A. R. Ammons

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A. R. Ammons, or Archie Randolph Ammons, (February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001) was an American author and poet.

Contents

[edit] Life

Ammons was born in 1926 and raised in rural North Carolina, near Whiteville, the youngest of a tobacco farmer's three surviving children. Ammons started writing poetry on board a United States destroyer escort in the South Pacific during World War II. Upon his return to civilian life he majored in science at Wake Forest University and later did graduate work in English at the University of California, Berkeley. For a year he was principal of the tiny elementary school in the island village of Cape Hatteras. For the better part of a decade he worked at Friedrich & Dimmock Inc. as a sales executive in his father-in-law's biological glass company in Millville, New Jersey. Later, Ammons became poet-in-residence at Cornell University.

Ammons spent periods of time as a resident of the South Jersey communities of Ocean City, Northfield and Millville.[1]

On April 25, 2007 an extensive collection of in-depth manuscripts, works in progress, private and business correspondence plus fifteen of his watercolors were donated to East Carolina University and became the anchoring component in the Overcash-Wright Literary Collection housed in the James Yadkin Joyner Library. After the collection has been cataloged and materials, such as the watercolors, have been cleaned and preserved in acid-free materials, the library plans on opening a reception for the public.

[edit] Works

Ammons published Ommateum with Doxology, his first book, in 1955. In 1964, he joined the English faculty at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and published his second collection. His Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972), won the National Book Award in 1973. Ammons is a maverick talent, utterly distinctive in voice, marked by high poetic ambition yet capable of whimsy. A nature poet, with a highly developed scientific acumen that sets him off from his contemporaries, Ammons often seems intent on making the consciousness of the poet the secret or real subject of the poem. In many cases, meticulous observation of the natural world is put at the service of abstract investigations and themes, such as the question of the one and the many; Ammons is constantly on the search for a unifying principle among minute and divergent particulars. The critic Harold Bloom has championed Ammons as a transcendentalist, 'the most direct Emersonian in American poetry since Frost'.

Among long poems, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965) is a notable experiment in form. The poem's skinny lines are the result of Ammons's decision to type out the poem, without revision, on a long roll of adding-machine paper. The buoyant and discursive Sphere (1974), considered by some Ammons's masterpiece, displays his formal and prosodic originality. Consisting of 155 sections, each containing four three-line stanzas, Sphere enacts 'the form of a motion' (the book's subtitle). The colon is used as an all-purpose punctuation mark, with the effect that closure is continually postponed. The three-line stanzas resemble what may be called "terza libre"—a rhymeless imitation of Dante's terza rima. Ammons writes in an American idiom, has a "democratic" bias in favor of lower-case letters, and switches rapidly from high to low diction.

Ammons also wrote, "So I said I am Ezra".

So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
I listened to the wind
go over my head and up into the night
Turning to the sea I said
I am Ezra
but there were no echoes from the waves
The words were swallowed up
in the voice of the surf
or leaping over the swells
lost themselves oceanward
Over the bleached and broken fields
I moved my feet turning from the wind
that ripped sheets of sand
from the beach and threw them
like seamists across the dunes
swayed as if the wind were taking me away
and said
I am Ezra
As a word to much repeated
falls out of being
so I, Ezra went out into the night
like a drift of sand
and splashed among the windy oats
that clutch the dunes
of unremembered seas. (written 1955)

[edit] Awards

Ammons won National Book Awards twice — in 1973 for Collected Poems 1951-1971, and in 1993 for Garbage. He won the 1975 Bollingen Prize for his volume Sphere. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, which was the first year of these fellowships. He received the North Carolina Award in literature in 1986. In 1987, Ammons became a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1992. He received the biennial Frost Medal for 1993/94. In 1994, his volume Garbage won the biennial Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. In 1995, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. In 1998 Ammons received the Wallace Stevens Award.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Poetry

  • A Coast of Trees (1981)
  • Briefings: Poems Small and Easy (1971)
  • Brink Road (1996)
  • Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (1972) winner of the National Book Award in 1973
  • Corsons Inlet (1965)
  • Diversifications (1975)
  • Expressions of Sea Level (1964)
  • Garbage (1993)
  • Glare (1997)
  • So I said I am Ezra (1955)
  • Highgate Road (1977)
  • Lake Effect Country (1983)
  • Northfield Poems (1966)
  • Ommateum, with Doxology (1955)
  • Selected Longer Poems (1980)
  • Selected Poems (1968)
  • Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974)
  • Sumerian Vistas (1987)
  • Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965)
  • The North Carolina Poems (1994)
  • The Really Short Poems (1991)
  • The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 (1977)
  • The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (1986)
  • The Snow Poems (1977)
  • Uplands (1970)
  • Worldly Hopes (1982)

[edit] Prose

  • Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues (1996)

[edit] Secondary sources

  • Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
  • Diacritics 3 (1973). An entire "essays on Ammons" issue.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Miller, Michael. "Pulitzer Prize poet will read works in O.C.", The Press of Atlantic City, June 22, 2007. Accessed August 14, 2007. "The late poet A.R. Ammons, formerly of Ocean City, Northfield and Millville, won the prestigious National Book Award."

[edit] External links