Vendler in her introduction to the second volume of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: “That last volume [i.e. Bosh and Flapdoodle] so disconcerted me that I could not for some time find a way to write about it. Its subject (not a new one) is death, faced now not conceptually but directly and epigrammatically and dismissively […]” (quoted in Ammons, 2017 li). Vendler then identifies the source of her perplexity as the book’s “bizarre poetic, one where pathos is bathos and vice versa, all often confined to an arrantly simple diction. Why? I asked when I read it” (2017 li). This essay offers a potential answer, which is that the “bizarre,” “disconcert[ing]” quality of Ammons’s late poetic has to do with his search for a postmodern late style, where the pathetic is remodeled as the zany through the deployment of stylistic efforts that typically refuse to seem effortless.
- 13 In fact, as Robert M. West notes in his edition of The Complete Poems, almost half of the poems in (...)
32In “Wetter Beather,” whose title again reads as a pun gone wrong (a botched spoonerism resulting from the switched initials w and b for “Better Weather” meanwhile producing the unidentified verbal object “beather”), the poetic persona shares doubts about whether his poems will ever go into print—doubts not necessarily intended to elicit either sympathy or reassurance from the reader. The poem is zany in that it displays a spectacularly failed effort toward both comedy and poetry. Like the title’s sloppy spoonerism, the clunky antanaclasis based on the word “press” suggests an unrevised text, jotted down with “no / intention of publication” (2005 89): “with […] // […] little / hope that others will press me thru the press” (89, my emphases).13 The poem builds a comic crescendo by proceeding to explain how the poet’s typewriter is affected by weather, especially variations in humidity levels. Like many aging bodies, it “will not do / well in a humidity” but will thrive, by comparison, in cool dry weather: just “[…] let a cool / front through or let a heat wave require the // air conditioner and the keys flick along as easily / as thought […]” (Ammons, 2005 88). Yet the poet chooses not to have his typewriter repaired, the machine having become, like him, irredeemably obsolete: “this foreknowledge prevents me,” he explains, “from hastening off, heavy manual machine under / my arm or confined upon my hip by the arm, // hastening off, I say, to the repair shop—” (2005 88).
33The comedy of old age deployed in “Wetter Beather” relies on the discrepancy between a working mind and a dysfunctional body: the strain under which that body moves (see, in particular, “heavy manual machine under / my arm or confined upon my hip by the arm” [88]) is obliquely revealed through the increasing confusion between the human body and the machine, as in “I am in // the midst of a technological redoing” (88) or again “my talent is so expired” (89)—both of which allow readers to think of senescence through the less daunting spectacle of mechanical obsolescence. Eschewing any sense of pathos even as it envisages “radiant screens [that] no / longer flicker” (88-89), the poem’s embrace of the body-turned-machine exemplifies a Bergsonian definition of laughter as “[s]omething mechanical encrusted on the living” (Bergson 37, emphasis in the original).
34Boredom, which is addressed as a topic and adopted as a poetic strategy throughout Bosh and Flapdoodle, is another aesthetic category connected to the trivial that deserves to be read as part of Ammons’s old-age style as it grapples with ageist preconceptions of old age as boring and/or bored. “Tail Tales,” whose title immediately conveys monotony through its use of homophony, introduces what is perhaps the most memorable poem about old age in the entire collection (coming, as it happens, immediately after “Get Over It”): “Old men drain and dread and dream and dress / and dribble and drift and drink and drip and // drone and drool and droop and drop and drown / and drowse, dry, and dry up […]” (2005 33). Through its clever sonic amplification of /dr/ consonants (drain, dread, dream, dress, dribble, drift, drink, drip, drone, drool, droop, drop, drown, drowse, dry) along with the use of polysyndeton (the mechanically repeated “and” linking the verbs), the poem produces a rather exaggerated (or tall) tale about the drabness of elderly living that paradoxically makes boring sound interesting.
