Ghost in the Poem Machine

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This weekend in Chicago I had an experience that seems familiar, and I'm wondering if any of you can relate to it. I was standing in Jared's living room, browsing through his books, and I picked up an Ammons book for a second. Flipping through once or twice, I landed on a poem that immediately struck me -- I don't know what it was exactly, something about its weird descriptions of peat-bogs rising and falling, its idiosyncratic but masterful development -- and it seemed unlike anything else I'd ever read. Jarod came out a moment later and we talked briefly about Ammons and then moved on to some other subject, but not beforeI'd pencilled A.R. onto my "oughtta-read" list.

So last night I'm at the UI library. I grab the same Ammons book. Look through it. No sign of the peat poem. Sure, there were poems with the word "peat" in them, but nothing resembling the poem as it existed and still exists in my memory. It's almost like going one day to visit an old plantation house and seeing it in full swing, belles sipping lemonades on the veranda and all, and then returning again the next day to find only mouldering boards and broken panes and a big pile of Spanish moss. Like reading Ammons' secret haunting poem which has since reverted to its usual disguised form. A silly thought, but nice, and I can't help but think that this has happened before with writers that have grabbed me -- the first response being unaccountably strong and not necessarily based on the text at hand but on something that is sensed furling and unfurling behind the text. Anyone else ever had this kind of mis-read happen?

I ended up checking out not that book but another, called The Snow Poems. Very strange work. Rough and ragged as hell. I'm not sure if I love them exactly, but there's something going on here. In honor of Theis's cheese standing alone, here's part of one called "Hard Lard":

so that we can achieve the podium of
inhumanity, the clearing, wherefrom
we can look back and away to the
astonishing thing, man's rise and demise,
and then what, the crazy universe here,
here, here for thousands, even millions
of years, going on with purposes, if
any, not ours: room
enough for every correction of view,
where perspective is never sold out, utero,
utero, the
commencement before the commencement:
snow sounds like gritty pellets
on the panes:
I thought it was a mouse in my paperbox

Hard to take it out of itself, though -- the whole thing is one sentence, I think, four pages long. Ends with:

hard fart hard tack I feel so much
hard ware hard sell better on my
hard head hard boil feet provided
I have something
to lean against

Oh yeah, and right before that ending he says, "a poem is a machine made out of worlds/ a poem is made of words fed to machines," and this I like.