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Substantial Planes by A.R. Ammons

By T.

1 September 2014

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Substantial Planes
A.R. Ammons

It doesn’t
matter

to me
if

poems mean
nothing:

there’s no
floor

to the
universe

and yet
one

walks the
floor.

MARGINALIA

1.
Why do I write, and why do I read? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

2.
Wonderment, I tell myself earlier this year, in my journal. Every time I arrive at a page, I bring with me questions. Every time I turn to the next, I leave with more.

3.
What does it mean to be kind?

4.
There’s a lot of work to be done. I could see the road a little bit now: where I have to go, what I have to do. Really it’s more like a shadow of an arrow, saying, There. Forward. But the path is there.

KEEP READING

SHARED WITH GRATITUDE

This poem appeared in Really Short Poems by A.R. Ammons, published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. (Available direct from W. W. Norton & Company • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)

ABOUT A.R. AMMONS

Archibald Randolph (A.R.) Ammons was born in rural North Carolina on February 18, 1926. His experiences growing up on a cotton and tobacco farm during the Great Depression inspired a great deal of his poetry. Ammons wrote his first poems while serving aboard a Navy destroyer during World War II. Ammons’s many honors include two National Books Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize… (more)