35Ironically, the many verbs crowding the lines of “Tail Tales” in quick monosyllabic succession indicate how active “Old men,” in fact, often are. Yet because these verbs are used without direct objects (even when they command one, as is the case with “drain” and “dread”), any claim to agency seems to have been relinquished. Conjugated in a fractured present typical of postmodern temporality as defined by Zygmunt Bauman, these verbs make way for a present tense into which the future dissolves. According to Bauman, there is indeed “a specifically postmodern, strategy of survival” (29): “Instead of trying (in vain) to colonize the future, it dissolves it in the present. It does not allow the finality of time to worry the living—by slicing time […] into short-lived, evanescent episodes” (Bauman 29). Ammons’s postmodern comedy of old age repeatedly investigates this “slicing” of time into “short-lived, evanescent episodes” that do not shy away from their drabness, as suggested by the previously examined poem.
36On the one hand, Bosh and Flapdoodle reclaims the boring (rather than the interesting) as key to its poetic process and part of the aesthetic agenda of Ammons’s old-age style, precisely because of prevailing representations of old age that have long been tied to boredom. As one poem wryly observes, “even getting old gets // old” (2005 71) so that while the “aches and pains, surprising / and scary at first […] don’t wear off […] // the novelty does” (71-72). On the other hand, the boring conveniently offers a space of disengagement from the capitalist logic of productivity that unsettles postmodern conceptions of art geared towards the (merely) “interesting,” understood as an innocuous form of engagement that is emotionally unexciting and politically unthreatening. In fact, part of the prevalence of the interesting as a postmodern aesthetic category according to Ngai comes from how easily it reverses into boring, since both categories share what she calls an “affective uncertainty” (135), a distinct quality that “resides in [their] indeterminate or minimal affect” (136).
37In a poem evocative of Allen Ginsberg’s “Supermarket in California,” ominously titled “Tree-Limbs Down,” Ammons describes the exertion of walking through a shopping mall—the postmodern setting par excellence—as experienced by an aging body that has grown impervious to the logic of consumerism and simply wants nothing. Read against the multisensory intensity of Ginsberg’s “neon fruit supermarket” (Ginsberg 29) or Ammons’s early walks into the woods, this old-age walk poem ponders “The poverty of having everything,” when commercial goods fail to spark any genuine excitement (“nothing […] which would pick me up”) and price tags expose the simulacra of mimetic desire (“like wanting” is repeated twice) (2005 86): “I stop at a cheap $79 piece of jewelry, // a little necklace dangler, and it has a diamond / chip in it hardly big enough to sparkle,” the speaker muses; “imagine, a life with a little sparkle in it, a // little sparkle like wanting something, like / wanting a little piece of shining” (2005 86).
38Experiencing the “mall halls” (like the “tail tales”) as a space of phonic, commercial, and social redundancy unalleviated by hopes of “a / little sparkle” (itself a redundant turn of phrase, since “sparkle” already contains the suffix “-le” for “little”), elderly citizens, like unwanted goods, are faced with their own superfluity. As the poem draws to a close, the lyric I significantly remains in “the aisles of / desire,” ex-aisled (so to speak) from the “litter / glitter” of “the United States of / Shining Garbage” (2017 445): “I // traipse my dull self down the aisles of / desire and settle for nothing” (2005 87). The poem’s last line ultimately offers a playful revision of Lavoisier’s law of conservation according to which “nothing’s lost, nothing’s created,” except that here, there is “nothing wanted, // nothing spent, nothing got” (2005 87).
