"Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take"
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Ammons is smuggling a whole poetics into a single, slippery sentence: the poem isn’t a product manufactured under stable rules, it’s an event that invents its own rules as it happens. “In becoming” matters. He’s not talking about the poem as a polished artifact on the page, but the poem as a live process of attention, choice, revision, accident. The law arrives mid-creation, like a footpath worn in the act of walking.
That claim also carries a quiet rebuke to literary bureaucracy: workshop formulas, critical checklists, even the comforting idea that a poet can “find a method” and keep applying it. Ammons doesn’t deny craft; he radicalizes it. Craft, here, is responsiveness rather than obedience - an ethics of composition that treats language and perception as shifting terrain. The subtext is anti-doctrine: if you think you’ve extracted a transferable “system” from one successful poem, you’ve probably reduced what made it alive.
The second clause lands the punch. “Extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take” reads like a patient, experienced shrug at would-be disciples (including the poet’s future self). You can borrow a technique, you can echo a stance, but the borrowed law won’t fully “take” because the conditions that generated it were singular: this moment, this mind, this music, this weather of thought. Coming out of a 20th-century American lineage suspicious of rigid formalism yet wary of pure spontaneity, Ammons stakes out a middle path: poems are made, but they’re made by discovering the rules they require, not by importing rules they can’t metabolize.
That claim also carries a quiet rebuke to literary bureaucracy: workshop formulas, critical checklists, even the comforting idea that a poet can “find a method” and keep applying it. Ammons doesn’t deny craft; he radicalizes it. Craft, here, is responsiveness rather than obedience - an ethics of composition that treats language and perception as shifting terrain. The subtext is anti-doctrine: if you think you’ve extracted a transferable “system” from one successful poem, you’ve probably reduced what made it alive.
The second clause lands the punch. “Extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take” reads like a patient, experienced shrug at would-be disciples (including the poet’s future self). You can borrow a technique, you can echo a stance, but the borrowed law won’t fully “take” because the conditions that generated it were singular: this moment, this mind, this music, this weather of thought. Coming out of a 20th-century American lineage suspicious of rigid formalism yet wary of pure spontaneity, Ammons stakes out a middle path: poems are made, but they’re made by discovering the rules they require, not by importing rules they can’t metabolize.
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| Topic | Poetry |
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