A. R. Ammons

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Archie Randolph Ammons, (February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001) was an award-winning American poet.

Contents 1 Life 2 Awards 3 Poetic style 4 Works 5 References 6 External links 7 Print sources

[edit] Life

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Ammons grew up on a tobacco farm near Whiteville, in southeastern North Carolina. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he attended Wake Forest University, where he majored in biology; he received his M.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1964, he joined the faculty of Cornell University, eventually becoming Goldwin Smith Professor of English and Poet in Residence. He retired from Cornell in 1998.^[1][2]

[edit] Awards

During the five decades of his poetic career, Ammons was the recipient of many awards and citations. Among his major honors are two National Book Awards (1973, for Collected Poems 1951-1971, and 1993, for Garbage); the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets (1998); and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the year the award was established.^{[1] [3]}

Ammons's other awards include a 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for A Coast of Trees; ^[4] a 1993 Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Garbage; the 1971 Bollingen Prize for Sphere; the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal; the Ruth Lilly Prize; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[5]

[edit] Poetic style

Ammons often writes in two-line or three-line stanzas. Poet David Lehman notes a resemblance between Ammons's terza libre (unrhymed three-line stanzas) and the terza rima of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." Lines are strongly enjambed.^[6] Some of Ammons's poems are very short, one or two lines only, while others (for example, the book-length poems Sphere and Tape for the Turn of the Year) are hundreds of lines long, and were composed on adding machine tape or other continuous strips of paper. His National Book Award winning volume Garbage is a long poem consisting of "a single extended sentence, divided into eighteen sections, arranged in couplets".^[7]

Many readers and critics have noted Ammons's idiosyncratic approach to punctuation. Lehman has written that Ammons "bears out T. S. Eliot's observation that poetry is a 'system of punctuation'." Instead of periods, some poems end with an ellipsis; others have no terminal punctuation at all. The colon is an Ammons "signature"; he uses it "as an all-purpose punctuation mark."

The colon permits him to stress the linkage between clauses and to postpone closure indefinitely.... When I asked Archie about his use of colons, he said that when he started writing poetry, he couldn't write if he thought "it was going to be important," so he wrote "on the back of used mimeographed paper my wife brought home, and I used small [lowercase] letters and colons, which were democratic, and meant that there would be something before and after [every phrase] and the writing would be a kind of continuous stream." ^[6]

According to critic Stephen Burt, in many poems Ammons combines three types of diction:

• A “normal” range of language for poetry, including the standard English of educated conversation and the slightly rarer words we expect to see in literature (“vast,” “summon,” “universal”).
• A demotic register, including the folk-speech of eastern North Carolina, where he grew up (“dibbles”) and broader American chatter unexpected in serious poems (“blip”).
• The Greek- and Latin-derived phraseology of the natural sciences (“millimeter,” “information of actions / summarized”), especially geology, physics, and cybernetics.

Such a mixture is nearly unique, Burt says; these three modes are "almost never found together outside his poems".^[8]

[edit] Works

Works published before 1970 do not have ISBNs.

Poetry

• Ommateum, with Doxology. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1955.
• Expressions of Sea Level. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1964.
• Corsons Inlet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1965. Reprinted by Norton, 1967. ISBN 0393044637
• Tape for the Turn of the Year. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1965. Reprinted by Norton, 1972. ISBN 039300659X
• Northfield Poems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1966.
• Selected Poems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1968.
• Uplands. New York: Norton, 1970. ISBN 0393043223
• Briefings: Poems Small and Easy. New York: Norton, 1971. ISBN 0393043266
• Collected Poems: 1951-1971. New York: Norton, 1972. ISBN 0393042413
• Sphere: The Form of a Motion. New York: Norton, 1974. ISBN 0393043886
• Diversifications. New York: Norton, 1975. ISBN 0393044149
• The Selected Poems: 1951-1977. New York: Norton, 1977. ISBN 0393044653
• Highgate Road. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.
• The Snow Poems . New York: Norton, 1977. ISBN 039304467X
• Selected Longer Poems. New York: Norton, 1980. ISBN 0393012972
• A Coast of Trees. New York: Norton, 1981. ISBN 0393014479
• Worldly Hopes. New York: Norton, 1982. ISBN 0393015181
• Lake Effect Country. New York: Norton, 1983. ISBN 0393017028
• The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition. New York: Norton, 1986. ISBN 0393024113
• Sumerian Vistas. New York: Norton, 1987. ISBN 0393024687
• The Really Short Poems. New York: Norton, 1991. ISBN 0393028704
• Garbage. New York: Norton, 1993. ISBN 0393035425
• The North Carolina Poems. Alex Albright, ed. Rocky Mount, NC: NC Wesleyan College P, 1994. ISBN 0933598513
• Brink Road.New York: Norton, 1996. ISBN 0393039587
• Glare. New York: Norton, 1997. ISBN 0393040968
• Bosh and Flapdoodle: Poems. New York: Norton, 2005. ISBN 0393059529
• Selected Poems. David Lehman, ed. New York: Library of America, 2006. ISBN 1931082936

Prose

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

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Two poems by Ammons
• Lehman, David. "A.R. Ammons' Life and Career."
• A.R. Ammons Interviewed by David Grossvogel
• A.R. Ammons Poetry and Translations at the Open Translation Project sponsored by Bryant H. McGill
• Diacritics

[edit] Print 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.