Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

296 PART THREE

Well, now he knows how, writing a poem, though it was “a time of tremendous
economic and spiritual deprivation, even loneliness... the only book we had
in our house was the Bible... But all this privation was compensated for by a
sense of the eternal freshness of the land itself,” a “sense of identity with the
things around me.”
His seventh-grade teacher, a first cousin, says Archie wrote a poem then, and
in tenth grade “I wrote one about Pocahontas—it was a beauty.” After high
school he worked in a shipyard and at eighteen joined the Navy, a destroyer in
the South Pacific. There his off hours went into poems. In college he studied
biology, then ran a grammar school in North Carolina, went to grad school at
Berkeley where the poet Josephine Miles encouraged him, and for twelve years
was vice president for a New Jersey glass manufacturer. The state ’s landscape
and southern shore imprinted his poems, but his first book, selling sixteen cop-
ies in five years, earned royalties so small that “one year I got two four cent
stamps.”
Yet the book’s first poem, written at twenty-five, sounds a keynote to his
work, speaking through the priest-scribe who brought the Bible and its people
out of Babylonian exile.

So I said I am Ezra

and the wind whipped my throat

gaming for the sounds of my voice

The Bible tells us Ezra, in Jerusalem, read from the law of God “distinctly, and
gave the sense, and caused them to understand.” Ammons naturally sets him
on the seashore,

but there were no echoes from the waves

The words were swallowed up

in the voice of the surf

or leaping over the swells

lost themselves oceanward

Walt Whitman, declaiming “Homer or Shakspere to the surf and sea-gulls by
the hour,” loved the “words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind.” He
also felt Nature rebuffing him “Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing
at all.” Ammons too feared immersing his voice “in the voice of the surf.”
But wind and water are his elements, and voice his very being. “Somers
Point” has “bay water thrashing” the New Jersey shore.

What are you doing out here

this windy on the headland

said the bay reeds bent inland.

From the beginning he asks how to reach out, respond to the sea’s endless surg-