In the previous newsletter I quoted a snippet from a volume by A.R.Ammons called The Snow Poems (1977), which is 292 pages long, huge for a volume of poetry that is not a collected works. The reason is that Ammons occasionally experimented with trying to capture the quotidian—the random, inconsequential details of the everyday in what amounted to a versified diary. His earlier book-length poem
I like Ammons's book "Garbage" (Norton, 1993), which won the National Book Award for Poetry that year, twenty years after his first such award. It has seventeen sections, which might be called cantos if his well-crafted couplets could be compared to Dante's tercets in the "Inferno." Only his garbage dumps do not descend from one to another, better to worse. They occupy the flat landscape of the East Coast, "roughage … above snow in / winter, pure design lifeless in a painted hold." Can't get much more real than garbage.
I like Ammons's book "Garbage" (Norton, 1993), which won the National Book Award for Poetry that year, twenty years after his first such award. It has seventeen sections, which might be called cantos if his well-crafted couplets could be compared to Dante's tercets in the "Inferno." Only his garbage dumps do not descend from one to another, better to worse. They occupy the flat landscape of the East Coast, "roughage … above snow in / winter, pure design lifeless in a painted hold." Can't get much more real than garbage.