AMMONS, A(rchie) R(andolph)

---

Nationality: American. Born: Whiteville, North Carolina, 18 February 1926. Education: Wake Forest College, North Carolina, B.S. 1949; University of California, Berkeley, 1950–52. Served in the U.S. Naval Reserve, 1944–46. Family: Married Phyllis Plumbo in 1949; one son. Career: Principal, Hatteras Elementary School, North Carolina, 1949–50; executive vice president, Friedrich and Dimmock, Inc., Millville, New Jersey, 1952–62; assistant professor, 1964–68, associate professor, 1969–71, and since 1971 professor of English, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Visiting professor, Wake Forest University, 1974–75. Poetry editor, The Nation, New York, 1963. Awards: Bread Loaf Writers Conference scholarship, 1961; Guggenheim fellowship, 1966; American Academy traveling fellow-ship, 1967, and award, 1977; Levinson prize (Poetry, Chicago), 1970; National Book award, 1973, and 1993, for Garbage; Bollingen prize, 1974; MacArthur fellowship, 1981; National Book Critics Circle award, 1982; North Carolina award for literature, 1986; Robert Frost medal, Poetry Society of America, 1993; National Institute of Arts and Letters award, 1994; Rebekah Johnson Bobbit National prize for poetry, 1994; Ruth Lilly Poetry prize, 1995. D.Litt.: Wake Forest University, 1972; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1973. Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1982. Address: Department of English, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Ommateum, with Doxology. Philadelphia, Dorrance, 1955.

Expressions of Sea Level. Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1964.

Corsons Inlet. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1965.

Tape for the Turn of the Year. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1965.

Northfield Poems. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1966.

Selected Poems. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1968.

Uplands. New York, Norton, 1970.

Briefings: Poems Small and Easy. New York, Norton, 1971.

Collected Poems 1951–1971. New York, Norton, 1972.

Sphere: The Form of a Motion. New York, Norton, 1974.

Diversifications. New York, Norton, 1975.

The Snow Poems. New York, Norton, 1977.

The Selected Poems 1951–1977. New York, Norton, 1977; revised edition, as The Selected Poems, 1986.

Highgate Road. Ithaca, New York, Inkling Press, 1977.

For Doyle Fosco. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Press for Privacy, 1977.

Poem. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Press for Privacy, 1977(?).

Six-Piece Suite. Ithaca, New York, Palaemon Press, 1979.

Selected Longer Poems. New York, Norton, 1980.

A Coast of Trees. New York, Norton, 1981.

Worldly Hopes. New York, Norton, 1982.

Lake Effect Country. New York, Norton, 1983.

Easter Morning. Greensboro, North Carolina Humanities Committee, 1986.

Sumerian Vistas. New York, Norton, 1987.

Garbage. New York, Norton, 1993.

Tape for the Turn of the Year. New York, Norton, 1993.

The North Carolina Poems. Rocky Mount, North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1994.

Brink Road: Poems. New York, Norton, 1996.

Glare. New York, Norton, 1997.

Other

Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996.

*

Bibliography: A.R. Ammons: A Bibliography 1954–1979 by Stuart Wright, Wake Forest, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1980.

Critical Studies: "A Poem Is a Walk" by the author, in Epoch (Ithaca, New York), fall 1968; "A.R. Ammons: When You Consider the Radiance" by Harold Bloom, in The Ringers in the Tower, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1971; A.R. Ammons issue of Diacritics (Ithaca, New York), 1974; A.R. Ammons by Alan Holder, Boston, Twayne, 1978; "A Poetry of Restitution" by John Hollander, in Yale Review (New Haven, Connecticut), 1981; "A.R. Ammons and The Snow Poems Reconsidered" by Michael McFee, in Chicago Review, 1981; "The Problem of Freedom and Restriction in the Poetry of A.R. Ammons" by Thomas A. Fink, in Modern Poetry Studies (Buffalo, New York), 1982; "A.R. Ammons: Ecological Naturalism and the Romantic Tradition" by Donald H. Reiman, in Twentieth-Century Literature (Hempstead, New York), 1985; A.R. Ammons issue of Pembroke Magazine (Pembroke, North Carolina), 1986; A.R. Ammons edited by Harold Bloom, New York, Chelsea House, 1988; "The Poetry of Ammons" by Nathan A. Scott, Jr., in The Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), autumn 1988; A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope by Steven P. Schneider, Rutherford, New Jersey, and London, Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1994; The Spiritual Eye of A.R. Ammons: Mystical Elements in 'Sphere: The Form of a Motion' (dissertation) by Bertha J. Hanse, University of Arkansas, 1995; "Garbage: A.R. Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Century" by Lorraine C. DiCicco, in Papers on Language and Literature (Edwardsville, Illinois), 32(2), spring 1996; Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues edited by Zofia Burr, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996; "A.R. Ammons's Stevensian Search for a Supreme Fiction in 'Sphere'" by John Adames, in Twentieth Century Literature (Hempstead, New York), 43(1), spring 1997; "Language: The Poet As Master and Servant" by David Young, in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, edited by Stuart Friebert and others, Oberlin, Ohio, Oberlin College, 1997; "A.R. Ammons and the Whole Earth" by Kevin McGuirk, in Cultural Critique (Cary, North Carolina), 37, fall 1997; "Rage for Definition: The Long Poem As 'Sequence'" by Klaus Martens, in Eichstatter Beitrage, 20, 1998; "'The World Was the Beginning of the World': Agency and Homology in A.R. Ammons' Garbage" by Leonard M. Scigaj, in Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment, edited by Michael P. Branch and others, Moscow, University of Idaho Press, 1998.

