Bosh and Flapdoodle: Poems

by A.R. Ammons

"No other contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A. R. Ammons."―Harold Bloom Bosh and Flapdoodle is A. R. Ammons's last completed collection of poetry. Written over a six-week period, the book offers a series of candid, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking ruminations on age, illness, and death, while still finding room for the poet's always penetrating observations of daily life and natural events.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2005

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 3 out of 5]

If you
stagger it

ought not
to be

just because
you're old

this one is, of course, very clever and
alludes to the history of western civilization

also to domestic abuse and also to persons
unmentionable in high office dealing with

significant affairs: but since my poems strive
to dislocate themselves from social affairs,

I play connections diffidently: it is
preferable to be an important poet by not

saying anything.

[Michael Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am glad this book was published, and I had a chance to read it. A few of the poems don't really work for me, but I cannot put my finger on why.
Some have said Ammons is being a grumpy old man here in his final volume. I don't think so. In fact, one of the strongest elements of the book is what is missing in most literature: humor. The poems do not serve as jokes, but any lover of language should be able to smile at the turns of phrase and subtle puns in so many of these poems. Further, Ammons not only goes out on his own terms, but manages to embrace what is new as well as what we assume is traditional.
This is not A.R. Ammons' best book of poems, but it is evidence of why he was one of America's most important poets.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Felt rushed and disjointed, even though it was a long time in editing. Not sure all the poems needed to be included, but it was good to read this as the last collection. The language is still entertaining and fun, but the subjects turn a little too much to grumpy old poet.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book was brought out by the estate of A.R. Ammons, who died a decade earlier and had left a hefty 150-page manuscript. Why didn't his literary executor leave well enough alone? These pieces read like mere drafts and not highly revised final poems.

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

They said today would be partly cloudy: I'd
like to see the other part

[Scott Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not perfect, but I found it well-worth the time.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ammons' final book, and very much an old man's book it is, at its best effortlessly conveying the melancholy that must accompany the latter stages of life. Witness passages such as:
"...we never
thought we would live forever (although we did)
and now it looks like we won't"
(from "In View of the Fact")

Or the heartbreaking opening lines of "Between Each Song"

"I once would have said my sister Vida but now
I can just say my sister because the other
sister is gone: you didn't know Mona, lovely
and marvelous Mona"

But at other times it degenerates into complaints about the degeneration of the body, and while I understand that, too, must be a pressing concern for an older man (Ammons was only 70 when he wrote it, incidentally), I cannot say it's a subject I want to read poetry about.

Ammons is a master of the sudden switch from one subject to the next, sliding without warning, sometimes in the middle of a couplet or line, from the concrete to the profound or back again. The technique is effective at times, jarring at others, confusing or enlightening in turn.

There are at least half a dozen poems in this book that I know I will come back to many times over the years, including "Surprising Elements" and his final poem, "Way Down Upon the Woodsy Roads," both of which contain statements of his influences and philosophy:

The Ammons women (nine of them, my father's
sisters) were jovial women: well, I guess you

could say that: for them, the distance between
fun tears and tears was a flash of seconds

And:

Don't you think poetry should be succinct:
not now: I think it should be distinct: it

should wander off and lose its way back and
then bump into a sign and have to walk home

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bosh and Flapdoodle is the final poetry collection by A.R. Ammons, a poet I fell in love with earlier this year after reading another collection called Briefings. In that collection, I found the poems to be wonderfully crafted, presenting old themes in new ways, and a joy to read. I am sorry to say that in this, the book I am currently reviewing, Ammons seems to have gone so far up his ass that the poems are very, very shitty.

I guess I am being too mean. He was old by then. He was probably running off fumes. And had I not read Creeley's On Earth, another final poetry collection, I'd probably have been kinder but since the Creeley book was so good, I was expecting Bosh and Flapdoodle (stupid name, by the way) to be good as well.

It wasn't. It was worse than good, of course, but it was also worse than bad. It was boring.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only thing I read from A.R. Ammons, his last book of poems. Lots of clever lines and two word stanzas. Generally didn't do much for me.