A.R. Ammons, Bosh and Flapdoodle (Norton, 2005),
hardback, 159pp., $22.95

     Bosh and Flapdoodle is A.R. Ammons’ final completed collection of poems, and comes with export-strength testimonials. David Lehman calls it “a wonderful book by a major American poet—full of wisdom, pathos, humor, mortal longings, and intimations of immortality.” Conversely, Harold Bloom perceives “intimations of our common mortality,” judging that “No other contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A.R. Ammons.” Aside from raising a smirk with that rather finical set of commas around the words “in America” (presumably the pause is meant to reassure us that, yes, Harold really has read all the contemporary poets before he hands out his lapidary laurels) Bloom’s eagerness to usher Ammons into the posthumous hall of fame is also somewhat at odds with the tone of many of these poems: “I’m sure you think all this is just as important and worthy of posterity as I do…,” Ammons writes. Thinking about A.E. Housman, in another poem, serves to 

                                        …screw up the
strivings for immortality: no use to be

immortal in the bodies of others while one’s
own body molds away or flakes off in pasty
chunks… 

The move against inflated claims is characteristic of a general approach in the poems: towards self-deprecation, demystifying, debunking.

     We might want to untangle the possible self-servingness of these moves – most often they finally strengthen the stable, self-possessed authority of the singular subject—but the charm of the whole performance goes some way to balancing such an objection. John Ashbery pins this down rather well in his dust-jacket flap praise for the “lightness and nimbleness” with which Ammons “wears the disguise of ‘grumpy old man.’” We may well wish the poems would stray further, linguistically, from their “diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact,” but they don’t outstay their welcome, by and large, and when they do we feel invited to skip forward, or do something else: “I have 4 / interests—money, poetry, sex, death: I guess // I can jostle those….”

     Stylistically, this comes across in a number of ways. The poems have throwaway titles that you’ve forgotten by the time you finish the poem and are pleased to notice the second time. There’s a joy in overdoing things—one poem asks “do I have to tell you everything?”, but the rest of the book proceeds to tell us too much, more than we needed; to overwork its riffs beyond the point of repair: “change your lifestyle: / that’s, take the life out of your style and // the style out of your life…” Inevitably, this can sometimes become a little boring, but it’s boring in a way that seems essentially faithful to the precise tenor and fascination of being bored, the texture of being eloquent and strung out. A number of the poems end in a set of ellipses followed by an enigmatically indented and capitalised phrase, sometimes a self-delightedly unfunny joke (“THAT’S OIL, FOLKS,” ends “Oil Ode”) and other times a mysterious gobbet of poésie pure: “DRAB POT.” Or else the endings can be mischievously silly: “this train has run out of track pppssssssttt….”

     The press release accompanying this book mentions, as evidence that he is a “people’s poet,” the fact that Ammons “championed lowercase letters long before the Internet and uses the colon as an all-purpose punctuation mark.” This is a little imprecise, perhaps: lowercase letters have always done alright for themselves without being “championed” by anybody (let alone by the—uppercase-I—“Internet”), and anyway the poems in Bosh and Flapdoodle use uppercase letters for proper nouns and the beginnings of sentences. But the colon is indeed the most prominent punctuation mark (followed by the comma, apostrophe, exclamation point, and parentheses). If the two main kinds of clausal relation governed by the colon are expansion and explanation, Ammons’ practice suggests a combination of the two. In a sense each clause resembles one more in a continuous string of aphorisms quoted to illustrate the sum of the preceding.

     What this produces is an effect of discursive levelling which seems sometimes pleasing and sometimes a little disappointing—the sense is that each part of the poem is as meaningfully or meaninglessly significant as each other; there are no climactic points, no peaks and troughs. A poem called “Quibbling the Colossal” makes a partial statement of this poetics: 

…the reason 

I can’t attain world view or associational
complexity is that when I read I’m asleep by 

the second paragraph: also, my poems come in
dislocated increments… 

—but these increments, the poem continues, might just let some light in, “more than what little was left,” a ranging expansiveness winningly glossed as “room to / breathe and stretch and not give a shit.”

     This also gives room, of course, to take swings at some old-fashioned kinds of “meaning”; piecemeal, the book suggests a fairly convincing apology for a poetry that tries to be referential, that works out the central, “mainstream” kinds of meaning—“meaning is really good while it lasts… to go the / other way further out into the periphery is // to lose hold on the central issues and / become thin, manneristic, too arty…” We might or might not agree with this, but it is a strength of the book that it is prepared to discuss its own poetics. It makes claims; it is upfront about where this writer judges the centre and the periphery of the matter to be (which is also, of course, a political matter); and it makes clear the writer’s own position vis-à-vis that “centre,” for the poems to stand or fall by the strength of these claims on our attention. Whether or not this makes the poet “likelier to become a classic,” as Bloom says, it certainly gives Bosh and Flapdoodle an integrity and sense of proportion that belies such naïve and evasive appropriations.

— Matthew Sperling