Archie Ammons and the Poetry of Hymns [by Roger Gilbert]

       I’m writing a critical biography of the late Archie Ammons, who edited The Best American Poetry 1996.  Since there’s been lots of talk about songs on this blog, I thought I’d write my first post on Ammons’s own favorite songs.  When asked to name his influences, he invariably began by citing the hymns he heard and sang as a boy.  In 1997 he declared in a note for an anthology that “I’ve been influenced by everything and everybody, especially by the only poetry I knew as a child, hymns.  The mixture of song, form, and meaning became the basis of flow for me, as well as most of the content I have engaged.”  Ammons’s early love of hymns was strengthened by the fact that he had an unusually fine singing voice.  In a draft version of an autobiographical note, he reports “I could carry a tune from an early age […]  I had a high, clear voice and was sent around when I was in the second grade to sing for the other classes.”  Singing evidently gave Ammons enormous pleasure, since he continued to perform hymns, popular standards, and folk songs as an adult for his own amusement.  He even expressed an occasional wish that he had pursued a singing career, telling one interviewer in 1990 “I think if I could’ve been anything, I would like to have been a gospel singer—or else a country music singer, one or the other.”
       Group song allowed Ammons to experience a fleeting sense of community that he otherwise found elusive, even within his own family.  In an autobiographical draft he wrote “I remember that my sisters, one two years and one six years older than myself, and I sang hymns sometimes in the evening for our parents.”  In 1958 Ammons drafted a poem on this subject that he tinkered with several times over the years but never included in a book.  Originally called “Gospel Singing,” it finally appeared in a small magazine in 1969 under the title “Chinaberry”:

       Out in the edge of the yard at evening
       under the reaching chinaberry tree
       in the belled, gray country silence
       mother and father
       sitting in the cool on the washbench,
       the black iron washpot
       three-legged and belly burnt
       the other side of the path circling the yard,
       under the outer arms of the chinaberry umbrella,
       the wooden wide bench, soapslick dry,
       galvanized tubs upside down,
       cold to touch in the summer dusk,
       contained, exact in inner dreams—
       we stand in our diagonal of height,
       Mona singing her clear, gospel-singing, happy soprano,
       devotional gems, songs of deliverance, glory
       trains and royal telephones,
       Vida, her thin-faced pale alto self-taught
       coming like whippoorwills weary with sleep, next
       in height, and I, shortest,
       too young to more than keep the tune,
       singing together, together to the sandhill fields,
       to whatever moves in with night over the pines,
       coming from where in the west the far great
       cherry on the ditchbank stands, standing out black
       against the farther, lower pines,
       together to the tired, song-starved mother,
       My Friend is the King
       to the father of three, three gray faces under
       the darkening tree, three here, three in graves,
       together to the sleeping coops and quiet barns
       Oh where is my wandering boy tonight?
       On the top of Mt. Zion is a City
       three singing in the deep-lying Carolina country
       far from town
       “prettiest thing I ever heard”
       eyes lost in the green blood of night’s tears
       of old inherited sorrows, grainy & wasted as the land,
       beautiful, wasted as the years in
       the mother’s face, in the father’s hands.

An earlier draft of the poem included the lines “three children with eternity’s myths unconscious / halos on their transfigured heads,” but these disrupt the poem’s delicate balance between sacred and secular sources of comfort, and Ammons wisely chose to omit them in the published version.  The power of religion is more movingly evoked by scattered phrases from the lyrics themselves, cited without characterizing comments.  Songs like “The Royal Telephone,” “This Train,” “When I Reach that City on the Hill” (“On the top of Mt. Zion is a city”), and “My Friend” all grow from the convergence of traditional hymns, folk ballads, country and blues that came to be known as gospel music.  (“Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight” is a bit of an anomaly here, a quaint Victorian parlor tune with no overt religious content.)  Ammons also alludes to two popular collections, Gems of Devotion and Songs of Deliverance, both commonly used in Southern churches.  In an interview with Shelby Stephenson he described the former meticulously: “I have a copy of one of the songbooks we used at Spring Branch Church:  Gems of Devotion, compiled by Mrs. Ruth Winsett, assisted by R.E.W.  ‘Address all orders to R.E. Winsett, Dayton, Tenn.  Prices: Limp, 25c. each, $1.40 per 6, $2.75 per dozen.  Clothboard, 45 c. per book.  WHOLESALE RATES TO DEALERS.’”  Ammons’s affection for this little book can be gauged by his half-playful, half-reverent recital of the particulars printed on its cover.
       Not surprisingly, certain hymns spoke to Ammons more powerfully than others.  In the interview with Stephenson he mentions four as being among his favorites, “The Glory Land Way,” “The Uncloudy Day,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and “The Jericho Road,” all of them included in Gems of Devotion.  Of these, “The Uncloudy Day” seems to have left the deepest mark:

