This is the last of a four-part series celebrating April as National Poetry Month.

 

Can you regain innocence?
Yes, but only for a moment.
Seize it. Love it.

This is not a poem - just words that mean something.
— Lisa McMahan

Maybe it’s my MTV attention span. Maybe I am too busy these days. Maybe it’s the way my brain works.

Lately, I’ve been unable to read anything much longer than a page. I read pieces of the newspaper - the headline and a few paragraphs down. I start books I can’t seem to finish. I am drawn to short passages, small books, quick poems, quotes, flashes of words. And when I read poems, I’m more interested in poetic phrases than the poem itself.

I still read a lot. I just can’t read a lot at one time. It’s a restlessness that comes from reading short poems.

A few weeks ago, I finally found the perfect book for me - The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons. No poems longer than a page. No rambling sentences. Just pure genius whittled to its core. They range from philosophical to whimsical. “Progress Report,” for example is a quick musing:

Now I’m
into things

so small
when I

say boo
I disappear

No need for pages of critique here. Just a thought to make your mind think in a new way. Reading this book was the perfect candy I’d been waiting for.

The day I bought the book, I read these poems to my high school classes, and a hush fell over them as if they’d been charmed by some magical power. Try this one on for size. It’s called “Self.”

I wake up from
a nap
and sense a
well in myself:
I have
dropped into
the well:
the ripples
have just
vanished

No, there’s not a period at the end. Ammons chose to leave this idea open ended, as if the poem is a door that opens the mind to something larger. So often, we too have these little epiphanies throughout the day. Maybe at a stoplight or while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. We are thinking machines, constantly processing information and experience. Ammons teaches us to take stock of those ideas and jot them down. Too often my students and I have been guilty of rejecting a clever thought because it doesn’t seem important or fully developed. But the more I think about it, we’re full of all these little miscellaneous ideas - quotes, witty phrases, puns, character names, made-up words, questions. These, too, have their place in literature, and when written down and arranged, make for some excellent poetry. Here’s another Ammons delight called “Pebble’s Story” :

Wearing away
wears

wearing away
away

It takes awhile for that one to sink in. Read it over a couple of times and let it roll over in your mind. Using six words - really just three - Ammons paints a subtle, yet sublime picture.

Ammons died this year at age 75. Though perhaps not as famous as Carl Sandburg or Robert Frost, he left a major mark on 20th century poetry. Born a few miles outside of Whiteville, N.C., he graduated from Wake Forest College and went to live in upstate New York where he became a distinguished professor of English at Cornell University even though he’d never finished his master’s studies. His poems are often filled with the love of nature and people that stemmed out of his rural raising. He won two National Book Award prizes, the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a MacArthur Prize Fellow Award and many other accolades including induction into the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ammons packed so much into his poems. But don’t take my word for it. Go to your nearest library or independent bookstore and check him out for yourself.

Like all great poets, he learned how to chose just the right word with painstaking precision and impeccable style. Reading his poems, I am reminded of a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote, “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

So let Ammons’ words encourage you to write down your thoughts. It doesn’t matter if they don’t turn out to be poems of the traditional sense. What you think is important, and your words may have the power to free someone else’s mind.

(Beadle is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville.)

 

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