298 PART THREE
Hopkins found constantly splaying up streamwater. Words are not things, yet
“things are slowed motion,” says Ammons. Otherwise why would an artist over
and over sketch hovering clouds, or paint surf endlessly breaking and forming?
What grips him are “dunes of motion, organizations of grass”—in a word,
ecology. A serious amateur natural scientist, Ammons swore by the term in
1963:
ecology is my word: tag
me with that.He likes “disorderly orders of bayberry,” “manifold events of sand,” biosystems
reckless of the square grids Jefferson’s 1785 Land Ordinance decreed for ruling
our western lands.
All these unions of order with flux, stillness with motion, occur in an au-
tumn poem from the Jersey shore. “Corsons Inlet” has one of those classic
openings,
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea...Like any beach walk, this 128-line, three-sentence poem pauses then moves
on, noticing things, freely indented, again and again, in the root sense
experimental.
the news to my left over the dunes and
reeds and bayberry clumps was
fall: thousands of tree swallows
gathering for flight:
an order held
in constant change:Since “Poetry is news that stays news” (Ezra Pound), we note those colons: “just
connect and connect and connect,” Ammons said about colons, “the world is so
interpenetrated.” Dunes with gathering swallows, as in Keats’s “To Autumn,”
equal “an order held / in constant change.”
“Corsons Inlet” tracks a walk “again this morning,” a fresh motion of mind,
moving and staying like the dunes so dear to Stanley Kunitz and May Swenson.
Ammons writes (and we read) not for reportage, “you don’t want the poem to
amount to no more than what you already knew when you began to write.” So
“Corsons Inlet,” poem and place alike, stays open to action, discovery, knowing
nothing final except “that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.”
“I have been for a / walk:” Ammons tells us years later in “Easter Morning,”
the wind is tranquil: the brook
works without flashing in an abundant