Garbage: A Poem

Rating:
Summary: Who could trash this???
Review: I think it's fantastic that Norton has reissued Garbage. It and the earlier Tape for the Turn of the Year are great examples of how the long poem can still be a fun, engaging, page-turner of a genre. Ammons was a crackerjack writer and he is at his best in Garbage. It starts off with an audacious premise - that garbage is a worthy subject for epic poetry. But, the next thing you know, Ammons is making you a believer with his astounding lyricism and exuberance. He then turns his romanticized trash heap into a springboard for a engaging discussion of life, art and the question of what is permanent. Garbage is bursting at the seams with Ammons' wry humor, old-fashioned homespun wisdom and refreshingly self-deprecating honesty about the befuddlement of the human condition. A hoot to read!

Rating:
Summary: One of the century's top 3
Review: In terms of importance and pleasure--perhaps the only meaningful qualities of verse--Garbage is right up there with Harmonium and the Four Quartets. I can think of no other books last century which have had such a profound effect on the art than the aforementioned books of Stevens and Eliot. Garbage is sure to have such an effect for 21st century poets. It has completely transformed my poetry; I can no longer write in a stilted and affected voice. What's more, it has provided me days upon days of intellectual pleasure.

The Ammons line is something totally unprecedented in poetry. Tentative, flippant, musical, supple and tough:

...Mike, the young

kid who does things for us, cut down the
thrift with his weedeater, those little white

flowers more like weedsize more than likely:
sometimes called cliff rose: also got the grass

out of the front ditch now too wet to mow, slashed:
the dispositional axis is not supreme (how tedious)

and not a fiction (how clever) but plain (greatness
flows through the lowly) and a fact (like as not)

Ultimately it is poets who decide which poet achieves greatness and which poet is forgotten. I believe Ammons will influence the coming generation of poets more than anyone else will, and Garbage is sure to play a starring role in this influence.

Rating:
Summary: a timeless poet & master of the long poem
Review: This book is brilliant, & so unique, through & through. Very particular music, with amazing, complex metaphors; a luminous lexus; a solid, earthy grip in the world with settings in real places such as route I-95 in Florida; & even humor. For example, at one moment in the book, there's an archetype which he comments on being "another Archie." His poetry never stops moving. I think his writing, especially this book with all its idosyncrasies & ideas, is very important poetry to know.