Once A Seaman, A Principal, A Glass Factory Excutive: Then The Poet Emerged
© Thadine Franciszkiewicz
If one examines the early educational and career paths that Archie Randolph Ammons traveled, one may not expect to hear or read about Ammons gaining honorable recognition as a master of poetry in his middle and later years of his life. A poet he was, is, and remains.
His studies focused on the sciences and nature. His careers varied from Navy life to administrative as a principal of an elementary school to being an editor to managing his father-in-law's glass factory. Finally, in his mid-thirties, he began to teach at Cornell University. For years he maintained the position of Poet.
Despite the fact that Ammons had begun to write poetry while in the Navy during WW II, his first published work did not appear until 1955. He chose a vanity press to print his book Ommateum. Since this is not unlike other poets throughout the last centuries, one might think that Ammons would follow a typical lifestyle of a poet. However, this poet did not.
It was almost a decade later that both his reputation as a remarkable poet blossomed and his numbers of dedicated readers increased. From that point, Ammons seemed to quickly receive one poetry award after another. These included The Ruth Lily Prize, The Frost Medal, The National Book Award (twice) Wallace Stevens Award, and many others.
Ammons's poetry superbly combines daily living behaviors, philosophical beliefs, and undeniable interactions between humans and nature. His imagery relishes the succinct life spans of snowflakes; his punctuation expresses the endless momentum of interrupted life activities. Take for example the following stanzas from a poem "Called Into Play:"
Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roads
and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to
find something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, look
down, look up, look close, think, think, think:
but in what range should I think: should I
The poem in its entirety can be found:
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?454...
At first, readers may be put off by the usage of the colon. Much like T.S. Elliot who crafted punctuation into the form of poetry, Ammons presented an idea as a poem by using the colon.
Critic David Lehman notes that the poet "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."
His studies focused on the sciences and nature. His careers varied from Navy life to administrative as a principal of an elementary school to being an editor to managing his father-in-law's glass factory. Finally, in his mid-thirties, he began to teach at Cornell University. For years he maintained the position of Poet.
Despite the fact that Ammons had begun to write poetry while in the Navy during WW II, his first published work did not appear until 1955. He chose a vanity press to print his book Ommateum. Since this is not unlike other poets throughout the last centuries, one might think that Ammons would follow a typical lifestyle of a poet. However, this poet did not.
It was almost a decade later that both his reputation as a remarkable poet blossomed and his numbers of dedicated readers increased. From that point, Ammons seemed to quickly receive one poetry award after another. These included The Ruth Lily Prize, The Frost Medal, The National Book Award (twice) Wallace Stevens Award, and many others.
Ammons's poetry superbly combines daily living behaviors, philosophical beliefs, and undeniable interactions between humans and nature. His imagery relishes the succinct life spans of snowflakes; his punctuation expresses the endless momentum of interrupted life activities. Take for example the following stanzas from a poem "Called Into Play:"
Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roads
and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to
find something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, look
down, look up, look close, think, think, think:
but in what range should I think: should I
The poem in its entirety can be found:
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?454...
At first, readers may be put off by the usage of the colon. Much like T.S. Elliot who crafted punctuation into the form of poetry, Ammons presented an idea as a poem by using the colon.
Critic David Lehman notes that the poet "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."
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