David Barber
from LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: 22 TAKES ON THE POETICS OF LISTS
[1] AMMONS, A. R.
[Broadside]: Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity
[Winston-Salem, North Carolina]: Privately Printed for Stuart Wright, 1979.
Price: $300.00
Unbound. Broadside. Measuring 7” x 16”. A bit of faint creasing else fine. Only 30 copies printed; printed as a Christmas greeting from Wright and Ammons, each of whom received 15 copies. Although not called for, signed by Ammons below his printed name. A humorous poem, sort of an Everyone Poops of the animal kingdom, with the closing epigram In stercore veritas. See Wright A22, ABC checklist. OCLC locates five copies.
Item #503822
Between the Covers: Rare Books Inc.
Gloucester City, NJ 08030 USA
[2] Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity. Ammons, A. R.
Primary Category: Literature/Poetry
Genre: Poem
Annotated by: Coulehan, Jack
Date of entry: Sept-13-1995
Summary
This poem is essentially a list of the splendid variety of shit in the world. It begins: “You’ll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are . . .” and continues the catalog for 45 lines, from gosling shit, through cricket and mandrell shit, ending with “the shit of the wasteful gallinule.”
Commentary
One way to sing joyfully about the plenitude of nature! This poem is an ecstatic celebration of shit. It is also a celebration of language, particularly the spoken word, for this is a poem meant to be spoken. For a more reflective and meaningful (in the concrete sense of “meaningful”) poem on shit, see Maxine Kumin’s “The Excrement Poem” (see this database).
Primary Source: Worldly Hopes (Norton 1982)
NYU Langone Medical Center
LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database
[3] shit-list n. a (notional or real) list of people in disfavour.
1942 L. V. Berrey & M. Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Slang §336/2 Blacklist, … shit or stink list.
1945 Amer. Speech 20 263 In the vulgar talk of the barracks, soldiers uninhibitedly use the
phrase shit list, for a list of men whom one dislikes and is anxious to see embarrassed or
inconvenienced.
1953 C. Beaton Diary Aug. in Self Portrait with Friends (1979) xviii. 267 He [sc. Truman Capote]
uses with a toughness that is healthy and refreshing all sorts of extremely crude and indecent
phrases: ‘Oh, he’s on my dream trade.’ ‘He’s on my shit list.’
1965 Liberator Aug. 23/1 Sweet Mac is on my shit list.
1970 R. D. Abrahams Positively Black i. 8 Moynihan had made it onto the black shit-list in spite
of his obvious sympathies.
2006 S. Gillespie Pissed off ii. 29 People on my shit list can count on being cut off permanently. I
don’t suffer fools gladly.
Oxford English Dictionary. This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, September 2011; most recently modified version published online December 2022).
[4] “Shit List” (1982) is an apt illustration…
In poem after poem Ammons obsesses over the philosophical question of “the one and the many” as others may obsess over their favorite basketball team or popular singer. Consider the opening of “The Fairly High Assimilation Rag” (1983): “Plato derives the many from the one and Aristotle / the one from the many.” In a nutshell, the question of the one and the many is whether reality inheres in countless particulars (the many) or whether there is a motion and a spirit (the one) rolling through all things. Understood as a tug-of-war between unity and diversity, the question has an immediate application to the American scene…. Not “a whit manic” about Whitman’s influence, Ammons uses the inventory for the same reason it appealed to the author of “Song of Myself”: it is democratic, anti-hierarchical, a gathering of particulars, a reveling in what is at the “base” of the triangle, “base” understood as having an ethical or class meaning as well as a geometrical one. “Shit List” (1982) is an apt illustration of the irreverent Ammons inventory.
David Lehman, “A. R. Ammons: ‘God Is the Sense the World Makes without God.’ ”
American Poetry Review (May 2006)
[5] Draft of a poem, titled: “Shit list; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity.”
Guide to the contents of the Journals of Archie Ammons found in the Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections Archie Ammons Papers, collection #14-12-2665
Journals of ARA: Box 7
Volume 50, Page 109
- Letter from Betty [Academy of American Poets] to A.R. Ammons, dated 12 May 1970.
- Letter from Richard Howard to A.R. Ammons, dated 10 May.
- Letter from Harold Bloom to A.R. Ammons, dated “Tuesday.”
- Leaf containing 4 poems, titled: “Hearkening,” “Image,” “Village, Town, City—Highway,
Road, Path,” and “Meander.” Date unspecified.
