Ammons is probably best known for two stylistic innovations: his eccentric use of the colon and his liberal incorporation of scientific language in his poems. Both of these devices are on full display in a poem called “Mechanism.” The poem falls into two parts, a short introduction to his general concept followed by a long, thickly layered description of a goldfinch. Here are the first four stanzas:
Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
morality: any working order,
animate or inanimate: it
has managed directed balance,the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
some energy left to the mechanism,
some ash, enough energy heldto maintain the order in repair,
assure further consumption of entropy,
expending energy to strengthen order:honor the persisting reactor,
the container of change, the moderator:
What Ammons calls in the title and in line six a “mechanism” is called by the simpler name “going thing” in the first line. Both names refer to a wide array of phenomena, as the little list in the first stanza implies: “goldfinch, corporation, tree, / morality.” What characteristics could these four things possibly have in common? Goldfinches and trees are both living organisms, but corporations and morality? There’s an unlikely pairing. Yet for Ammons all these things exemplify what he calls a “working order,” any dynamic system that takes in and puts out energy, that organizes and repairs itself, that staves off entropy and chaos. Living creatures, businesses, and abstract value systems all possess these features. Notice that the poem begins with an imperative; we are being instructed to “honor” all these mechanisms, not because they are all equally beautiful or good, but because they all work, they all have achieved a kind of self-sustaining balance. (Ammons was working as a sales executive at a glass manufacturer when he wrote this poem, so he would have been especially aware of the importance of balancing what comes in and what goes out for a corporation.)
Now that he’s laid out the general principles behind this notion of “mechanism” or “going thing” or “working order,” Ammons is ready to explore one example in greater depth. In theory he could choose any of his four examples—goldfinch, corporation, tree, morality—but he decides to go with the goldfinch. (He wrote plenty of poems about trees, too; corporations and morality didn’t seem to appeal to him quite as much as poetic subjects.) Here is the rest of the poem:
…the yellow
bird flashes black wing-barsin the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,
startles the hawk with beauty,
flitting to a branch whereflash vanishes into stillness,
hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,
the gastric transformations, seeddissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,
blood compulsion, instinct: honor theunique genes,
molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into
sets, the nucleic grain transmittedin slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
some cells set aside for the special work, mind
or perception rising into orders of courtship,territorial rights, mind rising
from the physical chemistries
to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, maleand female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
racial satisfaction:
heat kept by a feathered skin:the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
burner under the flask)
so the chemistries can proceed, reaction ratesinterdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame
staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise andnecessary worked out of random, reproducible,
the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the
goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operationsthat stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a
great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.
A striking feature of the poem, one it shares with many others by Ammons, is that it consists of one extremely long sentence. He achieves this result through his highly unorthodox use of the colon, which serves as an all-purpose connective between clauses. Ammons liked to say that colons gave his poetry a more democratic flavor, because they took away the need for capital letters. But the colon also gives his poems an increased sense of fluidity, of continuous forward motion, a quality he valued very highly.
The poem begins with a fairly conventional description of the goldfinch flitting through wild cherry bushes, eluding a hawk; then suddenly we embark on a fantastic voyage deep inside the bird, punctuated by the repeated imperative “honor.” Ammons wants us to admire the infinite subtleties of biological processes in the same way we might admire or honor the craftsmanship of a great work of art. To that end he points out all the many levels of activity going on inside this small bird—physiological, chemical, reproductive, genetic, molecular, etc. In doing so he resorts to a great deal of terminology not usually found in poetry. For some readers words like “platelets,” “hemoglobin,” “nucleic” may be off-putting, but for Ammons they have a music of their own, one that he artfully plays against the more traditional music of poetry. There’s a lovely moment in the eighth stanza when he’s discussing how the bird’s digestive system works that illustrates this kind of verbal contrast: “synthesized into / chirp.” Notice how the line break accentuates the leap from more abstract, scientific language to the word “chirp,” which actually imitates the sound of the bird.
After touring the bird’s internal mechanisms, the poem ends by moving back outside, leaving us with another brief glimpse of the goldfinch flashing through the bushes. All the Latinate, scientific language gives way to a much simpler descriptive vocabulary as we return to the ordinary appearance of the bird in its natural surroundings. I especially like that parenthetical remark “not a great songster.” Ammons isn’t interested in claiming that his goldfinch is a magnificent singer, like Keats’s nightingale, for example. Its magnificence lies in the mere fact of its existence, the product of billions of invisible operations. In effect Ammons has performed a kind of poetic dissection of the bird, one that leaves it still very much alive and twittering at the end of the operation.
Let me end with a couple of further observations about the poem. An early, untitled draft in the Ammons archive at Cornell contains much of the language found in the final text, but differs from it in two major ways. First, rather than beginning with the general directive to “Honor a going thing,” the draft opens with the line “how to maintain a goldfinch,” and proceeds to focus exclusively on the bird. Only later did Ammons introduce the more abstract concept of “working order,” along with the list of examples. (Interestingly, the first version of that list contained only three items: “goldfinch, corporation, tree”; a later typescript has “morality” penciled in the margin, adding a further level of abstraction to the idea of “working order.”) The second major difference is that the first draft has not yet been organized into the carefully shaped three-line stanzas that appear in the published poem. It’s tempting to see a link between the poem’s coalescence into stanzaic form and the abstract understanding of “working order” as a pattern recurring across diverse phenomena that emerged in the process of revision.
Finally, a comment on the poem’s title, “Mechanism.” It seems to me that Ammons is taking a subtle poke here at Yeats, a poet who often sparked his annoyance. The obvious point of comparison is with the mechanical golden bird of “Sailing to Byzantium,” which represents the triumph of art over nature. Ammons’s goldfinch has not been fashioned by goldsmiths, yet its internal mechanism is more miraculously complex than anything a Byzantine emperor’s craftsmen might produce.
(ed note: this is a repost from June 19, 2008)