39Dan Chiasson, in The New Yorker, once called Ammons “The Great American Poet of Daily Chores” who “turned the mundane—garbage, boredom, his car not starting—into art.” But what if, in these late poems, the lyric I preferred not to undertake the conversion “into art”? The poems gathered here grapple with the paradox of wanting to find a style that might be boring yet interestingly so: “how can I be // plainly, truthfully boring except by being / boring (clever line break) […],” he asks (2005 150, my emphases). As suggested by the “clever line break” placed twice after “be” and “being,” these lines seem to simply affirm a desire “to be”—perhaps even to celebrate what Wallace Stevens, in one of his late poems, calls “Of Mere Being” (Stevens 476). In “Thoughts,” a poem that humorously challenges the Western cult of posterity in the face of death (incidentally, the only poem written in tercets in the entire collection), the speaker emphasizes “being” as superior to “being remembered” through a series of comic rewritings: “this is a version of an old thought // of mine: one forgets before one is forgotten, / so don’t worry about being remembered, just / worry about being” (2005 120). Despite its comic overtone, the poem’s central tenet—that posterity is overrated—“screws[s] up the / strivings for immortality” (120) that has served as basis for many artists’ search for a late style. One may in fact see the odd stanzaic pattern as a way of signaling the momentous implications of such “thoughts” for the entire collection.
- 14 Epstein’s book focuses on “an overlooked turning point in the story of American poetry: a moment of (...)
40Ultimately, Ammons’s somewhat oxymoronic interest in boredom resonates within the history of poetry, where the mundane has gradually displaced the transcendent as a way to reflect (on) the looming crisis of attention that has come to define the postwar era. As Andrew Epstein seminally argues, “The notion that poetry itself might be defined as a form of attention, a heightened mode of attentiveness to the world, seems to be a feature of our age” (12).14 To Epstein, poets like Ammons, Bernadette Mayer, and Ron Silliman “seem to sense the increasingly dire crisis of attention as it unfolds. They anticipate the large-scale cultural concerns about distraction and alienation from everyday life that have become so pervasive in the past several decades […]” (13). Ammons’s last book thus crucially functions as a site of contested attention, registering the many interferences and parasitic thoughts that come in the way of writing and undermine its pursuit.
- 15 On the intricate relationship between writing and pain in American literature, see Thomas Constanti (...)
41Testing the continuities between the interesting and the boring, the poems that make up Bosh and Flapdoodle undercut any shift toward pathos even as they register the bodily pains that repeatedly interrupt the poet’s train of thought and have become a new normal for the old: “when I read I’m asleep by // the second paragraph,” the speaker notes in “Quibbling the Colossal,” before adding “also, my poems come in / dislocated increments, because my spine between // the shoulderblades gets to hurting when I type” and finally “also, my feet swell from sitting still […]” (2005 51). Through its unspaced spelling of “shoulderblades” (evocative of continuous pains cutting across the spine from one scapula to the other) and its disruptive use of “also” (suggestive of cumulative pangs), the poem addresses the embodied realities of old age when engaging in the acts of either reading (“I’m asleep by // the second paragraph”) or writing (“hurting when I type”) becomes hampered by acute physical as well as mental exhaustion.15
42By registering the dead ends of old-age creativity, namely moments when inspiration stalls and boredom prevails, the poems in Bosh and Flapdoodle run the risk of boring their readers. Yet they also speak to common concerns about our minds’ capacity for sustained attention. Far from being oxymoronic, the lyrical exhaustion on display here in the form of the boring appears as a key component of Ammons’s old-age style in that it redefines the poem as a low-intensity energy field. More often than not, these are poems that come to a halt as a result of entropy following a sudden energy loss, as is the case at the end of “Out From Under,” when the rhetoric just peters out and the lyric I suddenly loses interest before cutting off: “so how / long do I have to go on about this. . . .” (2005 136, ellipsis in the original). Following in the footsteps of both Epstein and McRae, I see this comedy-style boringness as a playful revision of Charles Olson’s famous definition of poetry as a “high energy-construct” (“the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” [Olson 52]).
