Briefings: Poems Small and Easy by A.(Archie) R.(Randolph) Ammons
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Overview: Briefings: Poems Small and Easy, singled out by Harold Bloom as Ammons’s “finest book,” is also, his most enigmatic. To begin with, its eighty-eight poems do not really constitute a “new” book; they were written over a period of twenty years, as their arrangement in the Collected Poems 1951-71 testifies. In that volume, the Briefings poems are included in four chronological groupings: 1951-55; 1955-60; 1961-65; 1966-71. And although the majority (sixty of the eighty-eight) Briefings poems come from the fourth of these periods, twenty-two (exactly one quarter) come from ‘61-’65, and there are four poems from the early fifties, two from the later. More confusing: why does Ammons include these and not other of the earlier poems, given that the ones chosen are neither, as every critic has remarked, “easy,” nor are they especially “small.” “Return” (B, 19-21) for example, has 45 lines; Collected Poems 1951-1971 has any number of poems much shorter than this one that are omitted from Briefings. Why?
But there is a further mystery. The eighty-eight poems, not so small and not so easy, that constitute Briefings are arranged alphabetically by first lines. There is not a single reference to this decidedly odd phenomenon, but surely the poet knew what he was about when he began with “A bird fills up the,” followed by “A clover blossom’s a province;” “A clown kite, my,” “After yesterday,” and “A leaf fallen is” and concluded with “Yes but,” “You’re sick,” and “You would think I’d be a specialist in contemporary.” Interestingly, the final poem, the famous “The City Limits” stands outside this alphabetical scheme (It begins with “When”), just as, it stands outside the particular paradigms that characterize Briefings.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics > Poetry
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