inaugurates the 2014 Poetry Month celebration with A. R. Ammons: 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 over-reach from which all possibilities, like filaments, depend: killing, nesting, dying, sun or cloud, figure up and become song—simple, hard: removed. Ammons (1926-2001) grew up during the Depression in the rural South, and worked, among other things, at a biological glassware company before teaching at Cornell University. Generally regarded as an heir to the American Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau and a disciple, by turns, of Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, Ammons developed a voice and vision wholly distinct. It is not by chance that his first book, *Ommateum*, was named for the compound eye of the insect: his poems try to see the observable world more and more widely and shrewdly. He was celebrated for long, diary-like poems, but excelled also at brief poems that bristle with wit. This salute to a sparrows work is a kind of *ars poetica*, an ideal for the creative artist, drawn from the natural world; the epiphany comes in the deft title.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 17:16:19 +0000
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