Reconstruction in Art

At end of Tape for Turn of Year, A. R. Ammons tells his readers that he has given them long/uninteresting so that they could experience/vacancy (p. 205). statement follows earlier comparisons of long poem to an interstice: space between/electrons and to the dull days/when turning & turning revealed nothing (p. 204). poet returns to these images two years after poem's appearance, in an address before International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh (Epoch, 18 [Fall 1968], 114-19). There he recalls more relevantly ways in which poem resembles a walk. Both tend to involve the whole person and not really reproducible. They have shapes which occur or unfold in ongoing way and characteristic action of a moving observer. What tends to be ignored one day becomes observable next, and very familiarity of terrain makes it possible to observe novel and ephemeral. This quality of dulling recurrence has led to critical statements like Marius Bewley's that poems are not afraid of repeating themselves, which they often do with conviction and without monotony and to placing of Ammons among that company of writers who obsessed with one or two central themes [. . .] to which they return on every creative occasion (Modes of Poetry, Hudson Review, 21 [19681969], 713). talk also repeats notion of poem as a betweenness, citing Coleridge's statement in Biographia Literaria (1817) that imagination reveals itself in balance or reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities (Epoch, 114). This betweenness is here described in Platonic terms; it is a vehicle for overcoming concrete and universal, one and many, similar and diverse, and it is capable of bridging duality and of bringing us experience of a 'real' that is also a reconciled, a unified, real world (Epoch, 114). Thus, Ammons sees his own work in terms of a process which is both accretive and dialectic and in which mind reveats function of Metaphysical poet's in being medium through which opposites may be contained. In contrast, however, to those of Metaphysical poets, experiences Ammons undergoes do not lead to an active identity-a self which like individualism of Renaissance tries to impose its uniqueness on world. Rather, as his Pittsburgh talk makes clear, poet considers walks and consequently poems meaningless: The

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