A.R. Ammons’ long poem “Corsons Inlet” reports a morning’s walk near a beach in New Jersey. It begins matter-of-factly, “I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning,” and the first stanza summarizes the itinerary. Although it reads like a diary entry, the poem is also a manifesto for a particular kind of free verse in which there will be:

… no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to  precept.

The American city, with its rectangular blocks and buildings, represents thought as organized, articulated, and linear. In the city, nature has been humbled to design. Similarly, in a sonnet or a villanelle, language has been forced into a form. But Ammons reports that on the Jersey shore,

I was released from forms,

from the perpendiculars,

      straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends

               of sight:

The narrator offers precise observations about changes that occur gradually. For instance, a dune is really different from a creek, but there is no point where one turns to the other. The “transition is clear / as any sharpness: but ‘sharpness’ spread out … ”

The poem’s layout–with its ragged margins and sudden blank lines–resembles the shapes of nature on a sandy coastline on a muggy, hazy day. On the dunes, and elsewhere “in nature there are few sharp lines.”

If the poem were all about vagueness, it would be dull. And if nature were truly formless, it could not be captured in words, no matter how loose and free. But Ammons detects tight order at small scales. The order turns blurry only from further away–a model for his own poetic form.

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:

blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:

snail shell:

            pulsations of order

            in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,

broken down, transferred through membranes

to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no

lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together

            and against, of millions of events: this,

                         so that I make

                         no form of

                         formlessness:

“Carapace of crab” is a fragment of tightly observed, onomatopoeic, self-conscious verse, but it is adrift in a larger poem whose form is loose and impressionistic.

I have cited examples of vagueness in space. Ammons is also interested in  vagueness over time.

thousands of tree swallows

               gathering for flight:

               an order held

               in constant change: a congregation

rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable

          as one event,

                      not chaos: preparations for

flight from winter, …

As someone who once wrote a whole long poem about entropy, I am especially interested in this passage. I had treated disorder as problematic, both morally and aesthetically. For Ammons’ narrator, receptivity to vagueness and resistance to distinctions are not just valid aesthetic choices, but also moral imperatives. He identifies structure with “propaganda” and even “terror” (political words) but reports his acceptance of nature:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,

shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

          from outside: I have

          drawn no lines:

 …

so I am willing to go along, to accept

the becoming

thought