*  *  *

A.R. Ammons is an American romantic in the tradition of Emerson and Whitman. He is committed to free and open forms and to the amassing of the exact details experience provides rather than to the extrusion from it of any a priori order. His favorite subject is the relation of a man to nature as perceived by a solitary wanderer along the beaches and rural fields of New Jersey, where Ammons grew up. Because of the cumulative nature of his technique, Ammons's work shows to best advantage in poems of some magnitude. Perhaps the best, and best known, of these is the title poem from Corsons Inlet, in which, describing a walk along a tidal stream, the speaker says,

   I was released from forms,
   from the perpendiculars,
   straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
   of thought
   into the hues, shading, rises, flowing bends and blends of
   sight…

Here as elsewhere Ammons accepts only what is possible to a sensibility attuned to the immediacy of experience, for he admits that "scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, / that I have perceived nothing completely, / that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk."

Another kind of poem characteristic of Ammons is the brief metaphysical fable, in which there are surprising colloquies between an interlocutor and mountains, winds, or trees, as in "Mansion":

   So it came time
   for me to cede myself
   and I chose
   the wind
   to be delivered to.
   The wind was glad
   and said it needed all
   the body
   it could get
   to show its motions with…

The philosophical implications in these poems are explicit in "What This Mode of Motion Said," a meditation upon permanence and change phrased as a cadenza on Emerson's poem "Brahma."

Ammons's Collected Poems 1951–1971 was chosen for the National Book award in 1973. Not included in this compendious volume is his book-length Tape for the Turn of the Year, a free-flowing imaginative journal composed in very short lines and written on a roll of adding machine tape. The combination here of memory, introspection, and observation rendered in ever changing musical phrasing is impressive. Such expansiveness is Ammons's métier. Sphere: The Form of a Motion is a long poem in 155 twelve-line stanzas that comprise one unbroken sentence. Taking Whitman and Stevens as his models, Ammons combines the all-inclusive sensibility of the one with the meditative philosophical discourse of the other, as these excerpts may suggest:

   …the identifying oneness of populations, peoples: I
   know my own—the thrown peripheries, the stragglers, the cheated,
   maimed, afflicted (I know their eyes, pain's melting amazement)
 
 
   the weak, disoriented, the sick, hurt, the castaways, the
   needful needless: I know them: I love them, I am theirs…
 
 
   the purpose of the motion of a poem is to bring the focused,
   awakened mind to no-motion, to a still contemplation of the
   whole motion, all the motions, of the poem…
 
 
   …by intensifying the alertness
 
 
   of the conscious mind even while it permits itself to sink,
   to be lowered down the ladder of structured motions to the
   refreshing energies of the deeper self …
   the non-verbal
   energy at that moment released, transformed back through the
   verbal, the sayable poem…

Ammons continues to revel in both long wandering poems and shorter lyrics in his volume Sumerian Vistas. As he points out in "The Ridge Farm," a meditative poem of fifty-one stanzas, "I like nature poetry / where the brooks are never dammed up …" His work is consistent in its experimentation with open forms and in its celebration of living processes and of the identity of man with nature.

Perhaps Ammons's most profound study of culture, human behavior, and the physical world is his 1993 fin de siècle long poem titled Garbage, in which he attempts to link science, spirituality, and philosophy as modes through which to evaluate garbage. For Ammons garbage has a force that brings communities together. Refuse expresses something essential about us; it is the originating point of communal consciousness and survival. His desire to know "simple people doing simple things, the normal, everyday routine of life and how these people thought about it" finds him recognizing "a monstrous surrounding of / gathering—the putrid, the castoff, the used, / / the mucked up—all arriving for final assessment." Historian, archeologist, culturalist, environmentalist, and—for this book's project—garbologist, Ammons uses the figure of "curvature," which shows that "it all wraps back around," to cast the net wide enough to consider the various angles of garbage, even though the central figure of the book is the garbage dump itself.

Aesthetic involvement in our physical world and the processes of assembly and disassembly are Ammons's perennial concerns. In Brink Road he approaches a world largely unpeopled but still in motion and perpetuity: "… a snowflake / streaks / out of the hanging gray, / winter's first whitening: white on white let it be, / then, flake / to petal—to hold for a / minute or so." Often compared with Robert Frost and e.e. cummings, Ammons has a voice that sometimes hits a note with a Zen ring to it. In "Saying Saying Away" he revealingly contends that poems "flow into a place where the distinction / between meaning and being is erased into the meaning of / being."

Winner of the National Book award in both 1973 and 1993 and recipient of the Robert Frost medal of the Poetry Society of America for his life's work, Ammons has had a prolific career that has carried him to his long volume Glare, which has the tone of a kind of diary, looping evenly, meditatively, seemingly inconsequentially back to itself. At its best moments it moves with a Wordsworthian grace typical of Ammons's early work:

   if you can
   send no word silently healing, I
   mean if it is not proper or realistic
   to send word, actual lips saying
   these broken sounds, why, may we be
   allowed to suppose that we can work
   this stuff out the best we can and
   having felt out our sins to their
   deepest definitions, may we walk with
   you as along a line of trees, every
   now and then your clarity and warmth
   shattering across our shadowed way.

—Daniel Hoffman and

Martha Sutro