Tory Dent's book is lost somewhere in the morass of the apartment, so instead I turn briefly to one of the louderARTS project's poets of the month: A.R. Ammons. I started reading Ammons' book "Glare" a year or so ago, but left it at Roger's house where it got absorbed into THAT morass and only recently resurfaced. "Glare" is a book-length poem that mingles abstraction with what hints at a long narrative line... it's been a long time, and I need to start back at the beginning again.

But in quickly choosing a partner Poet of the Month for Marilyn Nelson, he sprang to mind. In addition to the fact that his work is a fascinating mix of styles and lingual textures, I have a soft spot for someone who didn't get noticed at all until 38, and wasn't critically acclaimed until a decade later -- and still ended up publishing more than 30 books of poetry.

Check this out:

City Limits
by A.R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

***

That is ONE SENTENCE! One sentence, gorgeously spiralling in and out of itself, turning and twisting and never feeling strained. The sense of being lifted out of oneself, of being transported for a moment to a fundamentally new place, is what I believe distinguishes poetry from all other forms of writing. It is what I find lacking in so much of what I hear on microphones around the city -- that dedication to getting it SO RIGHT that the world tunnels to just - that - poem. So all noise, breath, light disappears for the moment of the poem. In short, to explain the world in such a way that only a poem will do.