       O they tell me of a home far beyond the skies,
       O they tell me of a home far away;
       O they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise,
       O they tell me of an unclouded day.

Ammons referred to these lines on at least two occasions when explaining how the content of hymns entered into his poetry.  In a 1982 autobiographical essay he wrote “I heard plenty of words at Sunday school and preaching, and I heard the hymns whose words merely went with tunes, but now, as I look back, I see that I heard the meaning of the words, too, because they are the content of my own poems.  ‘Oh, they tell me of a home far beyond the skies’—etc.”  Some years later he elaborated on this point in an interview: “And also, by the way, the content of much of my poetry is not different from the content in those hymns.  There’s a hymn that begins, ‘Oh they tell me of a land far beyond the sky / Oh they tell me of a home far away’—that’s all over my poetry, that kind of transcendence, sense of a distant home, a spiritual home.”  Ammons may have been thinking particularly of his poem “In Memoriam Mae Noblitt,” whose final stanza clearly echoes “The Uncloudy Day” and similar hymns:

       this is just a place:
       the reality we agree with,

       that agrees with us,
       outbounding this, arrives
       to touch, joining with

       us from far away:
       our home which defines
       us is elsewhere but not

       so far away we have
       forgotten it:
       this is just a place.

(Listen to Ammons reading the poem: )

The simple yet potent metaphors of redemption and transfiguration, home and creator, that Ammons found early on in hymns gave him images for longing that he drew on repeatedly throughout his career.  One of the last poems he wrote ends with an echo of another favorite hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River,” which includes this stanza:

       Ere we reach the shining river,
       Lay we every burden down;
       Grace our spirits will deliver,
       And provide a robe and crown.      

Here is the untitled poem:

       When the bubbles of nothingness rise
       out of nothing—
       a fine and brittle crust like
       blown glass, cooled motion, forms
       and in the rough spots
       chinks of someday
       we have our lives
       build wars, consider
       prophets, and
       carefully seek to know
       what robe or crown to wear

In Ammons’s humanist revision, we must provide our own robes and crowns, conferring sanctity on ourselves without the help of divine grace.   The hymn’s shining river becomes the momentarily cooled glass within whose chinks and bubbles we conduct our lives.  In a typescript of the poem, Ammons crossed out the word “robe” and substituted “tam,” a playfully eccentric touch that tempers the Biblical solemnity of the original line.  As much as he loved the dignity and eloquence of the old hymns, Ammons often felt the need to set their language against other tones, some of them downright irreverent.  At times a jaunty tam suited him better than a pious crown. 

-- Roger Gilbert

Comments

[DL]

I can hear him sing "Shall we gather at the river" -- without accompaniment -- and it's a haunting experience. Incontestable that the hymns in church provide some of the music, some of the structure, of his hymns to possibility. In that marvelous late (if not last) poem, what do you make of the striking "build wars, consider / prophets"?

[Roger]

I agree that's a striking phrase, David. Given the cosmological time frame that the poem establishes, I suspect that "build wars" is Ammons's way of radically condensing history, making us see how tiny the gap between building and destroying is when viewed under the aspect of eternity. A more standard phrase might be something like "civilizations rise and fall"; but to say "build wars" conflates rising and falling in a way that suggests the ultimate futility of all human making. As for "consider / prophets," I hear an ironic hint that we would need to do more than just consider them to break free from the cycle implied by "build wars." (Presumably Ammons includes himself among the unheeded prophets.)