A.R Ammons - eclectic poet

Ammons was known as an eclectic poet in his time (he died in 2001).

The New York Times had the following to say:

Typing some of his work on long strips of adding-machine tape, Mr. Ammons wrote more than 25 books of poetry, including ''Garbage,'' a 1993 book-length poem that won him his second National Book Award.

It was one of many prizes that he collected in his long literary career, which he started while in the Navy in World War II. His honors included the Tanning Prize for ''mastery in the art of poetry,'' a MacArthur fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Frost Medal for Achievement in Poetry Over a Lifetime.

In 1973 he received a National Book Award for his ''Collected Poems: 1951-1971,'' and in 1974 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry of the Yale University Library for ''Sphere: The Form of a Motion.''

It's good to see the re-use of adding-machine tape.

One of his poems called Poetics is reproduced below:

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper -- though
that, too -- but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

I particularly liked the phrase, from what black wells of possibility.


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