43In “Rattling Freight Lines,” Ammons coins the term “prosetry” (2005 140, 141), a portmanteau word merging prose and poetry that seems to capture American poetry’s postwar “pursuit of the everyday” (Epstein)—through casual speech and a postmodern mode of hovering attentiveness. At first, the poetic persona’s allegiance to “prosetry” is downplayed. The term is ushered in as an offhand remark, caught on paper but unworthy of print (again, much like doodling), as evidenced by the parenthesis and question mark that frame its first appearance on the page: “what I am trying to make (prosetry?)” (2005 140). The next poem, however, entitled “That’s What I Just Got Through Saying,” takes up the word again, this time reclaiming it as “the kind I write—prosetry—” (2005 141). “Prosetry” has thus shifted from the tentative to the definitive, only to be cast doubt on again: “I make a new word for it, probably / not new: prosetry, though, is a word for the // groundlings” (2005 141).
44In “I Wouldn’t Go So Far As to Say That,” Ammons tests the validity of “prosetry” as defining his old-age style by making a case against “the well-written” and the “perfectly revised” (2005 151): “I […] wonder how you can // bear to be in the presence of the well-written / all the time” (2005 151), he asks. Mocking “some little creep” intent on “iron[ing] out” his poems to “make [them] look neat,” the speaker eventually “confess[es] now to some interest in good bad // writing” (151, my emphasis). Evidently, “what to // do about style” (151) remains a central question (“one of my meanest problems,” the speaker assures us [151]) as the poem, like so many others in the book, troubles the boundary between interesting and boring, exciting and dull, comic and just sad. Of course, to expound the boring/bored quality of Ammons’s late poems (even as part of their challenge to Romantic views of a late style) is to risk making them more interesting than they are or intend to be, in the same way that embracing exhausted topics and forms runs the risk of re-energizing them. Yet these are precisely the kinds of paradoxes Ammons explores in Bosh and Flapdoodle.
45A third category embraced by Ammons in Bosh and Flapdoodle alongside the zany and the boring is the gross. Although there are many earlier instantiations of the gross in Ammons’s poetry (McRae devotes an entire chapter to him in his study of the “Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America”), here the gross becomes a key constituent of his comic performance of old age destined to repeal the cuteness of idealized senescence. Conceding that “you sometimes see // old folks cold-free and nicely trained for yrs [sic] / at a time” actually amounts to affirming that rheumy eyes and noses, like “bathroom urgenc[ies],” are only to be expected (2005 44). McRae also reads grossness as part of the late(ness) comedy show:
The substanceless speaker of Ommateum has been replaced by someone inhabiting a deteriorating American body. Ammons’s development from abstraction to grossness does not mean renouncing abstraction; abstraction will still be present in Bosh and Flapdoodle, some forty years later. Rather, he adds the humor of the gross to the humor of the abstract, in an aggregative and inventive process. (McRae 91)
- 16 By choosing the gross over the cute, Ammons is also presumably grappling with the gender politics t (...)
46While sexual anxiety and erectile dysfunction still appear here and there (see, in particular, “Good God” and “Hooliganism” [2005 42-43, 46-47]), thus “produc[ing] a variety of unpromising metaphors” (McRae 108) that are recurrent tropes of male aging (see, in particular, Yeats and Roth), the category of the gross features most prominently in the book as a foil to the cute, through a series of “latrine poems” that repeat the motif of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Fountain yet recast it as part of a postmodern aesthetics.16 In “Widespread Implications,” the tone is rather gleeful, as exemplified by the following lines: “old boys are young boys again, peeing arcs / the pleasantest use of their innocence, up // against trees or into boles, rock hollows or / into already running water!” (2005 109).
47In “Odd Man Out,” by contrast, the clinical description of symptoms commonly affecting “old men’s bladder walls” (2005 58) is mimicked by the highly segmented syntax (with up to four commas in one line): “at the latrine, if you can get started, only, // say, the first level, a third, goes, especially / if you’re in a hurry […]” (2005 58). Introduced by the imperative “listen,” these lines speak to the desire to make such disabilities audible as well as visible especially to those not (yet) affected by them: “listen, talk about old: mineral // deposits stiffen old men’s bladder walls […]” (58). The passage thus becomes an invitation to “listen, talk” about aging, and not succumb to the temptation to simply turn a blind eye.
