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...