The American Century: Literature since 1945 545character of things. The organisms he creates must respond to life as particularity
and process; they must be dynamic, unique to each occasion; above all, they must be
open. “There is no finality of vision,” Ammons concludes (with deliberate
inconclusiveness), “... I have perceived nothing completely, / ... tomorrow a new
walk is a new walk.” Echoing a whole series of great American texts, Ammons also
speaks here for another generation of poets who respond to “The wonderful
workings of the world” with their own persistent workings and reworkings of the
imagination. “Ecology is my word,” Ammons affirms in another, longer poem
published in 1965, Tape for the Turn of the Year, “... come / in there: / you will find
yourself / in a firm country: / centers and peripheries / in motion.” “My other word
is provisional,” he continues, “... you may guess / the meanings from ecology / ... /
the center arising / form / adapts, tests the / peripheries, draws in / ... / responds to
inner and outer / change.” Those lines could act as an epigraph to many volumes of
American verse published during the 1960s and later, in which the poet tries to
insert himself in the processes of life, and, in turn, the reader is asked to insert
himself in the processes of the work.
The emphasis Ammons places on ecology in his Tape for the Turn of the Year or
later works such as Glare (1997) brings into focus one aspect of postwar American
poetry that unites formalist poets, confessional poets, and others: a willingness to
attend to social and political issues, and to the historical experience of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. On one, deep level, such attention is
unavoidable: we are historical beings and our participation in sociopolitical processes
must necessarily feed into everything we do. Sylvia Plath clearly had this in mind
when she said “the issues of the time which preoccupy me ... are the incalculable
genetic effects of fallout and ... the terrifying ... marriage of big business and the
military in America”; however, she went on, “my poems do not turn out to be about
Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not
about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the blackness of the moon over a yew
tree in a neighborhood graveyard.” As it happens, this is not the whole truth about
Plath’s own work: her poems sometimes address social problems (notably, the
position of women), and she is not afraid to link her personal intimations of disaster
to the holocaust of world war and the apocalypse now threatened by nuclear
weaponry. But, as a general point, it is still worth making: it is one thing to have a
historical consciousness – and this nobody, not even the most abstracted writer, can
avoid – and quite another to be historically involved, to have the imagination of
commitment. One form of such commitment has already been touched on with
reference to the work of Sexton and Rich: the willingness of many poets to confront
the questions of sexual identity and sexual politics. This is not, incidentally, a
willingness confined to women poets. Robert Bly, among others, seemed ready to
blame the failure of American culture on its denial of what he sees as the inner-
directed feminine principle (“the mother of solitude”) in favor of the outer-directed
masculine one (“the father of rocks”). Later, in Iron John (1990), he developed his
ideas into a bestselling series of instructions on becoming a whole man. Other
kinds of commitment have been generated among poets speaking in and for “ethnic”GGray_c05.indd 545ray_c 05 .indd 545 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM