A R Ammons

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Ammons, A[rchie] R[andolph] (1926–2001), North Carolina‐born poet, after graduation from Wake Forest College and study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was encouraged by Josephine Miles, wrote poetry while working in a glass factory before publishing his first small book, Ommateum, with Doxology (1955), whose title refers to the vision that insects have with compound eye structure. A move to teaching creative writing as a professor at Cornell (1964– ) preceded his next book, nearly a decade later, Expressions of Sea Level (1964). With it began his career as a major poet. Writing in his own voice, he also relates clearly to the American transcendental tradition, recalling Emerson's concern with the relations of the One and the Many, Thoreau's isolation and concentration on nature, and Whitman's democratic sensibility and use of lengthy monologue. While waiting for the publication of his second volume, Ammons wrote a personal poetic journal, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), whose brevity in line and length in form were the result of his typing it, without revision, on a roll of adding machine paper. His collection of lyrics was quickly followed by another, Corsons Inlet (1965), in one of whose poems he wrote of “eddies of meaning …running like a stream through the geography of my work …but Overall is beyond me.” In these works and those that followed, including Northfield Poems (1966), Uplands (1970), Briefings (1971), Collected Poems (1971, National Book Award), Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974), Diversifications (1975), The Snow Poems (1977), Highgate Road (1977), A Coast of Trees (1981), Worldly Hopes (1982), Lake Effect Country (1983), and Sumerian Vistas (1987), he confirmed his position as a leading American writer of his time (he won a Bollingen Prize, 1973–74), whose poems are marked by a tension between specific observations and philosophic abstractions framed in an ecological context, often expressed in meditations inspired by solitary walks along a shoreline. Garbage (1993, National Book Award), is a single poem of 2200 lines in 18 sections, composed, like Tape for the Turn of the Year, on adding machine tape. It is a meditation on trash, which we and all other life forms finally are.

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A. R. Ammons (Archie Randolph Ammons), 1926-2001, American poet, b. Whiteville, N.C., grad. Wake Forest College (1949). He began writing poetry while serving in the Navy during World War II, and, after working as a school principal and sales executive, he taught creative writing (1964-71) at Cornell Univ. His second book of poetry, Expressions of Sea Level (1964), established him as a major American poet and exhibited his characteristic tone and themes: conversational free verse that frequently deals with the interrelationship of human beings and nature in a modern echo of transcendentalism . His other books of poetry include Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972, National Book Award), Sphere (1974, Bollingen Prize), Garbage (1993, National Book Award), Glare (1996), and the posthumously published Bosh and Flapdoodle (2005).

Bibliography: See Z. Burr, ed., Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues/A. R. Ammons (1996); studies by A. Holder (1978), H. Bloom, ed. (1986), R. Kirschten, ed. (1997), S. P. Schneider, ed. (1999), and D. Burak and R. Gilbert, ed. (2005).