- Letter from Harold Bloom to A.R. Ammons, dated “Friday.”
- Draft of a poem, titled: “Hearken.” Date unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y.
- Draft of a poem, titled: “6 September.” Date unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y.
- Draft of a poem, titled: “Shit list; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity.” Date
unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y. 2 leaves.
- Letter from A.R. Ammons to Harold Bloom, dated 7 May 1970.
- Letter from A.R. Ammons to Richard Howard, dated 6 May 1970.
[6] … a joyous catalogue of ninety-five kinds of animal shit
With Ammons, even among such themes, one rarely feels “cramped in abstraction’s gilded loft,” because the poems, high and low, know just where they are, and they tell us. American modernism and whatever has followed it are heavy with long poems which attempt to contain the fragmentary, but lacking integration, are archives at best, and more often cluttered drawers. In the three astonishing long works in Collected Poems (“Extremes And Moderations,” “Essay on Poetics” with its poems within a poem, and “Hibernaculum”), we see how no poet is so alive to the processes linking the one and the many, the part and the whole, the high and the low, as Ammons is. He has always been simultaneously in flight toward “the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark” and knee-deep in his own backyard. “Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity,” is a joyous catalogue of ninety-five kinds of animal shit. Who but Ammons could include such in a book called Worldly Hopes?
Mark Dow, Boston Review (Dec 2001/Jan 2002)
7] Subject(s): Feces – Poetry
Title: Shit List; or Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity
Description: Broadside by A. R. Ammons; one of thirty privately printed for Stuart Wright, Christmas 1979. Inscribed “For Reid [ie, Reid Overcash], ho ho, Stuart [ie, Stuart Wright].”
Date: December 1979
Original Format: Extent 17cm x 40cm
Creator(s): Ammons, A. R. (1926-2001)
Subject(s): Feces – Poetry
Location of Original: East Carolina Manuscript Collection
[8] (i.e., list every kind of feces you can imagine and call it a work of art)
Ammons’s most outlandish foray into a maggot aesthetic—and perhaps his most extreme experiment in reversing hierarchies—is the poem “Shit List; or, Omnium-Gatherum of Diversity into Unity,” a forty-five–line poem that consists entirely of different kinds of animal feces….
Ammons’s irreverent reverence for the lowly and quotidian (what could be more everyday than shit and shitting?), his Hopkinesque love for the “pied beauty” of the world’s variety, his brazen and comic refusal of poetic decorum, his often scatological appraisal of the human body and its daily processes, and his penchant for Whitmanesque cataloging and enumeration—all come together here. But “Shit List” is also a conceptual work, fueled as it is by a triggering idea that is at least as important as the poem’s content (i.e., list every kind of feces you can imagine and call it a work of art). Like many conceptual everyday-life projects, it creates an archive of everyday life, an “omnium-gatherum,” or hodge-podge collection, that displays the enormous variety of specimens making up a category. It is a repository of information, a work that deliberately employs excess as a formal device for thematic purposes, and an act of collecting and gathering as a form of attention and “radical mimesis.” [….]
The title jokingly takes the slang phrase (“he’s on my shit list”) and literalizes it, forcing readers to think about what an actual “shit list” might entail. The poem participates in a long line of list poems, but takes their Whitmanic desire to exhaust the world’s variety to an extreme. From its first line forward, the point of “Shit List,” of course, is affirmation, as it rejoices in the variety and awe-inspiring qualities of excrement. It also has an implicit moral dimension—the poem’s very existence, and the brio with which it flouts rules of propriety, serve to combat puritanical repression and any ideological forces that would relegate such basic, daily, and bodily facts of life to silence and oblivion.
Andrew Epstein, “The Tiny Invites Attention: A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse.” Chapter 3 in Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford 2016)
[9] A. R. AMMONS: A CHECKLIST
Broadsides
Recording. Winston-Salem, NC: Shadowy Waters Press, 1975.
Breaking Out. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press Limited, 1978.
SHIT LIST. Privately printed gift for Stuart Wright, 1979.
Chicago Review, 57, 228-234 (Summer 2012)
Ed note.: This is a chapter from David Barber’s manuscript, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: 22 TAKES ON THE POETICS OF LISTS. He has also finished a new collection of poems, Naked (frothcoming from Northwestern UP). Barber is the former poetry editor of The Atlantic. The photo next to #5 is of A. R. Ammons. Photo on top: David Barber. See www.davidbarberonline.com
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Author: The Best American Poetry
