“Substantial Planes” by A.R. Ammons is a really short poem, coming in at a cool twenty-one words total. As a matter of fact, it is a poem from Ammons book The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons where all of the poems’ word counts range from five to barely scratching forty, basically just one sentence each. If you have ever tried conveying something completely in twenty-one words, let alone five, you know how difficult that can be. Despite this, Ammons capitalizes on briefness and creates poems compact like pills filled with ideas and images for readers to chew on. Ammons uses a technique to do this: stating some grand truth about some concept and just letting it do the talking and leaving room for several interpretations. “Substantial Planes” is a great example of this, as it puts poetry and the universe side by side:
Substantial Planes
It doesn’t
matter
to me
if
poems mean
nothing:
there’s no
floor
to the
universe
and yet
one
walks the
floor.
On my first read, I could not immediately parse the connection between poems meaning nothing and the universe and the universe having or not having floors. From subsequent readings, I have come to my own interpretation, but is it by no means something I could definitely say to be the ‘meaning’, if poems do in fact have them, of the poem. The poem lends itself to different interpretations, as I feel that is the whole poem’s argument. In the first half of the poem, there is just the plain statement of “It doesn’t/matter//to me/if//poems mean/nothing:” and then the second half comes in with heady images of the universe and floors…so what is it saying? The lines “there’s no/ floor//to the/universe” is another statement but one that is much grander than the first half of the poem. To me, it is saying, ‘the universe is infinite and has no limits, it is impossible to be contained, defined, and understood’. Following this, we get the lines “and yet/one//walks the/floor” which somewhat contradict the previous lines.
Adding a contradiction adds to the technique of stating a grand truth because whenever a ‘truth’ is refuted, things become interesting. Contradictions inherently offer two or more readings of one thing, and the contradiction here is saying that although the universe has no ‘floor’, it is we who live in it who must make some kind of sense of it. By being alive and obviously limited, unlike the universe, we have a floor. While we have a floor, there is also the sense in the poem that our floor is somewhat of our own making. That despite being limited, that should not hold back possibility. Although we know we are limited, we should not think that we have already reached that limit. This is why the speaker feels that it does not matter if poems have no meaning, they are still going to read and write them anyway. In doing so, the floor one walks changes, up or down, story to story, and poetry becomes within the limit. It should not be denied even if it has no ‘meaning’. I could go on about “Substantial Planes” for a while, but to keep with the spirit of the poem, I will keep it brief. In short: walk the floor, but do not be afraid to change your story.