A.R. Ammons - The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 1 1955-1977

Ammons Copyright 1977, 1976, 1975, 1974, 1972, 1971, 1970, 1966, 1965, 1963, 1962, 1960, 1959, 1957, 1955 by A. R. Ammons All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
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Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 Book design by Helene Berinsky Production manager: Julia Druskin The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Ammons, A. R., 19262001. | West, Robert, 1969 editor. |
Vendler, Helen, 1933 writer of introduction. Title: The complete poems of A. R.

Ammons / edited by Robert M. West;
introduction by Helen Vendler. Other titles: Poems Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 1. 19551977. Identifiers: LCCN 2017047332 | ISBN 9780393070132 (hardcover : v. 1) | ISBN 9780393254891 (hardcover : v. W. W.

Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

The editions two volumes thus present the 966 poems gathered in his books, including those from three limited-edition chapbooks most of his readers have likely never seen. This first volume begins with his debut collection, Ommateum with Doxology , published in 1955, and ends with the long poem The Snow Poems and the chapbook Highgate Road , both of which appeared in 1977. The second volume begins with the 1978 chapbook Six-Piece Suite and continues through the collection Bosh and Flapdoodle , which appeared posthumously in 2005; the second volumes appendices add 127 previously published but hitherto uncollected poems. In this volume and its counterpart, the text of each poem has been established after careful consideration of the manuscripts and other prepublication materials in the two major archives of Ammonss writing: the Archie Ammons Papers held by the Cornell University Librarys Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, and the A. R. Y. Y.

Joyner Library. Also helpful were the A. R. Ammons Papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills Southern Historical Collection, and the poets marked copies of his books, held by his widow, the late Phyllis Ammons, and their son, John Ammons. The archives include many interesting unpublished poems, drafts, and fragments that deserve to see printand perhaps in the future there will be an edition dedicated to that unpublished manuscript material, clearly presenting it as such. In this edition, however, only two previously unpublished poems appear, both in this volume: Finishing Up, from 1985, serves as a proem to the entire edition, and Bookish Bookseller, an undated comment on Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974), is included with the notes to that long poem.

As a rule, this edition defers to Ammonss final judgment, insofar as that could be determined, with regard to each poem. Those revised and reprinted in his retrospective volumes (the three Selected Poems published during his lifetime, plus the Selected Longer Poems , the Collected Poems 19511971 , and The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons ) appear here as sequenced in the books where they originally appeared, but as revised for those retrospectives. For his Collected Poems 19511971, the three Selected Poems , and the Selected Longer Poems , Ammons ordered his work chronologically, by date of first composition; he seems to have thought that date the one most worth preserving, as he very rarely recorded dates of revision. Although he did not date some of his earliest poems, nearly all those from his second book, Expressions of Sea Level (1964), through Collected Poems 19511971 (1972) are dated precisely, with the month, the day, and the year.

The poems of his later books, however, are dated more sporadically: exact dates are attached to many, but many others have no dates at all. For this edition, then, arrangement of all the poems by chronology of composition was impossible. Especially since most of the early books have been out of print for some time, the best approach seemed to be to present the poems as originally sequenced, book by book. No poem appears twice in this edition: in this volume, therefore, only the poems first gathered in Collected Poems 19511971 represent that book, and the same is true of The Really Short Poems (1990) in Volume II. Readers interested in considering the sequencing of all the poems in those two books will find that information in the notes to them. The sequences of poems in the three Selected Poems and the Selected Longer Poems , books that include no previously uncollected work, are given in Volume II at the notes conclusion.

Each poem Ammons dated is here followed immediately by the year of composition, outside parentheses; the endnotes give the complete date, as specifically as the poet recorded it. Each poem that appeared in a periodical, anthology, or other venue before being collected in one of the poets books is followed here by the year of that first publication, inside parentheses; the notes give detailed information about those appearances. Ammonss books sometimes credit with first publication little magazines not indexed by print or electronic resources; a few of those have remained elusive, and so for half a dozen poems the notes give only the title of the venue the poet credited. Lines are numbered here for convenient reference, but the poems sometimes complicate the issue of what should be included in that numbering. As one would expect, titles are generally not included in the line count, but the titles of poems within poems are counted. The one exception to this rule is The Snow Poems , which, despite the books plural title, Ammons regarded as one long poem: it is divided into titled sections, but in each case the title is nothing but a heading that exactly repeats the sections first line, and so it is not included in the overall line count.

In poems Ammons divided into numbered sections, the section-heading numbers are generally not countedbut if a poem within a poem is divided into numbered sections, those numbers are counted. The long poems sometimes use special characters to mark off passages; some seem no more than boundary markers, but some invite further consideration, and so all are included in the line numbering. In assembling, editing, and annotating the Complete Poems , I have depended on the resources of several institutions and the assistance and advice of many people. A Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP) Senior Fellowship from Mississippi State Universitys College of Arts and Sciences funded research travel. English Department Head Rich Raymond approved a helpful semester-long sabbatical leave and also granted me a second semesters release from teaching; for that and the many other ways he and his successor, Daniel Punday, have supported my work, I am deeply grateful. For their generous hospitality and fellowship during my research trips to New York and North Carolina, I thank Marlene Elling, Robert and Nancy Morgan, Margaret Bauer and Andrew Morehead, Maury and Dru York, and Stephen Craig and Joanne Promislow.