A.R. Ammons’s soaring ambition often produced stunning poems, poems of radiant magnitude and intricate beauty. They reveal a poetic mind of immense power, a mind that could praise the details of the natural world while penetrating the abstractions of infinite space and time. They are poems of great confidence; at their heart is an abiding belief in their own genius, and in places they read like a flow chart of that genius. This method became tedious in Garbage, but the range of that poem—its sheer audacity—kept it compelling. Ammons was always threatening to make some wild, inspired leap, to break into a space just beyond the edge of ordinary comprehension, and therefore demanded our attention. It’s the memory of that confidence and praise that makes the disillusionment of Bosh and Flapdoodle, which was written at the end of Ammons’s life, so dispiriting.

All the poems in this book are relatively short, often exactly two pages, written in meandering couplets that move, with intentional lack of compression, from one tangent to the next. As in Garbage, their occasions are typically a poetic thought which the poet has had, accompanied by his own parenthetical comments on his method, usually ironic and self-deprecating, but sometimes outlandishly self-important—as if he is writing the footnotes for his own critical editions. Ammons’s primary subject is being old, a state he does not relish, but to which he has relinquished himself. There’s a good deal here about aches and pains, dying friends, decreased sex drive; more often, though, the focus is the deterioration of Ammons’s faculties as a poet. By turns, he stubbornly insists on the value of his late, loose style, which he calls “prosetry,” then points out how bad—indeed unreadable—it is, berating himself for being unable to think or write as he once did. Most distressing are the thoughts that seem like those of an infirm mind, of an id no longer under control: the lint-in-the-belly-button thoughts and even, unfortunately, the turd-in-the-toilet thoughts. It’s not the subject matter that’s objectionable; after all, Ammons was the poet who was once able to illuminate:

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 [wince] from its storms of generosity:
—From The City Limits

The real problem is that Ammons had seemingly lost the strength, or the will, to suppress his most banal thoughts. Though the inclination towards praise still exists here, it leads only to frustration, even rage, and the scatological ruminations seem like expressions of that rage, as if he intended them to deface the page that no longer welcomed him. It’s harrowing to see how Ammons’s restless need to produce—however uncertainly—kept him from perceiving the magnitude of his earlier accomplishments, or taking solace in them. And while we can understand how a poet who sought greatness as fiercely as Ammons did would react this way to the diminishment of his gift, it doesn’t make it any less painful to watch.

— Danielle Chapman