Garbage by A R Ammons

by A.R. Ammons

The subject of garbage serves as the inspiration for a new collection of poetry, by the award-winning author of Sumerian Vistas, that explores the themes of nature and mutability.

Genres: Poetry, Literature, American, Read For School, Nonfiction, The United States Of America

Unknown Binding

First published December 1, 1993

About the author

Archie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California at Berkeley.

His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

life, life is like a poem: the moment it
begins, it begins to end: the tension this

establishes makes every move and movement, every
gap and stumble, every glide and rise significant:

for it life or poem went dribbling endlessly
on, what identifiable arc or measure could it

clarify: within limits the made thing accepts
its revelation and dissolution, its coming and

going, beginning and ending, being and nonbeing:
the poem moves through smooth or astonished

beginning, the taking on of engagement and
complication, the gathering up of direction and

possibility, and the falling out and fading
away: this is all so reasonable, we sometimes

wonder why grief tells us so we wanted to cling
to being, the good things, oh, the good things

[Pat Settegast · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Garbage, Ammons accompanies the reader on a journey through the wastelands of his discarded ideas and expectations, wheeling through spheres within spheres of the useless and used up: an epic poem in which our hero is the poet and the conquest is an unfailing fortress of trash. Those unfamiliar with Ammons' work may think a one-hundred-plus page poem a daunting place to start; it isn't. Ammons style is so open and playful--his sense of movement so spontaneous and free--that the words take on an intimate life of their own in the reader's mind. Simply said, I loved this poem because it consistently questions all delinations of value and worth. The poem twists and turns until it arrives at something so miniscule the point expands endlessly. Said another way, Ammons takes the reader to a place so worthless it is in fact priceless.

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

garbage is so far the highest evidence of our
existence here... (117)

meaninglessness becomes what to make of so many
meanings: and, truly, everything is real, so... (86)

Đubrište mi je uvek zanimljiva književna tema. Spomenuću ovom prilikom samo tri primera i to iz srpske književnosti: Šejka, Kiš, Bora Radović. Sva trojica u đubrištu uspevaju da pronađu neobičnu lepotu, koja prerasta u stanje sveta. Emons u figuri smetlišta, kroz daleki odjek Vitmenove poetike, ispituje ekonomiju akcije i reakcije, meditira o jeziku i oznakama, peva o procesima i nestalnosti, a sve aktivnosti se, pre ili kasnije, preobraze upravo u postojanje na deponiji. Smeće je ujedno i sferi metaforičnog i krajnje konkretnog, stalno promenljivog značenja: otpad faza, stanje, ne cilj. Zanimljiva, provokativna pesnička knjiga, koja budi zapitanosti.

[Leanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book-length poem divided into seventeen section. The form is all couplets and the content mainly concerns man-made garbage and vignettes from the speaker’s life. As these vignettes are occasionally about teaching poetry, I think we can gather that the vignettes are from the author’s life. Many of these vignettes have to do with minor nature encounters (a stray cat eats a chipmunk that likes to frequent the speaker’s yard; a bird shits on the speaker, etc). Intertwining all of this is ruminations on language and poetry, especially regarding meaning and excessive meaning and ways to make meaning (if you are thinking that there would be a lot of room here to make connections between garbage-making and word-making, you are right! Ammons repeatedly goes there).

I have many thoughts on this book. The diction is purposefully clunky and unbeautiful and stripped of most types of figurative language. Sentences can go on forever, syntax usually complicates and does not clarify. In short, there seems to be a real goal to use “unpoetic” language. Why? I am not sure. This goal interests me, although I can’t see myself ever pursuing it in my own writing.

At the same time, many of the seventeen sections are structured the same way. Musings, musings, musings, then bam! sharp turn into some real emotional ground. Now, does this poetic device contradict the above? i.e. can Ammons in good faith practice an anti-lyrical stance, indeed, an anti-poetry stance, while still employing a few of poetry’s trademarks (i.e., a repeating structure?)

This poetry is also pretty meta—Ammons likes to reflect on what he is doing while he is doing it. Usually, that annoys me. Here, it did give me some grounding. I would be thinking to myself, oh, the poet is being purposefully messy and vague and abstract because he wants to make some sort of (loving? despairing?) comparison between detritus of words and physical detritus. Then Ammons would say something that would exactly confirm this—he’d say something about how this poem is meant to be “dust with a few sharp corners” (well, he never said exactly that, but something like that).

So this book was satisfying in the way that some project books are satisfying, in that the whole thing spins off of one main subject. And the poet’s commentary on what he was doing was like shining the project up and making sure I got all of its individual facets.

I did find this book charming—I’m not that interested in recycling as poetic subject matter, and, honestly, Ammons treated this subject pretty lightly—he was more interested in piling up words of icky doodads than going deeply into the science of use, reuse, etc. However, should he have gone more deeply into what garbage is? Was his gentle gloss of the subject laziness?

I was talking about this book with my boyfriend, and he raised a good point. A book like this, which talks around its subject and refers back to itself, tells us again and again what it is creating. But a poet like Celan uses language to actually create a new world or a new way of thinking. In other words, while the former describes world-making, the latter actually does it.

