This week: A. R. Ammons Edited by: Stormy Lady More Newsletters By This Editor
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This is poetry from the minds and the hearts of poets on Writing.Com. The poems I am going to be exposing throughout this newsletter are ones that I have found to be, very visual, mood setting and uniquely done. Stormy Lady
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Poetics
by A. R. Ammons
I look for the way
things will turn
out spiralling 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.
After Yesterday
by A. R. Ammons
After yesterday
afternoon's blue
clouds and white rain
the mockingbird
in the backyard
untied the drops from
leaves and twigs
with a long singing.
On February 18, 1926 outside Whiteville, North Carolina, Willie and Lucy Della McKee Ammons welcomed son Archie Randolph Ammons into the world. Ammons was one of three surviving children the couple had together. The family farmed cotton and tobacco. Ammons spent his whole childhood in one place and attended school nearby. He attended Whiteville High School from where he graduated in 1943. After high school he was drafted into the U. S. Navy. He served on a navy destroyer in the South Pacific.
It was during his time on the ship that Ammons started writing poetry. After completing his service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University studying biology and graduated in 1949. While at the University he met and fell in love with Phyllis. The couple married in 1949. They had one son John Ammons together and remained happily married for fifty-two years. He then went onto the University of California at Berkeley to get his masters in English. Upon graduating he started working as a teacher and principal at Hatteras Elementary School. After working at the school he did a few odd jobs, real estate salesmen, an editor and an executive in his father's company. In 1964 he began teaching at Cornell University.
He published his first book of poetry, ‘Ommateum’ in 1955. He used his own money to fund the publication and the book sold only a dozen copies. He then went on to publish nearly thirty collections over his career. Some of those collections included, Collected Poems 1951-1971 published in 1972, which won the National Book Award followed by Sphere published in 1974, which received the Bollingen Prize. A Coast of Trees was published in 1981, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and Garbage was published in 1993, which won the National Book Award and the Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. His long poem Glare was published in 1997, this was his final piece of work published. His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ammons and his wife Phyllis lived in Ithaca, New York, where Ammons was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Archie Randolph Ammons died of cancer on February 25, 2001.
The City Limits
by A. R. Ammons
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
Rapids
by A. R. Ammons
Fall's leaves are redder than
spring's flowers, have no pollen,
and also sometimes fly, as the wind
schools them out or down in shoals
or droves: though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
Nature snakes through the
weathered remains
of the old car.
Battered by sun and rain,
she sits half-buried
in a tangle of wilderness.
She's like an abandoned lover—
rusted shoulders slumping
under the carelessly draped years
of time-gone-by.
Sometimes, when the wind swells
against her broken body
and sweeps through the emptiness,
memories,
long ago buried in dust,
come alive.
Weeds shudder
as ghostlike whistles echo
through shattered glass.
She seems to breathe
among the swirling layers of the past.
And when day flees
in fiery streaks of red,
and the last breath of wind grows still,
she remains—stranded.
Shimmers of dust
settle, once more,
into cracks and seams
and floorboards.
She sits, lifeless—
an old car wearing away
in the silence of abandonment.
Honorable mention:
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