Transcript

It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age.

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I took hikes this summer each night after dinner, a 2.5 mile loop with an elevation gain of 300 feet. The ascent flattens out every fifty or so feet. I was so in my head that I never felt the burn in my leg and thigh muscles, or noticed my labored breathing. I kept a rigorous pace that had me complete the trek in just under fifty minutes.

At the outset, mundane thoughts preoccupied me, like dinner, the contents of an unsent message, and the day’s scrolled headlines. But I loved when my mind drifted away from all that, how the walks quieted me. An open field called my attention to the bobolink flitting about then perched on tall grass. He seemed to stare at me, a poor suffering human with no wings.

The evening air was full of songbirds. The higher I climbed the more the bowl-shaped mountains off in the distance revealed their majesty. I continued on and reached the small pond with the swimming platform in the center. Here I stopped to watch the day’s last reflected clouds slowly pass over its surface.

But, eventually, concerns about the future overpowered this visible world of forested maples and spruces. I was back at my anxious, lofty thinking about life and meaning.

“Gravelly Run” by A.R. Ammons is one of my favorite poems. It captures the dilemma of people who are so beleaguered by existence and the world's theories that they find it difficult to just be. But what really draws me to this poem is its downhome, folksy phrasing blended with a learnedness that creates a felt strangeness. The opening “I don’t know somehow it seems” makes it appear as if we have just been dropped into a conversation.

When teaching this poem, I discuss regional dialects and registers of diction. I discuss voicing and tone. I discuss line breaks and the sinuous and muscular structure of sentences that appear as if indeed the poem flows down the page like a stream. Nature is set against humankind’s philosophies and theological debates. And so we talk about allusions to spiritual concepts and to Hegel, the 19th century thinker, who serves as a symbol for all ineffectual philosophic systems of thought.

In short, the poem asserts the natural world is indifferent to our human cares. It is best if we come to know ourselves through its cycles and terrains, but without all the troublesome wrangling over questions of meaning. It is good simply to make peace with the rhythms of life and of death.

Gravelly Run
by A.R. Ammons

I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
     of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
     by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:

the swamp’s slow water comes 
down Gravelly Run fanning the long 
     stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:

holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars’ gothic-clustered
     spires could make
green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass 
jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:
     I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
     unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

“Gravelly Run” from THE SELECTED POEMS OF A. R. AMMONS copyright © 1960 A. R. Ammons. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.