"I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry"
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Ammons opens with a gracious bow that doubles as a sidestep. "I am grateful" signals civility, but the dash immediately undercuts it: "though I can't keep up with" is less a confession than a quiet indictment. The line performs a poet's fatigue with the industry of explanation - the endless critical apparatus that builds around poems like scaffolding that never quite comes down.
The phrase "flood of articles, theses, and textbooks" is doing heavy work. "Flood" suggests both quantity and a kind of ecological overwhelm: scholarship as weather event, not dialogue. Ammons isn't anti-intellectual; he's allergic to the presumption that poetry has a stable "nature" that can be captured, categorized, and circulated in institutional packaging. That last clause - "that mean to share insight" - lands with gentle skepticism. "Mean to" implies intention without guaranteeing result; it's the softest way to question whether all this insight actually clarifies anything, or whether it mainly reproduces itself.
Context matters: Ammons came up in mid-century American letters, when the academy increasingly became poetry's primary patron, critic, and gatekeeper. His work often treats form as motion, attention as a living practice, and meaning as contingent - qualities that resist becoming a textbook unit. The sentence isn't a rant; it's a poet asserting jurisdiction. Read it as a boundary: appreciation for readers, impatience with systems, and a reminder that poetry isn't a specimen. It's an event, and events don't sit still long enough to be filed.
The phrase "flood of articles, theses, and textbooks" is doing heavy work. "Flood" suggests both quantity and a kind of ecological overwhelm: scholarship as weather event, not dialogue. Ammons isn't anti-intellectual; he's allergic to the presumption that poetry has a stable "nature" that can be captured, categorized, and circulated in institutional packaging. That last clause - "that mean to share insight" - lands with gentle skepticism. "Mean to" implies intention without guaranteeing result; it's the softest way to question whether all this insight actually clarifies anything, or whether it mainly reproduces itself.
Context matters: Ammons came up in mid-century American letters, when the academy increasingly became poetry's primary patron, critic, and gatekeeper. His work often treats form as motion, attention as a living practice, and meaning as contingent - qualities that resist becoming a textbook unit. The sentence isn't a rant; it's a poet asserting jurisdiction. Read it as a boundary: appreciation for readers, impatience with systems, and a reminder that poetry isn't a specimen. It's an event, and events don't sit still long enough to be filed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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