Thinking more about the “meta” elements and the belligerent everydayness of the language and content made me think how in many ways, “Garbage” could be viewed as self-indulgent. A lot of books from its era (it was published in 1993) and now do the same thing—in one way or another, they issue a command of, enter into my mind! I won’t try to filter or screen or consolidate, because that wouldn’t be an adequate reflection of this incomplete, inarticulate, purposeless world!

I’m getting sick of books like that. Yeah, the world might be all of those things, but I get bored reading the unsmoothed, unedited wanderings of someone’s mind. Why is art no longer allowed to make some kind of order out of chaos? That’s a generalization, but there is a real trend of this meandering, mundane writing.

I did nevertheless kind of like this book. Garbage is an interesting subject, no matter how you treat it; I enjoyed the moments of truth that often concluded sections; there was some humor; and I’m interested by some of the questions this book raised for me about project books, “process” as a subject, anti-poetic language as a goal, etc. Plus this book has one of the coolest covers I’ve seen in a while.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing and beautiful. Had to read a section for a modern poetry class, and immediately bought the book so I could read it all. Eventually wrote a paper comparing Ammons's cyclical view of time in the poem to Eliot's Four Quartets. Ammons takes the flawed and ugly (a landfill, humanity), and makes it spiritual. "For where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption." Thank you Mr. Ammons for reminding us that "reality is holy."

[Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything in this book is, in some way, garbage - the verse is indulgent and neverending. At times brilliant items emerge from a sea of geriatric curmudgeonliness in a way that echoes the immanence of beauty in the quotidian. This is not the type of poetry I thought I liked before I read it. Now, seven years after reading it, I think of it often.

[Courtney Ferriter · Rating 4 out of 5]

** 4 stars **

This is a brilliant long poem about garbage - literal human waste and detritus, metaphorical trash, and linguistic garbage. Ammons is at times funny and other times poignant and he is always reflective, from considering how art is made (including occasional reflections on his own writing of the poem itself) to how humans think and act more generally. The volume is just one long poem, so it is often meandering and circuitous, yet it is accessible in its language. It is divided into 18 sections, which makes it easier to read. Would recommend for anyone who appreciates poetry.

My favorite part of the poem:

[...] in the poet's mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and

shaped into new turns and clusters, the mind
strengthened by what it strengthens: for

where but in the very asshole of comedown is
redemption: as where but brought low, where

but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we
discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:

where but in the arrangements love crawls us
through, not a thing left in our self-display

unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of
new routes [...]

[Tom Danby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having just finished this, I am already excited to re-read and re-read and re-read this collection.

[Mike Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best poems I've recently read.

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 1 out of 5]

concise and accurate and pleasurable are not terms i would use to describe this work

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

unexpectedly one of my best reads of the month I love ammons this is a collection bursting with everything some beautiful meditations on writing a poem itself - a continuous sequence of couplets in however many sections and amazing -

…if death is so persuasive, can't life be: it is
fashionable now to mean nothing, not to exist,

because meaning doesn't hold, and we do not exist
forever; this is forever, we are now in it: our

eyes see through the round time of nearly all
of being, our minds reach out and in ten billion

years: we are in so much forever, we pay it no
mind, we'd rather think of today's shopping or

next week's day off: but we will not be in
forever forever, that is the dropout: is it

too much to be in forever a while: dead we are
out of time and forever, both: I want to get

around to where I can say I'm glad I was here,
even if I must go…

an ecopoetics or rather, more precisely, a wonderful installment in waste theory, which perhaps is a branch (or root) of the eco but I think in some ways more interesting or pertinent than the overriding. : celestial /garbage is so far the highest evidence of our /existence here ... we must undergo the sacrifice /of noticing that life has been spent into our life...

I love this stuff he's a remarkable poet and I'm excited to read more. a must

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review to follow

[Cameron Cook]

I don't know how to convince anybody to read this, or how to properly articulate what this book means to me, but I've read this poem four times and each time I've read it, I've been astounded by it in new ways. What a funny and sad and strange collection of ideas. I'll read it more times, and be astounded more times, until I die and this keeps on living and astounding.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A.R. Ammons's long philosophical poem is an autumnal reflection on getting older, death, the creative process, poetry, language, nature, the spirit, the meaning of life, time, and, of course, garbage. His way of seeing the world is not unfamiliar: he combines the dreaminess and pragmatism of American transcendentalism ("the spirit was forever / and is forever, the residual and informing / energy" "fly the / definite lest it lock you in!"), and there are passages here, as in Emerson, that are clearly meant to inspire an audience: "prize your flaws, / defects, behold your accidents, engage your / negative criticism--these are the materials / on your ongoing--from these places you imagine, / find, or make the ways back to all of us." To use a recurring image, "Garbage" spins out from the spindle of its central metaphor (garbage), and readers might be correct in lamenting its thematic and structural muffiness (Ammons swipes late in the poem at the "bitchy requirements / of form or rhyme"). But I found it all magnificent and wanted fiercely to be reading it whenever I wasn't. I did not want to let it go, underlining, writing in the margins, and circling page numbers. Valid or not, everything here is strongly, beautifully expressed, and his artistry makes the even the most familiar of his musings seem fresh and compelling.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garbage review
I'm always on people about recycling, so after seeing this poem hanging out at the library I had to take a glance. A. R. Ammon picks through the garbage with a vibrant mind of all that matters. Poetry with a unique sound. Here is some of the funnier parts of the poem, not that I was looking for funny but I enjoy a good laugh as always.

