12.11.2017

poet output

The two-volume too much Ammons by half.

2 comments:

Joseph Hutchison said...

I love Ammons and would have these if I could afford them, but the line numbering—on the left side of the poems—is ugly and intrusive, so no thanks. I have most of his books already anyhow, including the early Collected Poems with verse jammed onto the pages, as is W. W. Norton's wont, apparently to save a few bucks on paper. Anyway, Ammons, like Ashbery, is a voluble poet, at least on the page, and the only way to read him is yieldingly, without an accountant's green visor strapped on, or a critic's red pencil pinched between thumb and forefinger....

JforJames said...

In mining, stripping ratio or strip ratio refers to the ratio of the volume of overburden (or waste material) required to be handled in order to extract some tonnage of ore. For example, a 3:1 stripping ratio means that mining one tonne of ore will require mining three tonnes of waste rock.

I find a lower strip ratio in Ashbery...but I do like a lot of the earlier Ammons. Unlike the reviewer Dwight Garner, I regard highly some of his nature poetry. The early poetry was more in line of WC Williams. And "Easter Morning" is a poem I enjoy rereading.

I was reading the New York Times obit today and a professor who new Ammons personally said that Ammons loved conversation. Our poetry is who we are.