| Sumario: | Over the last 10 years a number of scholars have addressed the paucity of writing on modern poetry in new historicist and especially New Americanist scholarship. Formal innovation made modern poetry both difficult and seemingly apolitical, diminishing its potential for performing 'cultural work.' But it is modern poetry's innovations in the area of form in connection with its inescapable historical resonance that provides a model for dialectical understanding that goes beyond the prevailing culturalism. This essay considers the case of A. R. Ammons (1926-2001), a poet whose work suffers from a deficit of critical scholarship. I look at one episode on the threshold of 'the sixties,' his book, 'Tape for the Turn of the Year" (1965), and examine the relationship between its representational function and its 'operationalism,' arguing that its political relevance derives from the latter.
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