Gossamer Distinctions

Ammons, A.R.

I have a few mantras. It’s hard to find a good one, one that really sticks like a burr or pine sap or forget-me-not seeds. Like a birthday wish, you really shouldn’t tell anyone your mantra—oh well. One of my mantras is a line from A.R. Ammons: Tomorrow a new walk is a new walk. I try to walk everyday, for my mind and my body. Five miles is the goal. Often I take the same exact route, but every walk is new, for whatever I see or think or feel isn’t exactly the same as what’s come before. In the poem with the new walk line, “Corsons Inlet,” Ammons writes, “the walk liberating, I was released from forms, / from the perpendiculars, / straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds / of thought…” Sometimes I go for days or even weeks without walking and I start to feel trapped. Then I start again, build up the habit again, get out of breath on the Estey hill again, feel again that I can’t let a day pass without walking. In “A Poem is a Walk,” a lecture Ammons delivered in 1967 in Pittsburg, he says, “You could ask what walks are good for. Here you would find plenty: to settle the nerves, to improve the circulation, to break in a new pair of shoes, to exercise the muscles, to aid digestion, to prevent heart attacks, to focus the mind, to distract the mind, to get a loaf of bread, to watch birds, to kick stones, to spy on a neighbours wife, to dream.” What is poetry, I ask, but “that there is no finality of vision, / that I have perceived nothing completely, / that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk”?