Tired of tired hol­i­day tra­di­tions? I’ve ini­ti­ated a new one this year with a dear friend who lives across the coun­try: we’re read­ing A. R. Ammons’ long poem Tape for the Turn of the Year one day at a time between Decem­ber 6 and Jan­u­ary 10 (Ammons com­posed the poem thus, in the form of a diary-​epic, in 1963). I sug­gested the idea to my friend after read­ing Oren Izenberg’s essay, “We Are Read­ing: Col­lec­tive Inten­tions Across Poems,” pub­lished last year in Modern Philol­ogy. So far, it appears to have wings.

Although I’m a devoted Ammons fan, I’ve always had trou­ble with this poem. It has moments of char­ac­ter­is­tic grandeur, but also long tracts of strained and stunted ground. I real­ize now that the way to read Tape, or at least one good way, is in the spirit that it was writ­ten: as a rough-and-tumble exper­i­ment in the gen­er­a­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties of arbi­trary formal struc­ture. Tape was com­posed on a roll of adding tape run through a type­writer, the roll thus dic­tat­ing line length as well as the length of the poem itself. Ammons tells the tale for the first time in the open­ing sec­tion:

it was nat­ural for / me (in the House & / Garden store one / night a couple weeks / ago) to con­tem­plate / this roll of adding-​machine tape, so / narrow, long, / unbro­ken, and to pen­e­trate / into some fool use for it

Ammons com­pares the strug­gle of writ­ing this long, thin poem day after day to Sisy­phus’ fate—battling bore­dom, seek­ing a sign from the muse, watch­ing shad­ows crawl along the wall, count­ing birds on the lawn when the words won’t come, think­ing about lunch or sex instead of versifying—and his strug­gle is sup­posed to be a felt part of read­ing it. Hence, one of the dom­i­nant sub­jects in the poem is the seem­ingly end­less length of the roll, often with puns on sexual com­pe­tence and impo­tence. Here’s one among many such moments, from Decem­ber 11:

Let’s have faith to go / ahead & see if any­thing / will happen: / maybe the tape will run out . . . if I had a flute: wdn’t / it be fine / to see this long thin / poem / rise out of the waste- / basket: / the charmed erec­tion: / stiff­en­ing, uncoiling?

Ammons is care­ful to pre­serve fidelity to the orig­i­nal arti­fact: he keeps mis­spellings and has appar­ently revised noth­ing, choos­ing instead to cri­tique him­self or cel­e­brate his better moments as the tape rolls on, usu­ally a day or two after the fact. Feel­ing para­noid one night when he goes to visit family, he even tem­porar­ily “backguts” the tape out of the type­writer and takes it along for the ride (“what if the house caught / fire while I was gone?”).

Tape goes nowhere fast, and stays there. Like the best hol­i­day after­noons, it is mostly gentle and unevent­ful, pep­pered by mild plea­sures. This is why it is best read from one day to the next, leisurely and in dif­fer­ent states (I rec­om­mend whiskey and hard coffee at dif­fer­ent times of day, but on the same sections—again, great for the hol­i­days). Vir­tu­ally every day, usu­ally at the begin­ning of the sec­tion, Ammons offers a report on the weather and on the crea­tures and veg­etable life in his yard. Three examples:

sun­shine & shade / alter­nate at 32: winter / seems about to, but hasn’t / quite decided how to / happen . . . when the first / hor­i­zon­tal haze of / sun­light struck the sumac / thicket this morn­ing, / blue­jay flew in / and sat on an out­side / limb, his / appre­ci­a­tion, med­i­ta­tive / but imper­fect, trou­bled / by star­lings (Decem­ber 11)

first I heard/ on the radio this morn­ing / it was / 19 degrees / but it’s bright sunny / and / believe it or not / there’re a couple of / flies / out on the porch, still / okay, doing fine on “areas of warmth”: / but doing I don’t / know what at night: / a one-​legged star­ling / was hop­ping around on the / porch when I just drove / up: and a cat­bird was / sit­ting in the green-​withered / rhodo­den­dron bush, / warm­ing (Decem­ber 16)

10:29 a.m: the bead’s gone / 11:40 a.m: fine, hur­ry­ing snow: / 12:48 pm: every­thing white: / 3:20 pm: still snow­ing (Decem­ber 18)

