Tape for the Turn of the Year

“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.