- 17 Like Epstein, McRae understands Ammons’s lyrical garrulousness on the page as a playful exaggeratio (...)
48Through the lyric I’s (over)sharing of urinary symptoms, poetry is equated with logorrhea and verbal incontinence—“torrents of unexpected words,” Helen Vendler calls it (quoted in Ammons, 2017 liii).17 As per George Steiner’s famous definition in The Death of Tragedy, “Comedy […] tends to dramatize those material circumstances and bodily functions which are banished from the tragic stage. The comic personage does not transcend the flesh; he is engrossed in it”; Steiner concludes, “There are no lavatories in tragic palaces, but from its very dawn, comedy has had use for chamber pots” (247). Hence the numerous references to old men’s “piss-burnt pants” (Ammons, 2005 31), a testament to the embodied vulnerabilities of old age and the range of disabilities that form its every day.
- 18 The nonsensical phrase resulting from the mashup unravels the consumerist motto whereby “to buy” is (...)
49Just like the dysfunctional typewriter mentioned above, the broken urinal signaled glaringly on the page with the capitalized phrase “OUT OF ORDER” (2005 78) in “Free One, Get One By”—a poem whose title revises the sales technique known as BOGOF, i.e. “Buy One, Get One Free,” so characteristic of late capitalism’s push for overconsumption18—becomes the objective correlative of the character’s bladder dysfunction: “[…]—oh, but // that reminds me, one of the urinals at the / university is out of order,” it announces anecdotally, before noting that “a blank sheet // has been hung over it” (78). Collapsing the distinction between organic matter (which rots) and mechanical objects (which break down), the rather bizarre presence of the “blank sheet” covering the broken toilet like a shroud conjures up rituals of human burial just as the overpowering smell of rot (conveyed by the polyptoton that plays around with “rot” as an adjective, a participle and an active verb: “rotted,” “rotten,” “rots” [78]) becomes a reminder of death’s impingement upon the mundane.
- 19 See, in particular, Whitman’s famous lines: “Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and p (...)
50The poem’s scatological epiphany (“ROTTEN PISS: imagine, rotten piss: even // that rots” [78]) recalls the mixture of horror and delight memorably articulated by Whitman in “This Compost”19: in both poems, the poetic persona confronts the vibrancy of matter previously imagined as inert, marveling at the transformative power of dirt (in Whitman) and urine (in Ammons): “stand next / to it, it cuts your breath off” (Ammons, 2005 78). The gross thus becomes one of the striking modalities of Ammons’s old-age style as the poem exposes its readers to the overbearing sensory presence of waste through the use of capitalized words (“ROTTEN PISS”) and sibilants (especially in the triad “smells: stinks: stand”) that form a grotesque memento mori.
51Ultimately, the zany, the boring, and the gross converge within Ammons’s comic performance of old age not to foster proximity and identification with the reader but, on the contrary, to activate “the spectator’s desire for distance” (Ngai 8). “Hilarity and sour scorn typify my reactions,” Ammons writes in “Mouvance,” before adding: “as I look // back, I see not even a clown but a clown’s / clothes flapping on the clothesline of some // tizzy” (2005 65). In line with the collection’s title, Ammons’s sub-clownish spectacle of a “prosetic” late style turns both “flapping” and “doodling” into crucial aesthetic moves that question the very notion of artistic achievement.
52Choosing perplexity over pity, Bosh and Flapdoodle indeed forecloses any sense of empathy even as its poems exhibit, one after the other, the intense labor of old-age living and/or writing as altogether “exhausting and precarious” (Ngai 10). “[W]hen I started this / piece, I intended under the guise of praise // to pour the world’s contempt on old men,” the poetic persona concedes in “Get Over It” (2005 32); but “I wasn’t clever enough to modulate it gradually // the way, say, Shakespeare moves easefully / through changing weathers […]” (32). Measuring up his performance against the achievements of Shakespeare (who, as McMullan has demonstrated, has embodied “the idea of late writing or late style […] in anglophone culture” from the Romantic era onward), Ammons seems here to confirm “the tendency of subsequent writers self-consciously to look to Shakespeare for precedents for their own late work” (McMullan 5). Yet in this postmodern version of a late style powered by the zany, the boring, and the gross, his poems open up a zone of discomfort they do not seek to alleviate, alerting readers to what remains beyond the pale of poetry, and ultimately marking Romantic models of a late style as obsolete.