I don’t know, per­haps the accu­mu­la­tion of minu­tiae from day to day will annoy some read­ers. I’ve found it deeply plea­sur­able these last few weeks, espe­cially between ses­sions of read­ing while I move about in my own day and local weather, noting dif­fer­ently the vari­ety there. Ammons embraces the mun­dane with an almost reli­gious inten­sity, and he accepts his fool­ish­ness and the fool­ish­ness of writ­ing his fool poem with grace. Some­times he mocks his own self-​seriousness:

the poet lolls, suck­led / up in the rap­ture of his / sacred saying: // a nerve­less crea­ture / because all nerves: odd-one-out / because he stands aside to / see: fool that makes / fool­ish­ness a law: / will you be ruled, / sir, metered out? / the poet implores you to / get the hell off his back: / he will have / room / and a uni­verse / to cry all day / the tram­pling of a weed

At other times, we see that Ammons’ wonder in the face of birds and weeds is of a piece with his wonder in the face of more typ­i­cal sub­jects of sub­lim­ity. Between the weather and a descrip­tion of lunch—soup, sand­wich, milk, cookie, coffee—on Decem­ber 14, Ammons com­plains about the length of his tape, then launches into a sort of bib­li­cal lament on damned “exclu­sions”:

lepers on their islands, / drunks impris­oned in / drunk­en­ness, / the dis­ap­pear­ances (un- / noticed—the streets / seem always full, / lively & young enough) / into ill­ness, stiff bones, strokes, graves: / the silent child that stays / indoors, / unable to con­nect: / I feel the bit­ter­ness of / fate: I feel the / bit­ter­ness of fate: // what it means to / drive away from the / house: take a walk / down the street: / join the day­light / world’s clean going

This is one of many lyric erup­tions from within Ammons’ hum­drum cat­a­log, but he is also in the poem a “recorder” of mere events, and some­times ordi­nar­i­ness is inter­rupted by the extra­or­di­nary from with­out. Decem­ber 8 ends with a descrip­tion of rare winter thun­der and light­ning, fol­low­ing by a “sub­mis­sive, unwill­ing driz­zle.” Ammons leaves his diary for the night with an appar­ently incon­se­quen­tial set of images, recorded first in rela­tion to his poem:

sequence: events / stalled in their / occur­rence: a / run­ning with, fleet / recorder at the crest of change: / a plane is in / this: / it rum­bles in the / dis­tance, a chord through / my cir­cu­lar knowl­edge: it / is out in the rain

Decem­ber 9 opens with weather again, but soon reveals a deeper sig­nif­i­cance there. The same storm that had moved in Ammons poem and mind, lend­ing a mild wonder to this early sec­tion, has wrought “real” vio­lence else­where:

sunny again: // last night a plane / over Delaware struck the / storm / & 80 lives descended in / flames

A bizarre sense of guilt enters this sec­tion, as though Ammons’ use of the storm in the poem and the death of the plane’s pas­sen­gers were some­how con­nected, just as the loss of these lives is con­nected, inti­mately, to lesser losses:

real­ity last night was / more than I appre­hended: / is far more today / than fee­ble­ness lets me / know: / wind ruined sev­eral dead / weeds and rain / de-​seeded a lot of grass

It is in this way that Tape is most obvi­ously con­nected with Ammons’ larger poetic project. He is a poet of the very large and the very small, of the uni­ver­sal in the par­tic­u­lar and of unity in dif­fer­ence, as he reminds us explic­itly more than once in this poem. But what is the use of grand philo­sophic spec­u­la­tion, vatic vision, or even of cheap humor, when it all takes place on adding-​machine tape? Who is Ammons talk­ing to? I think I’ll have more to say about that after I’ve fin­ished the poem (look for another post on or around Jan­u­ary 10). For now, I leave you instead with his own answer, or one of them:

we must all / die, it’s quite / remarkable— / nev­er­the­less, true: / but break­fast, and get­ting / off to school & work, and / what color to paint the / second bed­room is / mean­ing­ful: it’s / no / great / joy to me / that I plunge deeply / (I think) into things: / eter­nal / sig­nif­i­cance is of some / sig­nif­i­cance to me: I / don’t know just how: but / tem­po­ral sig­nif­i­cance is / a world I can partly make