|
A. R. Ammons USA
by
Andrena Zawinski
Feature Editor, PoetryMagazine.com
A. R. Ammons in his poem Poetics said
in quite plain yet profound language:
I look for the way/ things will turn/ out spiraling from a center,/
the shape/things will take to come forth in...not the shape on paper
-- though/ that, too --...summoning itself through me/ from the self
not mine but ours.
And summon Ammons did. And what he produced was a prolific and rich
heritage he left to us. It is all ours now since A. R. Ammons died
February 27, 2001 of cancer at the age of seventy-five. Ammons was an
extensively published poet distinguished with some of the greatest
honors of our times, a classic poet in the truest sense.
Archie Randolph Ammons authored almost thirty books of poetry,
including 1993 National Book Award and Bobbitt National Prize winner
Garbage. His A Coast of Trees was in 1981 the National Book Critics
Circle Award for Poetry. Sphere received the Bollingen Prize in 1974.
Ammons first won the National Book Award in 1972 for Collected Poems
1951-1971. His honors were many including a Tanning Prize, Lannan and
Book Critics Awards, the Robert Frost Medal, Ruth Lilly Prize,
fellowships from Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations and Academy of
Arts and
Letters.
A. R. Ammons, a son of farmers born outside Whiteville, North Carolina
in 1926, wrote his first poetry serving aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer
as a sonar operator in the South Pacific. He used the G.I. Bill to
study biology as an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, and he
completed graduate studies at U C Berkeley. He spent some time as a
New Jersey vice-president of a glass firm. He was also a Hatteras
public school teacher and elementary school principal who went on to
instruct in 1961 at Cornell University in Ithaca. There he became a
Goldwin Smith Professor. His manuscripts, journals, letters,
clippings, photos, cassettes, and other materials were donated by him
in to Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in 1997,
and they were exhibited in 1998 at Ammon's retirement.
Mentor and editor as well as poet, his collections also include:
Ommateum, with Doxology (1955), Expressions of Sea Level (1964),
Northfield Poems (1966), Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), Uplands
(1970), Diversifications (1975), The Snow Poems (1977). |
For his inventory of papers,
see
http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/htm/04517_m.htm
Read the full text of Ammons' Poetics
along with the poems Uppermost, Terminus,
and Eyesight at:
http://www.uccs.edu/~cwetheri/Mtns/ARA/index.html
For POETRY's publication of An Improvisation for Angular
Momentum:
http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/94_95/ammons.html
For Robert Pinsky's remembrance of Ammons:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poems/jan-june01/ammons_02-27.html
© All Copyright, A. R.
Ammons.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.
|