For today’s Poetry Sunday, I’m featuring the American poet A.R. Ammons, who was first showcased last year for his poem “Gravelly Run“.
Born in North Carolina in 1926, Ammons grew up on his family’s farm during the Great Depression and attended a Pentecostal church, whose hellfire sermons terrified the young man. He first began to write poems while serving on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he pursued a postgraduate education and served in a variety of jobs before beginning to publish in earnest. His first collection, Ommateum, sold poorly, but his later books were critically praised and soon vaulted him from obscurity to fame. His work won him a position on the English faculty at Cornell University, where he was a much-beloved campus figure until his retirement in 1998 and death in 2001 from cancer. Over the course of his career he won countless awards, including the National Book Award, the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As a poet, Ammons stands out for his scientific background, which is clearly visible in many of his poems. His book-length poem Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974) was inspired by a photo of the Earth from space. His verse is free, fluid, often lacking capitals and punctuation. He abhorred rigidity and dogma in all its forms, and in his transcendent view of nature’s complexity, he bears a resemblance to Emerson, Whitman and other naturalist poets.
Ammons’ religious views are best described as Spinozan, identifying “God” as the sum total of nature and the laws of physics, rather than as a supernatural being with a separate existence. One of his poems is titled “God Is the Sense the World Makes Without God”. His freethought sympathies can also be seen in today’s poem, which was read at Ammons’ own memorial service. It speaks of mortality and transience, reminding us that the Earth is just one place of many in a vast and unfathomable cosmos, and that our lives are small threads in a far more immense pattern of ebb and flow. It was first published in A Coast of Trees (1981).
In Memoriam Mae Noblitt
This is just a place:
we go around, distanced,
yearly in a star’satmosphere, turning
daily into and out of
direct light andslanting through the
quadrant seasons: deep
space begins at ourheels, nearly rousing
us loose: we look up
or out so high, sight’ssilk almost draws us away:
Read the rest.
Other posts in this series: