Another Close Quotational Call

09 Mar, 2025

The theme of quotes and context apparently wasn’t quite done with me last week. Reading A. R. Ammons’s Snow Poems last night, I thought I’d come across a fun little bit to post to my class board, an amusingly self-deprecating observation that might just convince my classmates that poets, too, have a place in meteorology. How not to love the assertion that

people who have a life
to live don’t notice weather: the rest
of us study it like a feast, eating
the windshifts and coolings,
the details, main shows,
fringe events, chewing and wolfing:
who dines on clouds, drinks
the wind, gets loose mouthfuls, has
for fanfare stripped willows and grumpy hemlocks:  outriders
not regular, he should
address himself to the center
folds, vertical drapes, entryways
wherein to go straight¹

Yes! What have we all been doing, anyway, with lives we’re supposed to be devoting to noble endeavors like maximizing impact and shopping at scale, mouths agape while attempting to identify storm types and features and estimate damage, to predict what might develop and where, itching to be out in a field getting pummeled by a downdraft and reveling even in the sheer terror of it all?

I scribbled down the poem’s page number, jumping eagerly back in to see what else Ammons would tell my kind about itself, still hoping the students would also recognize something in those lines. But just as quickly as I’d thrilled at the prospect of having something to share, I was pulled up to a tire-shredding halt. Because where did Ammons go from there?

  … it is
one thing to tongue pussy and another
thing not to: well said, nature
lover: less polluted these
days than acid wind or leady sleet.²

Pardon me, but goddammit. Yeah, yeah; I should’ve seen it all coming with folds and vertical drapes and entryways, but why must this lovely celebration have devolved into predictable porntalk? By that point, this type of transition in Ammons wasn’t surprising; in this volume, at least, he tosses you into random lines of male-to-male bluster that I couldn’t help but read as some sort of need to prove that man-poets aren’t sissies. And at my generous best, given especially the rest of the poem and its unwillingness to accede to “herd appraisal and praise,” I’m willing to acknowledge that Ammons could’ve been saying that the world tells him that instead of dorking out on the weather, he should be devoting himself to and slangily talking up his interaction with lady parts.³ I was less disheartened, then, about one more round of genitals being shoved in my face, and more by the realization that I could not possibly post that section of the poem on the class board.

What would have happened had some curious student—or the instructor—actually gone in search of the rest of the poem? Sure, there’s the possibility that I might have been in violation of some code of conduct; there’s the more unfortunate chance, especially in this day and age, that I could even have gotten the instructor in hot water for having opened the door to (un-trigger-warned) talk of things erotic. My real shame, though, would have been in being viewed as the sort of person who passes along out-of-context quotations to spread warm fuzziness, assuming the good bits can just shed their origins and float innocently through and apply to every situation.

But here’s something else I want to consider—and in conversation, it would of course have to be with fellow freaks into something other than locker-room talk and “the admiration of can-do” so much of US culture seems to boil down to.⁴ Can’t we just talk about the weather (or any number of natural phenomena) as something glorious in itself, there in the foreground and unrelated to any sort of practical application, free of the need to justify or qualify our zeal or shunt the topic off for times when no one can think of anything else to say? The longer-than-expected search for something like an anthology of poetry devoted to weather (as opposed to ecology or the climate crisis) heightens my suspicions that said discussion might be difficult. Yesterday, though, I opened up the volume that search yielded, and if its title, borrowed from an observation by Virginia Woolf, is a good indication of what’s in store, I may be supported in reveling in atmospheric processes for their own sake. Here’s to the hope, then, that Gigantic Cinema will provide me some good creative observations to toss into classroom data analysis—without having to worry about naughty bits flying all over the place and making a joke of our dopey passion.⁵

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