"The mind picks up on the environment again turns to the practical policing of the scene, restores itself to normalcy and the objective world the body hitching itself up on the way: shit fire (and save matches)."

"I just wish neanderthal were still here: I would have loved those rugged little four-foot fellows: imagine a nest of workers down in the basement, sturdy little whippersnappers to run errands: first thing you know the muvahs are fucking your mother- in law."

[charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

perhaps the snarkiest and most direct affront to metaphysical dualism ever penned. someone tell the soul, ego, ideal form, whatever - to eat shit, literally. the epoch-defining poem you write was sponsored by the microchips in your laptop was sponsored by a factory worker slaving away for his end-of-day cigarette, the flicked ash running into the nearby streams into the desalination plant into the water you drink, mid-composition, into your piss. everything we "do" is inevitably garbage, an indulgence and faux-spirituality borne out of materiality seeking that which is beyond itself. garbage is the idol of unsatisfied organic matter. garbage is presupposed at every detraction from the infinite yawn of pantheism. what beautiful garbage we've made. more content, more media, more garbage to abject myself from this recursive limbo.

[Abner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Garbage in all its permutations - but most striking for me was what Ammons was saying about poetry (even his long poem), that "poetry is itself like an installation of Marine/Shale: it reaches down into the dead pit/and cool oil of stale recognition and words and/brings up hauls of stringy gook which it arrays/with light and strings with shiny syllables and/gets the mind back into vital relationship/with communication channels..." Garbage made shiny and light-filled and vital. Good to have garbage so that we can make it anew (to be made into garbage again).

[Colin Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many beautiful lines, it was beautiful whenever it was personal, and meaningful, and perhaps still always meaningful when it wasn’t personal: it went against my usual philosophy, as the start and end were the weakest: the weakest parts were the philosophical ones: it was like sophomoric march, emerging April, just may, stale June: it was like the golden years of one’s life I suppose: no real end because he is not dead: like a garbage with value at its core: I didn’t love the talk about garbage

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really wonderful poem. The title is my favorite part, because to me, garbage is a fascinating topic. I enjoyed reading a fictional, stream-of-consciousness treatment of the subject, rather than the nonfiction books on solid waste management I have read in the past. This poem comes at the concept of garbage from many different angles and shines fresh perspective on it as well as on the human condition. I really enjoyed it, and will definitely read it again.

[nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still think maybe I prefer Ammons in his shorter, more honed forms, but his tape-unspooling run-on long poem style is singular (at least as far as my limited poetry-reading life allows me to judge), and the concept here is perfectly suited to his backporch Presocratic, self-deflating, and post-nuclear nature-poet ways. Just doesn't quite stick the landing, which is a risk of his off-the-cuff, (ostensibly) undesigned approach.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely love A.R. Ammons. This was a great book-length poem about garbage. Yep. Garbage. But the beauty of Ammons is how he melds the divine and spiritual with the grounded reality surrounding us, especially nature. He plays with language here (words we use for garbage and describing garbage but which have other meanings). And there is beauty in every line Ammons writes.

[Lorenzo Sivilotti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gentle, kind, tender, beautiful; a poem at once about garbage and everything else; writing, aging, thinking, feeling, loving, losing, and simply being.
“we’re trash, plenty wondrous: should I want / to say in what the wonder consists: it is a tiny / wriggle of light in the mind that says, “go on”: / that’s what it says: that’s all it says”
10/10

[Jo B · Rating 5 out of 5]

“this is just a poem with a job to do: and that

is to declare, however roundabout, sideways,
or meanderingly (or in those ways) the perfect

scientific and materialistic notion of the
spindle of energy: when energy is gross,

rocklike, it resembles the gross, and when
fine it mists away into mystical refinements,”

<3

[Carolyn Hembree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots to learn from him about sustaining a book-length poem through structural coherence. Exquisite use of the line and working the larger motifs of the poem as well as the smaller units. I got bored though and fatigued by depictions of women.

[Corin · Rating 3 out of 5]

"beauty is so much in demand it's a wonder natural
selection hasn't thinned out anything not perfectly

beautiful: but nature, if I may speak of it,
likes a broad spectrum approaching disorder"

[Jamie Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was THE BOOK at one point in my college years. Everyone was either reading it, had read it, or pretended they had. This book changed me for a good while.

[Bobby Horecka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pleasurable read...

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

damn it turns out it really is that good

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just brushstrokes: From cultivation to suffocation. if spring and aspen speech. if love were likely it would not be love.
Really, phew. Good.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars