Tape for the Turn of the Year

by A.R. Ammons

“This is the most surprising formal invention of a major innovator, is the fullest vision Ammons gives us of his enormous creative enterprise. Among the major descendents of Whitman’s Song of Myself , Tape occupies an essential imaginative space, showing us much about what is essential in the American poetic imagination.” ―Harold Bloom In the form of a journal covering the period December 6, 1963, through January 10, 1964, A. R. Ammons’s long, thin poem was written on a roll of adding-machine tape, then transferred foot by foot to manuscript. He chose this method as a serious experiment in making a poem adapt to something outside itself. The tape determined both the length of the poem’s lines and when it ends. Tape for the Turn of the Year is a poem of infinite variety, blessed by the rich resources of one of this century’s greatest poets. By turns witty, serious, lyrical, and meditative, it is at once a superbly entertaining book and a significant literary achievement.

Genres: Poetry, Ecology

220 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 1965

About the author

Archie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California at Berkeley.

His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.

Reviews

[Jim Elkins]

> The Material of Writing Before Materiality

Materiality, material culture, object-oriented ontology, thing studies, actor-network theory: these are theories that pay attention to the thingness of the thing: the physical book, the paper, pages, weight, and texture. These material interests of contemporary scholarship are anticipated in A.R. Ammons's "Tape for the Turn of the Year," which was written on a single roll of adding machine tape.

As far as I can tell (I haven't called Cornell, which has the original reel), there is no scan of the tape, and no facsimile edition. The book transcribes the tape, so we don't see Ammons's original monospace typewriter font, and we can only imagine the edges of the paper reel on both sides of the irregularly formatted text. Here is a typical passage. The passage uses three different indents, so it proceeds stepwise down the page.

1:26 pm:

I feel a little
shivery :
the cold's making--
forgive me--headway :
but I just had a baked ham
sandwich, glass of milk &
coffee,
that to be
transformed into
whatever ammunition
it can :

after this,
this long poem, I hope I
can do short rich hard
lyrics : lines
that can incubate
slowly
then fall into
symmetrical tangles :
lines that can be
gone over (and over)
till they sing with
pre-established rightness :

here, I plug on :
whatever the Muse
gives, I release [p. 143]

The overly wide margins in the book erase the constraints Ammons gave himself, and the pages cut the spool, as he knew they would. He writes intermittently about the roll itself: he watches it unfurling day by day, and tells us how he re-rolls the typed portion in an ashtray. He might have heard about Kerouac's On the Road scroll, done in the 1950s, and it is just possible he knew about some of the early Fluxus experiments; but my guess is he didn't know either. His points of reference were writers such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Robert Penn Warren. (He worked at Cornell University, where I had classes with him in the 1970s. He was one of the first winners of the MacArthur "genius" grant, and when a reporter asked him what he'd do with the money, he said he'd buy himself a new typewriter.)

It may never have occurred to Ammons to publish a facsimile of his adding machine tape in monospace font with the edges of the tape made explicitly visible. He did have an interest in painting, and exhibited several times, but as I imagine it he wouldn't have thought that an image of the typewriter's embossed imprint, or even the red margins signalling the end of the tape is approaching (which he mentions several times; the red margins would have been visible at the center of the coiled tape roll as he worked) would have served any purpose except distracting readers from his voice. On the other hand, as the reader is reminded on every page, the project has a certain duration, requires specific arrangements (he unspools the tape at one point in order to take it with him on a trip out of town), and constrains each thought and line between its invisible margins. Tape for the Turn of the Year has an interesting awareness of its material reality, unlike the literalism of today's theories, where writers from Anne Carson to Garth Risk Hallberg make use of high resolution color scans to display as much as they can of the original manuscript's texture and presence. When Ammons asks himself

why do I need to throw
this structure
against the flow
which I cannot stop?
is there something
unyielding in me that
can't accept
the passing away of days [p. 87]

he doesn't mean the "structure" of the tape, its spools, his typewriter. He means the structure formed by their constraints, as they are represented in the book. That is a moderate, ambitious, and sensible alternative to today's insistence on the stuff itself, its mass, its materiality.

Two other writers Ammons probably didn't know are Arno Schmidt and Marianne Fritz. Fritz was a half generation younger, but she rejected computers, and Schmidt died just before desktop publishing became possible. Schmidt and Fritz created enormous collages of full-size sheets they fed through their typewriters, making ponderous, enormous books. Schmidt, at least, was indifferent to the possibility of typesetting his work, perhaps because it didn't seem feasible. (His gigantic book Zettel's Traum was typeset after his death.) It's wonderful to think of Ammons, the oblivious American, working away only a few years later on his narrow, simple adding machine tape, as if he was self-consciously rejecting the imponderable European maximalist tradition. In many ways, that's exactly what he was doing: I remember him typing up Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" in a poetry class, just to show us how leaden and artificial it was. The mimeographed copy he distributed was nearly ruined by his many mistakes in typing, which seemed to be the result of an Oedipal struggle just to type Yeats's words.

As a poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year feels as though it rides the first wave of postmodernism. It seems nearly unedited (we don't see strikethroughs or white-outs, if there were any) and it includes all sorts of unpolished thoughts, including elephant jokes (I haven't heard those since I was a child) and space- or time-filling observations, which he excuses by invoking the absence of the Muse. It also has flights of invention, and a wonderful, in the end entirely winning, mode of address to the reader: "reader, we've been thru / a lot together : / who are you?" (p. 200). It's as memorable a high-wire act today as it was when I first read it, when Ammons was younger than I am now.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning on 6 Dec 1963, A. R. Ammons wrote each day on a roll of adding machine tape. The thin strip of paper determined the line length, the length of the roll determined when it ended--10 Jan 1964. Essentially it's a journal in verse vaguely about the end of something and the beginning of something new and the reflections that transition brings about in a sensitive man observing the world about him. He's a poet and considered himself writing poetry. The visual form restricted by the width of the roll looks like poetry. He wrote recording the events of his days with the concision and the verbal freedom of a poet. Mostly it's poetry because he writes in such a way as to use words to reveal and arrest those moments he observed and gave thought to. In fact, he gave us a definition of poetry: "hope rising to motivate strength, the ideal and the abstract taking on flesh." Ammons demonstrates that on each day of his tape. A constant virtue here is the optimism as he records and notes the details before him, making beauty out of everything he sees: the quirks of weather, the way a jay pecks at a sumac head, a cow standing on the sunny side of a barn. All moments glimmer here, they all become objects of joy, the ordinary becomes the miraculous. The power of his reflections and the use of his observations to make tangible art out of the everyday is a towering achievement. One of my favorite passages: "somebody may have written/music before/or after Bach but/it wasn't necessary."

[Mark]

Difficult to rate this one. A famous experiment: in December 1963 Ammons bought a roll of adding machine tape and threaded it through his typewriter, writing some narrow lines each day, concluding when the tape ran out on January 10. Classic postmodern shenanigans: arbitrary and chance-based formal conceits, whimsical spellings, odd punctuation (Ammons almost always uses a colon to transition between clauses). The content is diary-like (blog-like, really--I can't be the first to make that comparison): daily ephemera (the weather, what he's eating, animal activity in the yard) punctuated by a few exciting things (he witnesses a distant plane crash during a thunderstorm), and more abstract musing about God, Bach, the universe, writing, etc. Occasional sudden addresses to an audience, alternately a lover, the Muse, God again, and sometimes "you" (us?). If there's more subtle architecture or thematic unities at play, I missed them on this first read.

This could be terrible, and at times Ammons comes off as merely a slightly smarter E.E. Cummings. But he's often an engaging raconteur, and there's something here reminiscent of Emerson or Thoreau's journals, or Whitman's Specimen Days: an acute eye attending to the very ordinary. The fun is in reading along as he writes it, one day at a time. It adds up to the texture of life over a five-week span, the sorts of things we talk to ourselves about when we're alone. The moments that flop add to the overall effect; most of us don't think in perfectly sculpted maxims. In that way it's a powerful work of realism.

[Melissa]

Idk

[nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great as a poetic response to "ecology" in that broad, Batesonian sense freshly devised in the 60s, with the poem's performative gimmick (reflexive long poem written in real time on an adding-machine roll) constantly routing the words back thru organic/material life, raising problems of scale, form, abstraction. Frequently goofy or awkward, but its only glaring flaw is Ammons's comparatively asinine thoughts on intimate human relations.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One time I destroyed a man's face using only an Easy Bake Oven.

Then I read this book. What a book.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

long and skinny

[Uther Pendragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5–5. The spoilers: several lines from the poem, including the last 40+ lines.

Here's a snippet from the introduction to The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons:


"In 1965 Ammons publishes the first of his winter diaries," Helen Vendler wrote. "Convinced that a poem aspiring to true manyness must be cut off, in both breadth and length, at a perfectly arbitrary place, he shapes his journal-poem to the narrow breadth and unforseeable length of an adding-machine tape fed into his typewriter, his truncated lines confined between the left and right edges of the tape."


In some sections of Tape, it really does feel like you're reading a journal. In others, it feels more like another great American long poem.

It's basically a type of constraint poem—somewhat similar to works produced by the Oulipo writers. The length of the poem and the maximum possible length of each line was determined before it was written.

In Tape for the Turn of the Year, Ammons uses many devices, such as comic misspelling and the occasional non-English word or phrase (macaronic), weather reports, journal entries, concrete poetry, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and many more devices. He also utilizes reference and allusion to various things, such as physics, psychology and Greek literature ; to people, such as William Carlos Williams, Bernard Berenson and Agathon ; to places, such as Parnassus and various places in America ; to events, such as a tragic plane crash which sadly had no survivors, and other current events of the time period.

Also, because of the constraints, he occasionally uses SMS language, such as "wd" and "yr" in place of "would" and "your" and several others. Though I'm sure there are earlier instances in literature, these are perhaps among the earliest examples I've encountered. It was an interesting choice, considering it wasn't a common practice in literature during the time period. (It was, however, commonly used in other things, such as telegraphs, many decades earlier.) It was a clever way to pack more information into a limited space.


Here are some of his lines, but without the indentations he placed at the beginning of most of these lines).

Lines 6671–6682

we have yet a while
to fill this tape: it's
getting small:
it turns fast:
before long
the red edge will
rise
from the floor: it'll
climb,
go under the roller, then
turn up
& out into the light:

(He was writing about the roll's red stripe, which meant it was near its end.)


Lines 6683–6707

how glad I'll be then!
I'm so tired
you can't imagine:
I want to do other things:

and you, O supposed
(& actual maybe)
reader: how
weary you are!
I've bludgeoned you
with every form of
emptiness: you've
endured my
wrestling need:
may something accrue
to satisfy you:

let's sit down & exchange
tenderness of speech:
have I deserved the
engagement of your eyes?
may I take your
time?
this noise & length
says
I honor your moments
of silent understanding:


Lines 6971–6984

I wrote about these
days
the way life gave them:
I didn't know
beforehand what I
wd write,
whether I'd meet
anything new: I
showed that I'm sometimes
blank & abstract,
sometimes blessed with
song: sometimes
silly, vapid, serious,
angry, despairing:


Lines 6994–7035

I've given
you my
emptiness: it may
not be unlike
your emptiness:
in voyages, there
are wide reaches
of water
with no islands:

I've given you the
interstices: the
space between
electrons:
I've given you
the dull days
when turning & turning
revealed nothing:
I've given you the
sky,
uninterrupted by moon,
bird, or cloud:
I've given
you long
uninteresting walks
so you could experience
vacancy:

old castles, carnivals,
ditchbanks,
bridges, ponds,
steel mills,
cities: so many
interesting tours:

the roll has lifted
from the floor &
our journey is done:
thank you
for coming: thank
you for coming along:

the sun's bright:
the wind rocks the
naked trees:
so long:


Tape for the Turn of the Year has 7035 lines. It was written in 1963–1964. The Cornell archive has three typescripts of Tape for the Turn of the Year: the actual tape, and two others.

[Matthew Lloyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the most interesting and compelling single thing about Tape for the Turn of the Year is its method of composition: composed on a roll of adding machine tape through a typewriter, it is a composition based in part on the materiality of the equipment as well as the mind of the poet. I learned about this poem when I listened to Simon Armitage's lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry last May, and I think it was that material component that made it stick out to me. The form is fascinating, and it gave me a new appreciation of what poetry could be.

Reading it, I started to wonder about what made this poetry compared to, say, "Instagram" poetry, which is often criticised as being prose with enjambment. A few times I reread passages as if they were prose, and some worked while others did not. There's a certain stream-of-consciousness element to the structure that felt like a personal insight into the poet and his life. At other times, there's a kind of factual reporting, a comment on the method and the materiality of the long, thin poem, and other mundane details that can feel like an attempt to run out the roll - but that in itself is interesting, the way Ammons felt compelled to complete the work and both longed for it to be over and despaired to be parted from it. It reflected my own feelings about journaling, even though no one will be reading that in 60+ years, I think.

Armitage reread the poem in, I think, 2014-15 as a kind of "advent calendar", day-by-day, which also appealed to me. I'm disappointed in myself for not managing it until the end, especially when I realised that 1963-64 had the same day/date correspondence as 2024-25 (Friday 13th December!), and that Ammons was about my age when he wrote it. Perhaps next time. I did still read it for the turn of the year, and I think appreciate it more for that.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a series of poems written on a long adding machine tape (if you are old enough to know what that's like--comparable to the tape in a grocery store receipt printer, I guess). It runs from Dec 6 thru Jan 10 and I've been reading the "poem of the day" with breakfast every morning for the last month and a bit. It's in the vein of William Carlos Williams, but more direct, less "flowery" (which is a hoot, since WCW isn't flowery in the least, so it might give you an idea of how abrupt and angular this writing is, while remaining rooted in the beauty and puzzles of the external world). In fact, in the midst of the poem the author attends a memorial service for that great man. There are better days than others, but the final poem is magnificent, as he sees the red alert at the end of the roll appearing first on the floor and then making its way through the typewriter (this is an early 1960s poem) in his little study/office/studio, bright with light and the wind blowing.

I came to this poem via Austin Kleon's blog. I'm not a huge fan of his books, which are too reductive for me, but I love his everyday pieces and all the stuff he throws at the wall to see if it sticks. I am there for that!

https://digital.library.cornell.edu/c... (this is the original tape from the Cornell archives. Ammons moved from New Jersey to work at Cornell some time after writing "Tape.")

[jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

normally i do not like to rate things but how can u not give this five stars. so much wonder and joy in the everyday found in this very long, very narrow daily journal. sometimes it’s a bit boring, oftentimes he repeats himself or doesn’t get at smth that he hasn’t gotten to already, but that’s life baby. a testament to that hong sangsoo quote, the one like “i don’t mind if i repeat myself, bc every day i’m a little bit different anyway.”

i think a new annual tradition is in order! pay no attn to the fact that i finished three weeks late

[Leland William · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read.

Tape for the Turn of the Year is a diaristic poem written over a few days in the mid 60's on a roll of adding tape. In it, Ammons endeavors to give himself and the readers space, the blue of the sky without view of the clouds, the ground, or the sun. It works, and the reader gets to see him in all his foolishness and genius.

[Sierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

My class read this and no one could relate to him because they thought he was too strange and abstract. He was honestly one of the first people I've known of that I can actually relate to (outside of the sexism). It was like he had my shrooms trip.

[Jamie Perez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder if a special library somewhere (Cornell?) has the tape still.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little late, but I wrote about this poem on the 60th anniversary of Ammons coming to the end of the tape. You can read it here.

[Larissa ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A review, of sorts, is posted on my LiveJournal. (It's more of a long poem, inspired by this long poem.)

[Henry Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

The spool of A. R. Ammons poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year, is an extended exercise in ars poetica. Through the use of images and form, Ammons builds a case that the hunger to create is channeled from a bodily need and that to indulge in creation is to grasp at the void. The question of whether this is a worthwhile endeavor or not takes a backseat to the practice of creation. In the poet’s case, the act of engaging with language within the finite realm of the spool. As he moves from image to image he discovers the same resilient pattern in everything. Just as you can sample DNA from any cell in your body and find the same code, each image contains evidence that living is a Sisyphean practice. I’ll focus specifically on his use of Indians to illustrate this point and more importantly their progenation in the face of the melting ice caps.

Out of the ashes of the Trojans on page 7, Ammons introduces “a warm cycle.” The life and death of generations of Indians. Substitute Indians for any other metaphor found in Tape for the Turn of the Year and his thesis, or rather, his question, holds.

“ten thousand years: how

many Indians is that,

fishing the northern

coast, marrying, dying?

coming & going, they

left no permanent sign

on the warming trend:”

By inviting the “warming trend” into his question, he confronts the reader in the present with the end that they too face, climate change having passed the point of no return. Consistent with Lucretian physics, the void that is within us all, the space between atoms, dooms us to a temporary existence. Still, Ammons reminds us that our ancestor Indians fished and married, “coming and going”.

Lets substitute Indians then for Tape for the Turn of the Year itself. The poem, like the DNA of Indians passing from generation to geneartion, moves from image to image, idea to idea, perhaps not across “10 M” years but certainly across a spool of narrow tape. Ammons mention, specifically of the Sumerians, whose language is our earliest record of the written word, further grounds the relationship between the generations of Indians as metaphor and writing.

Throughout the Tape for the Turn of the Year, Ammon references DNA and the proteins that make it up. Their “interlink” he wonders on page 55, “a face of God.” Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine. The myriad of combinations these four proteins code, DNA that the Indians pass on and of course, in death, resign. This “warm cycle” metaphor operates on every level. Even Ammons writing works within the tradition of other writers before him. Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen which also moves from concept to concept, each time leveling it’s previous attempt, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura which lays the foundation for atomic theory and the idea that no physical thing is permanent as well as every work of ars poetica. Add Tape for the Turn of the Year to this ever-growing pile.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Returned to this long quirky poem after having first read it in the late 70s, and not much has changed. I love the project: Ammons purchased a roll of adding machine tape, loaded it in the typewriter and set out to fill it up with the flow of consciousness. It was a particularly audacious project since short lines are definitely not his forte. (Check out "Corson's Inlet," a truly great poem, from a volume I plan to return to soon, for the point of reference.) He wrote almost every day from 6 December to 10 January and, not surprisingly, some days were more interesting than others. As he wrote on New Year's Eve, the challenge was to forget a
language
that could take in all
kinds of matter
& move easily with
light or heavy burden:
a level
that could,
without fracturing, rise
& fall
with conception &
intensity:
not be completely
outfaced
by the prosaic
& not be inadequate
to the surges.


Sometimes he finds it, usually only intermittently, and there are long stretches where he's reaching. Part of the contract he made with his Muse, who, second to Ammons, is the lead character in the book.

Having spent a great deal of time with Robert Frost and Gary Snyder in recent years, I was more aware of the relative abstraction of Ammons' relationship with nature than I'd been previously. He's at his best when meditating on the nature of the patterns that flicker in and out of consciousness, as opposed to the specifics that form or are formed into patterns. And, for a book written in the mid-Sixties, the total absence of social/political context is striking. That's part of what keeps Tape from being a great American long poem.

But it is a jazz venture and my respect for that hasn't diminished.

Definitely not the place to start with Ammons, but really interesting for anyone interested in what was happening in American poetry in the mid/late 20th century.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun poem. It's written as a journal, but limited by the material it's written on (a roll of receipt tape), so there are a lot of fun constructions and comments from the poet. Perhaps more of a poem for creators than for readers.

[Rufo Quintavalle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This starts and ends very well but there is a longish stretch in the middle which reads like a kind of Andy Warhol paean to boredom - a lot of descriptions of the weather and the time of day and what he had for lunch. I guess once he had set himself the challenge of writing every day until his roll of paper ran out he was obliged to run with the form and that some days simply weren't as productive as others. Nevertheless I feel this book would have been stronger had it been shorter. I am used to Ammons' wonderful descriptions of nature and his ability to explore complex thought through simple language; what was new for me was his erotic writing which I am glad to have encountered too. There is good stuff in here and Ammons is someone I always enjoy reading - a bit like Bukowski in that you have to take the bad with the brilliant - but all in all I felt it was not as strong as Garbage which remains my favorite of his works.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don't dislike any Ammons, but this is probably my least favorite. I'm as much a fan of the unhinged and improvisatory as anyone, but with his long poems there's a sprawling arbitrariness sometimes [not always] to the structure that prevents it from packing as much of a punch. Of course, that could very well be the point, and I could very well later think 'what was I thinking?'. But a long-form improv approach can still lead to a more deliberate-seeming structure.

[of course, there is a structure here - the days that mark each new section, and the events of the days themselves - but it maybe is a little too transparent for me. sometimes a little more contrivance is what does it for me {structures are contrivances after all, are they not?}]

[Liz Minette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like A.R. Ammons after I read this. Here is a guy who, prior to being hired at Cornell, was kind of a jack-of-all-trades, and as he was writing these 'tape' poems, waiting for that call from Cornell to see if he got the job that he so wanted/needed. I like how too, when he and his wife, went on a day trip to Philadelphia, he took his register recipe tape with him in the car lest the house come to some misfortune and to his long poem inside. This is a bold work, needless to say - writing out your poems on cash register tape and then transcribing in to a book. Out of the box idea for writing & brillant

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ammons buys a long spool of adding tape, feeds the outer end of it into his typewriter in mid-December, and adds an entry to his "long, thin poem" daily. The poem ends up being about everything in a baggy, come-what-may sort of manner. Special attention given to weather (cold) and love (w/ the muse & women generally). Whenever the book gets boring, you can just think "he wrote this on ADDING TAPE" and feel better. Very quick read, if you want it to be.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ammons being himself, meditating on everything from science to geology and writing. Kind of dense at times, but interesting for it's form. Ammons wrote this book/poem on one absurdly long roll of adding machine tape, giving it the poem its narrow, strip like form.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unexpected use of constraints: Written on adding machine tape on a typewriter (thus constricting the width of the line and the length of the poem to interesting effect) as a sort of journal between December 1963 and January 1964.

[Allyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning work of poetry.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ammons needed to get this out of his system before moving on to real poetry. (He about admits as much here.) Some wonderful moments, but certainly no "Sphere" or "Garbage."

[Minh Anh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't get him that's why im hooked ig

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely bonkers