|
|
 |
Ammons' book, Garbage, won The National Book
Award. It is a poem one hundred and eight pages long consisting of eighteen sections
written in unrhymed couplets. The following lines appear in the third section: ...and meanwhile the back hatch and the birds as in a
single computer- of rejoicing... (Ammons, A.R.. Garbage. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 1993, pp. 27-28.) Ammons, an acclaimed master of words, decides the best description for the form of a flock of birds is "in a single computer-formed net," an unusual simile. In fact, it doesn't even function literally. What is a computer-formed net? A net formed out of computers? That's slightly illogical. A net(work) of a group of computers? But does anyone know what that looks like? Is there an actual image to call to mind of an inter- or intranet? Probably not, and maybe that's the point, since Ammons gestures at the religious in the same lines, hallelujahs of rejoicing. Robert Pinsky, another print poet that makes use of birds, also brings the idea of the divine into conjuction with those animals. Birds are in between Heaven and Earth, presumably having the power to fly to either. They are a connection, a link, between what we know and what we don't know, Heaven, a place in which we may believe resides a God in whose image our bodies may have been made. |