- 20 Vendler similarly suggests that “by retaining his last book [Ammons] kept his poetry alive, cryopre (...)
53The comic slips and verbal accidents on display throughout involve a degree of self-endangerment on the page reminiscent of stand-up comedians’ self-endangerment on the stage. In the process, they also activate the real time of live performance so that, while the failed puns function as a barometer for the speaker’s cognitive fitness, they paradoxically achieve the quality of live speech—understood as the opposite of recorded, written, or dead. What if Ammons’s late poems succeeded precisely where they failed, by producing what feels like “live” poetry, understood both as unfiltered or unedited but also, most importantly, as (still) alive?20
- 21 “But there are some other significant differences between the highmodernist and the postmodernist m (...)
54Contrary to Whitman’s necrologies, written against the backdrop of the Civil War, or even Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River epitaphs, which rail against the disappointed promises of the progressive era, Ammons’s death reports tend to reflect the flatness of unrelated minutiae. Such flatness is of course one of the key features of postmodernism as defined by Fredric Jameson (9).21 Ammons’s poetic manifesto in favor of “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness” (Jameson 9) is best articulated in “Sucking Flies,” which opens with the statement that “No longer confident of the transfigurations […]—now, / I just put in the wording” (2005 82). Steering clear of any attempt at transcendence, the speaker vows hereafter to “give words to the // passing music, taking it as it is” (2005 82).
55Seemingly renouncing the revelatory depths of geo-poetical soundings (“who am I to prevail upon the shallows to reveal // their source materials, the hidden currents, / hidden drives […]” [82]), Ammons’s old-age style takes the form of a quest for lyrical flatness that itself eventually falls flat—given the human brain’s irrepressible search for more, rather than less, meaning. “In View of the Fact,” a collective elegy to “The people of my time,” uniquely captures a form of magical thinking in the face of death, where despite the facts, mortality (like aging) somehow remains forever a fresh surprise: “well, we never // thought we would live forever (although we did) / and now it looks like we won’t: […] (2005 29). As funerals gradually replace weddings and baby showers (“it was once weddings that came so thick and / fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo: // now, it’s […] somebody / else gone or on the brink” [29]), it becomes increasingly difficult not to experience the work of death as part of everyday life: “our address books […] now are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches” (29).
56This way of thinking about death, which recalls Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (coincidentally published in 2005, like Bosh and Flapdoodle)—where she similarly marvels that “We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away” (198)—perfectly aligns with Bauman’s essay “Survival as Social Construct” (1992), which envisions the postmodern era as operating a major paradigmatic shift from death as a necessity to death as a contingency. With fear of death newly “split into small-scale worries, each one separately removable,” Bauman argues, “the fearful finality and irremediability of the original worry can be never [sic] scanned in its totality” (5). As Ammons’s poem lists the dead and dying (“a 60-year old,” “Ruth we care so much about,” “somebody / else gone”) in the midst of everyday chores (“baking,” “the phone rings”), they become part of the—increasingly exhausting—business of living, so that day after day, “[d]aily life becomes a dress rehearsal for death” (Bauman 29).
THAT’S OIL, FOLKS
—A. R. Ammons, Bosh and Flapdoodle, 26
- 22 The palindrome, which had in fact been authored by Alastair Reid, reads as follows: “T. Eliot, top (...)
