For my last post on A. R. Ammons [in June 2008], I thought I’d discuss the textual history of one of his very late poems, “Speaking.” Our genial host here at The Best American Poetry blog, David Lehman, arranged for this poem to be published in The New Yorker a few months after Ammons’s death in February 2001. He also included it in the excellent selection of Ammons’s poems that he edited in 2006 for the Library of America. Extremely attentive readers may have noticed a small but significant textual discrepancy between the poem’s two published versions. Here is the poem as it appeared in The New Yorker:
Speaking
There will be rains I’ll need
no shelter from; cold winds
no walls need broach the chill of for me:
when fire splits seams
out of the ground, I won’t
need the warmth at all; lone, ever,
when you who have given
your days to me, when you
come close, I won’t sense
that last approach: not
knowing how to speak,
I’ll say nothing.
And here is the poem as it appeared in the Library of America Selected Poems:
Speaking
There will be rains I’ll need
no shelter from; cold winds
no walls need brook the chill of for me:
when fire splits seams
out of the ground, I won’t
need the warmth at all; love, even,
when you who have given
your days to me, when you
come close, I won’t sense
that last approach: not
knowing how to speak,
I’ll say nothing.
The variable phrase occurs at the end of the sixth line: “lone, ever” or “love, even.” (The substitution of “brook” for “broach” is a more straightforward correction of a typist’s error.) Three drafts of the poem exist: two manuscripts and one typescript with handwritten emendations. In both manuscripts the phrase is ambiguous and could be interpreted either as “lone, ever” or “love, even,” though in one it looks more like the first and in the other more like the second. What initially tipped the balance in favor of “lone, ever” is the fact that the typescript contains that phrase. For various reasons I won’t go into, I’m quite certain that the typescript was made not by Ammons himself but by an assistant; however, the fact that he made other changes to the typescript but allowed the phrase to stand would seem to suggest that he meant it to be part of the poem.
This may in fact be a case of a typo establishing itself in the poet’s own mind as superior to the original phrase; the most famous instance is Yeats’s acceptance of “soldier Aristotle” in place of “solider Aristotle” in “Among School Children.” After discussing the line several times, however, David and I eventually concluded that “love, even” was in fact what Ammons must have meant when he first wrote the poem. Though “lone, ever” undeniably resonates with Ammons’s abiding sense of solitude (see my post on the hermit lark), “love, even” performs a more integral function in the poem, completing its catalogue of forces to which the dead speaker will be immune: rains, winds, fire, even love.
The poem’s last line also underwent significant change. In one manuscript it appears as “I won’t have anything to say”; in the other Ammons changed it to “I will have nothing to say”; and in the typescript he crossed that line out and substituted “I’ll say nothing.” In general his revisions moved toward greater economy, and I believe that this last version would have been his final choice. But in the absence of an authorized text, editors must make their own choices, based on the evidence at their disposal and their knowledge of the author’s work and mind. The fact that this poem foretells its author’s withdrawal into the silence of death makes more poignant the necessity of choosing his words for him.
from the archive; first posted June 25, 2008
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Author: The Best American Poetry
