A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO A. R. AMMONS
Dr. P. Dhanavel
Archie Randolph Ammons became one of the celebrated poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps the major reason for this almost incredible achievement was his whole attitude to poetry, which he inevitably formed due to his socio-economic political circumstances.
Poetry is a sanctuary, says Ammons in his poem “Triphammer Bridge”:
Sanctuary, Sanctury, I say it over and over and the word’s sound is the one place to dwell that’s it, just the sound, and the imagination of the sound - a place.
He conceived of poetry as a sanctuary because he had no other place to go. This formulation is very close to Rabindranath Tagore’s. In one of his letters dated 8th may 1893, included in Glimpses of Bengal, Tagore tellingly remarks:
Consciously or unconsciously, I may have done many things that were untrue, but I have never uttered anything false in my poetry - that is the sanctuary where the deepest truths of my life find refuge.
As well known, Tagore wrote poetry throughout his life, mostly in songs. Similarly, Ammons has poured out his heart and soul in poetry incessantly and probably, like Tagore again, restlessly. It is possible that Ammons had occasions to read and know about Tagore, while he was exploring the Eastern thought at Wake Forest college library.
He came to know of his real potential only after meeting Josephine Miles at the University of California, Berkley. Miles, an accomplished poet and critic, encouraged Ammons to send out his poems to magazines and thus opened his eyes to the larger world of poetry. She also advised him to see William Carlos Williams, the star poet of the day. Later Ammons met Williams and found him to be generous and inspiring. In fact many aspects of Ammons’s poetic form are indebted to Williams. A short poem called “Small Song” for instance, exemplifies the poetic form:
The reeds give
way to the
wind and give
the wind away.
The details observed by the poet are small, often insignificant, but the thoughts embodied in the poem are profound, as in Williams’ famous poem “The Redwheel Barrow”.
The poet had to wait for a long time to get his real recognition. He published his first book of poems, Ommateum with Doxology in 1955 through a vanity publisher but few copies were sold. The same book later cost $ 1300 a copy in 1989. Perhaps that is the fate of many poets who go unnoticed early and become popular late. Not many publishers were willing to bring out his second volume Expressions of Sea level. When it was published by the Ohio State University Press, it earned him the status of “a major poet” of America in The Oxford Companion to American Literature. In a way that helped him to land as faculty of Cornell University in 1964. Since then he has served Cornell with dedication and held the prestigious Goldwyn Smith Professorship of Poetry.
Hence volume after volume came out at regular intervals: Tape for the Turn of the year (1965), Corsons Inlet (1965), Northfield Poems (1966), Uplands (1960), Briefings (1971). Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972), Which won him the National Book Award, Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974). Which brought him the Bollingen Prize, Diversifications (1975), The Snow Poems (1977). A Coast of Trees (1981), which earned him the National Book Critics Circle Award, Wordly Hopes (1982), Lake Effect Country (1983), Sumerian Vistas (1987) The Really short poems of A. R. Ammons (1990). Garbage (1993), which fetched him the second National Book Award. Brink Road (1996), and Glare (1997). In addition to two books of Selected Poems, he also edited volumes of poetry by others. This prolific poet has received a number of awards and honours, including the McArthur Foundation Award known as the “genius award”.
In his long
chequered poetic career, Ammons has basically dealt with the themes that he
had set down in his foreword to Ommateum:
These poems are, for the most part, dramatic presentations of thought and emotion, as in the themes of the fear of the loss of identity, the appreciation of natural beauty, the conflict between the individual and the group, the chaotic particle in the classical field, the creation of false Gods to serve real human needs.
Evidently, Ammons is a pluralistic and provisional poet concerned with subjectivity, nature, society, science, religion, and so on in various complex facets. For the uninitiated, his early poems, mostly set in the Sumerian land with the persons of Ezra, may appear to be difficult to access. Once the ice is broken, this metaphor is significant in the transitional phase of Ammons from the Sumerian wind to the Chinese water image, Amman’s poetry is a smooth sail for the reader. At times, the course may look fiightful, especially in The Snow Poems. But one can traverse the rest with delight and wisdom. Inevitably, the reader reaches the state of Shanti. If this reading is not incorrect, shanta rasa seems to be the predominant rasa of Ammon’s entire poetry. Simultaneously, the reader can feel Karuna rasa too.
There is not much of change in Ammon’s themes. Most of them take different forms of One and Many but essentially they reveal the poet’s interest in understanding and appreciating the contradictions and contraries in nature as they appear to him. However, he has attempted various experiments in poetic form – short, long, and very long poems; free and structured verse, purely subjective and objective approaches. One of his notable experiments is Tape for the Turn of the Year. It is a post modernist poem typed on an adding machine tape. The size and shape of the poem was dictated by the tape and the poet recorded his impressions freely but in a mock-epic manner.
Further, he “colonized” colon: he rarely used period in this poem. In fact, the poem has only one period, that too in the middle of the poem within parenthesis. His preference for colon suggests the beginninglessness and endlessness of the universe. Man is caught in the middle: he can go back and/ or forward as he chooses. The same tape format he used for Garbage too but with a lot more control and seriousness of purpose. The Snow Poems has been considered to be disastrous due to its radical experiments with double columns and triple columns. However, this collection points Ammon’s readiness and determination to continue with his poetic freedom.
Often Ammons is seen as a nature poet in the tradition of William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau, and other romantic writers. Like Robert Frost. Amnons, distinguishes himself as a “dark romantic”. He looks up to nature not with a sense of innocent joy, nor with a sense of spontaneous celebration but with a sense of profound gratitude. He traces his philosophy or life to Lao-Tzu, the legendary founder of Taoism, who advocated the paradoxical Natural Way of Life. Appropriately Ammons is concerned with several forms of ecological hazards, afflicting man and earth today. If Robinson Jeffers argued that the earth had no need for man, Ammons concedes that man is an insignificant creature in this universe and suggests that man must conduct himself properly till the end of his life.
To have a
foretaste of Ammon’s poetry at the turn of the third millennium, an extract is
gleaned from Garbage:
We give rise to us: we are not, though,
though natural, divorced from higher, finer
configurations:
tissues and holograms of energy circulate
in us and seek and find representations of
themselves
Outside us, so that we can participate in
celebrations high and know reaches of
feeling
and sight and thought that penetrate (really
penetrate) far far beyond these our wet cells
right on up past our stories, the planets,
moons, and other bodies locally to the
other end of
the pole where matter’s forms diffuse and
energy loses all means to express itself
except as spirit........
That nothing separate and that man is smaller part or the larger nature are the major ecological insights that Ammons has consistently and convincingly infused into his entire poetry. It is wise then to enter the new century and the new millennium with sustainable wisdom rather than destructive knowledge. The relevance of Ammon’s poetry to the present and future mankind is undoubtedly great indeed.
A number of research works have been carried out on the poetry of Ammons. The first book length study on him, Alan Holder’s A.R. Ammons appeared in 1978. Harold Bloom collected many significant critical essays in A.R. Ammons for the grand Chelsea series in 1986. Another major work A. R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope by Steven Schneider came out in 1994. The present author wrote the first Indian dissertation on “Paradox in A.R. Ammons Poetry” and obtained his doctoral degree in 1997. Surely Ammon’s poetry will provide a sanctuary to all those who seek a “place to dwell” in this increasingly complex world. What is more, the Indo-American Centre for International studies (formerly ASRC), Hyderabad, has almost all the volumes of this great poet.