57In a gesture typical of Ammons’s old-age style, the book that began with a somewhat infelicitous title also ends with two confounding words, printed in all caps and centered on the page in mock-imitation of Greek and Latin epitaphic inscriptions: “DRAB POT” (2005 159). Thus ends Bosh and Flapdoodle, with a final flourish in praise of drabness, a drabness that is sought out and treasured as part of Ammons’s performance of old age. His “drab pot” is neither the time-defeating Keatsian urn—which will remain “When old age shall this generation waste” (Keats 344)—nor the Stevensian jar “placed […] in Tennessee”—which, though “gray and bare,” still stood “upon a hill” and “took dominion everywhere” (Stevens 60-61). Rather, it is the putrid “drab pot toilet” ascribed to T. S. Eliot in a famous palindrome mistakenly attributed to W. H. Auden22 as an exemplar of toilet humor amongst modernist poets. At once chamber pot and funerary urn, Ammons’s “DRAB POT” plays a joke on us by bequeathing infamous last words, words that simultaneously overwrite TOP BARD, thus producing a reversible signature that spells both achievement and failure.
- 23 See, also, Ford’s review of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons for Poetry Magazine: “In the last ye (...)
58Even as they deconstruct Romantic expectations of a good ending, the poems that make up Bosh and Flapdoodle therefore paradoxically seek “inventions of farewell” (Stevens 371). In previous collections, poems customarily ended with either a single period or no punctuation at all, as if to attenuate any marker of finality. Not so in his last book, where half the poems end with a lengthened ellipsis “. . . .” (as in the final poem, the aptly named “Way Down Upon the Woodsy Roads”), a typographical sign indicative of a suspension of writing, rather than an ending per se, that also draws attention to these endings through the use of not just one but four consecutive periods. Also unique to these poems are the striking strings of words printed in all caps and centered (like “DRAB POT”), whose monumental presence on the page is swiftly undercut by their semantic innocuity. These cartoonish last words transform Ammons’s diary of old age into comic strips: “THAT’S OIL, FOLKS” (2005 26); “RAISE A BEAD” (59); “THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION” (79)—to quote but a few.23 None of these final phrases even remotely holds up to the standard of epiphanic last words, understood as delivering a final truth or wisdom. One after the other, they exit without style, exercising a poetic right not to choose a depth of thought or meaning, in other words claiming a kind of lyrical flatness that is decidedly postmodern.
- 24 “Le rapport au temps que suppose le style tardif n’est pas un amour du passé en tant que passé, mai (...)
59Ultimately, A. R. Ammons’s late-life poetry opens up new “Geriatric Vistas” (Edelstein). His last collection explores lyrical exhaustion as the barometer not just of a postmodern old age but also of larger concerns about planetary depletion in the age of late capitalism. Formally as well as thematically informed by a lateness that exceeds the human scale to encroach upon the geological, his old-age style is a constant reminder that the end of the planet as we know it is also near and it is perhaps too late to reverse its destruction: “so much ice plunging off Antarctica” (2005 45). “Oil Ode” typically weaves together several defining features of this style—the comedic, the pragmatic, and the ecopoetic. Beginning with the practicalities of regular oil changes recommended for optimal car maintenance (“My wife says that the two guys on TV say that / the most important thing is changing the oil” [2005 25, emphasis in the original]), it adds a layer of “Comic Badness” with a sprawling digression on sexual lubricants even as it touches upon the dangers of unregulated extractivism. Likewise, “Surface Effects” begins with pleasantly flowing brooks before directing the reader’s attention to California’s hydraulic diversion system (2005 19) and, finally, carbon monoxide (2005 20). As lateness becomes measured on the scale of geological time, individual anxieties about aging, social irrelevance, and physical or cognitive disability gradually merge with ecological anxieties about the stunted future of the planet. If what makes a late style is its ability not so much to cast “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads” (Whitman 656) but to “maintai[n] a tension toward an impossible future,” as suggested by Marielle Macé’s reading of Said,24 then postmodern late stylists envisage an “impossible future” that is not theirs only—rippling instead into the next generations.
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