SPEAKER:
(MUSIC PLAYS) This is the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was Poet Laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by A.R. Ammons. A.R. Ammons did not intend to become a leading American poet. I never dreamed, he once said, of being a poet, poet. I think I always wanted to be an amateur poet. But critics and peers say he was destined for greatness. Some even compare Ammons to Emerson or Whitman. Archie Randolph Ammons was born in the winter of 1926 on a farm in North Carolina. He grew up during the depression, picking cotton and hanging tobacco. Images from those years fill his poetry, the softness of cotton, the sweet smell of tobacco, a bird bouncing on a branch, a slaughtered hog. When Ammons was 15, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor.

By 18, he was in the South Pacific on a naval destroyer. It was then that Ammons began writing. In the off hours, he would compose poems from his bunk. When the war ended, Ammons went home to North Carolina. He studied biology at Wake Forest University and then went on to work as an elementary school principal, a real estate broker and a salesman at his father in law's glass company. In 1955, Ammons self-published his first book of poems. It was called Ommateum, and it sold 16 copies. His later books were more successful. In 1973, his Collected Poems won the National Book Award. That was followed by Sphere, A Coast of Trees, Sumerian Vistas, and in 1993, Garbage, for which Ammons was awarded his second National Book Award. Ammons was awarded many other prizes and fellowships, including the Wallace Stevens Award and the Ruth Lilly Prize. In 1978, Ammons was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1981, the first year the award was given, Ammons won a MacArthur fellowship.

In 1964, Ammons became a professor in English and a poet in residence at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He taught there until he retired in 1998. A.R. Ammons died in the winter of 2001, one week after his 75th birthday. The following poems were recorded at the Library of Congress in 1963.

HOWARD:
A.R. Ammons Reading His poems at the Library of Congress, October 22nd, 1963.

AMMONS:
Can it be informal?

HOWARD:
Well, it can be as informal as you like, Archie.

AMMONS:
Fine. Thank you, Howard.

HOWARD:
Just go ahead and read when you want and stop and talk when you want.

AMMONS:
Fine. This one is called Glass. The song sparrow puts all his saying into one repeated song. What variations, subtleties he manages to encompass denser meanings. I'm too coarse to catch. It's one song, an overreach from which all possibilities like filaments depend. Killing, nesting, dying, sun or cloud figure up and become song, simple, hard, removed.

HOWARD:
And then one other short one.

AMMONS:
It's called Dunes. Taking root in windy sand is not an easy way to go about finding a place to stay. A ditch bank or wood's edge has firmer ground. In a loose world, though, something can be started. A root touch water, a tip break sand. Mounds from that can rise on held mounds, a gesture of building keeping a trapping into shape. Firm ground is not available ground. Then I'd like to try, Howard, some of these longer ones that came in, in between.

HOWARD:
Yes. So are those the ones that was first, so taken by, I think, before we met?

AMMONS:
I think these short poems are a result, though, of having written so many long poems that you just feel after a while that there's so much, so many words in it's time to try to eliminate some of them. It's a beautiful challenge and I think maybe it's the essential one.

HOWARD:
Well, they both are the opposites of one another. The more you do one, the more you will be attracted to the other.

AMMONS:
There is a certain amount of material that you want to get out of your system. You hope it becomes poems, but it may not.

HOWARD:
Steven said it can never be satisfied, the mind. Never. And that's true of other people. If you write short poems, they'll tell you you're unambitious.

AMMONS:
Well, I hope to have some of both some of these days if things go well. This one called Mechanism frightens many of my friends who are organic specialists. But it's, as you say, it's a facet too. You can't limit reality, so why limit yourself if you're only there to try to reflect it?

HOWARD:
Of course, I don't know what I'm agreeing to because I don't know the poem yet.

AMMONS:
Fine.

HOWARD:
But I'm prepared to give you a blanket agreement to begin with.

AMMONS:
Alright. Mechanism. Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree, morality, any working order, animate or inanimate. It has managed directed balance. The incoming and outgoing energies are working right. Some energy left to the mechanism, some ash. Enough energy held to maintain the order and repair a sure further consumption of entropy. Expending energy to strengthen order. Honor the persisting reactor, the container of change, the moderator. The yellow bird flashes black wing bars and the new leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay startles the hawk with beauty, flitting to a branch where flash vanishes into stillness. Hawk, addled by the sudden loss of sight. Honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin, kinetics, the light sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies of control, the gastric transformations, seed dissolve to acrid liquors, synthesized into chirp vitreous humor, knowledge, blood compulsion, instinct. Honor the unique genes, molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into sets, the nucleic grain transmitted in slow change through ages of rising and falling form.

Some cells set aside for the special work, mind or perception rising into orders of courtship, territorial rights, mind rising from the physical chemistries to guarantee that genes will be exchanged. Male and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper racial satisfaction. Heat kept by a feathered skin, the living alembic. Body heat maintained, bunsen burner under the flask so the chemistries can proceed. Reaction rates interdependent, self-adjusting with optimum efficiency. The vessel firm, the flame staying, isolated contained reactions. The precise and necessary worked out of random, reproducible, the handiwork redeemed from chance while the goldfinch unconscious of the billion operations that stay its form. Flashes, chirping, not a great songster in the bay cherry bushes, wild of leaf. That's all.

HOWARD:
Well, thank you, Archie.

AMMONS:
It's a pleasure. Howard.

SPEAKER:
That was A.R. Ammons, recorded at the Library of Congress in 1963, and used by permission of W.W. Norton and Company. You've been listening to the Essential American Poets podcast, produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about A.R. Ammons and other essential American poets, and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.