Archie Ammons's much-loved poem "Easter Morning" begins with an oblique reference to one of the formative events of his childhood:
I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow or grow old but dwell on
When Ammons was four years old, his younger brother Elbert died. In an autobiographical essay he wrote “I have images of him lying in his cradle covered with a veil, and I saw his coffin being made, and I watched as he was taken away, his coffin astraddle the open rumble seat of a Model A. I see my mother leaning against the porch between the huge blue hydrangeas as she wept and prayed.” One image left an especially deep impression on Ammons, as he recalled in a 1989 interview:
The most powerful image of my emotional life is something I had repressed and one of my sisters lately reminded me of. It was when my little brother, who was two and a half years younger than I, died at eighteen months. My mother some days later found his footprint in the yard and tried to build something over it to keep the wind from blowing it away. That’s the most powerful image I’ve ever known.
One would be hard-pressed to find an image that more poignantly captures the perennial conflict between transience, embodied so often for Ammons by the action of wind on sand or dust, and the human need to preserve fragments of its own existence and of those it has loved. Not surprisingly, the wind becomes a ubiquitous presence in Ammons’s early poetry, sometimes acting as an adversary, sometimes as a friend and even a guide.
In 1950 Ammons’s mother died, and that fall he enrolled as a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley. Ammons had been writing poetry since his time in the Navy, most of it extremely derivative and sentimental. Then in January of 1951, while in Berkeley, he had a breakthrough. Virtually overnight, he began to write in the assured, oracular style that characterizes his early poetry. The poem that announced this inception became the opening poem of Ommateum, “So I Said I Am Ezra,” which stages a stark, elemental encounter between a solitary speaker and a hostile environment:
So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
I listened to the wind
over my head and up into the night
Turning to the sea I said
I am Ezra
but there were no echoes from the waves
The words were swallowed up
in the voice of the surf
or leaping over the swells
lost themselves oceanward
Over the bleached and broken fields
I moved my feet and turning from the wind
that ripped sheets of sand
from the beach and threw them
like seamists across the dunes
swayed as if the wind were taking me away
and said
I am Ezra
As a word too much repeated
falls out of being
so I Ezra went out into the night
like a drift of sand
and splashed among the windy oats
that clutch the dunes
of unremembered seas
The poem’s central act is the repeated enunciation of the name Ezra, an attempt to inscribe identity in a medium that refuses to hold it. Commentators have associated the name both with the Biblical prophet and with Ezra Pound, but in a letter to his early mentor Josephine Miles Ammons provided a more personal gloss:
The name Ezra is one of those private associations which poets would be much kinder to leave out. I take it from the name of a classmate in elementary school. His name was Ezra Smith, like me a country boy in a wooden school. I think he was killed in the war. But, to me, anybody with the name Ezra would never do anything but wander. I think of the character as wiry, evaporated, leathern, a desert creature, much soul and bone, little flesh. Too, the word itself is just a little twisted, restless, but soft and mystical to the ear.
I’d like to suggest that another name lies behind “Ezra.” That name is Elbert. Like Ezra Smith, Elbert Ammons was a dead childhood playmate, long evaporated into spirit. (In fact my research indicates that Ezra Smith of Whiteville NC was not killed in World War II but lived until 1984. The fact that Ammons felt the need to posit his premature death only strengthens the connection with Elbert.) While the names “Elbert” and “Ezra” share initial letters and trochaic rhythms, their resonances are clearly quite distinct. There’s nothing twisted, restless or mystical about the name Elbert; it evokes no Sumerian vistas or prophetic thunder. It’s easy to see why Ammons chose not to begin his poetic career with the line “So I said I am Elbert” (though it’s not quite as jarring as “So I said I am Archie” would have been). The substitution of Ezra for Elbert allowed Ammons to superimpose myth and autobiography, universal and particular levels of reference. But the act of assuming the identity of a dead companion gains both poignancy and power when the life is that of the little brother who died, the primordial lost other. My biographical hypothesis is that Ammons became a poet by identifying himself with his dead brother, and by reenacting his mother’s futile attempt to keep the mark of his being intact before the wind.
(ed note: this post first appeared on June 17, 2008)
