Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
FROM OMMATEUM TO BOSH AND FLAPDOODLE a review by Eric Walker Robert M. West, Editor. The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, 2 volumes. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.
ERIC WALKER, a North Carolina native, is Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at Florida State University. He has taught classes at Florida State University since 1984 and specializes in 18th and 19th century British literature. His current research focuses on adoption studies for a book on Romanticism and adoption. His book Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War (Stanford University Press, 2009) was awarded the 2009 SAMLA Studies Book Award. ROBERT M. WEST’s poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Pembroke Magazine, Appalachian Journal, Asheville Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Literary Journal, Southern Cultures, Poetry, and NCLR. He has also published two poetry chapbooks, Out of Hand (Scienter Press, 2007) and Convalescent (Finishing Line Press, 2011). He has an MA and PhD in English and Comparative Literature from UNC Chapel Hill and a BA in English from Wake Forest University. He is a Professor of English at Mississippi State University, where he is an Associate Editor for Mississippi Quarterly.
The richly welcomed publication of the capacious two-volume Complete Poems by A.R. Ammons is a landmark moment in the history of twentieth-century American literature. Just as histories of poetry in the first half of the century headline the careers of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot, so the history of American poetry in the second half of the century now takes its primary bearings from the lifetime achievements of three poets born in the 1920s: Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Archie Randolph Ammons, the lone Southern figure on the billboard. The lives and works of all three poets now belong to the curatorial engines of biographies and collected editions. In the wake of his death in 2017, Ashbery’s career is being consolidated in collected volumes published by the Library of America. We have the proudly independent publisher W.W. Norton to thank, not only for serving as the longtime publisher of both Rich, who died in 2012, and Ammons, who died in 2001, but also for the serious investment in posthumous collected editions of both poets, Rich in 2016 and now Ammons in 2017, with these two splendid volumes. Roger Gilbert’s forthcoming biography of Ammons will tell the tale of the farm boy from Whiteville in Columbus County, NC, who, via the wartime Navy, Wake Forest College, Berkeley, Cape Hatteras, and long years on the Jersey shore, wound up writing and teaching in upstate New York for the second half of his life, his two dozen books of
A.R. AMMONS has been featured often in NCLR since its inception when Ammons served as “Staff Poet” and provided orignal poems for the first five issues. Read Founding Editor Alex Albright’s interview with Ammons in the premiere (1992) issue and essays on Ammons in the 1995 and 2006 issues.
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poetry from the mid-’60s onward garnering most of the top-tier laurels in the catalogue: two National Book Awards, a Bollingen Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the Ruth Lilly Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur “Genius” Award. With Reynolds Price, Ammons was the most prominent North Carolina writer on the national stage from the 1960s to the end of the century – Price an Anglophile Orange and Warren County homeboy, Ammons a Yankee expat who in 1966 bailed out after three months from his one attempt at a fellowship year in Europe, where, homesick, he notes in a journal that “I feel here especially that I must return to my home state.”1 But that return never happened except for intermittent visits, including a guest year at Wake Forest in 1974–75. In the late long poem Glare (1997), Ammons surveys this geography of self: I reject the North because it is not my native ground, and I reject the South because it rejected me, and I reject European clutterment because we fought to put that ocean between us: I identify with no sort or kind.
In the same poem, however, another section characteristically launches itself from native ground less frosty than Ithaca, NY: “well, it’s true, I’m from North / Carolina where there’s precious little
1
Ammons’s journal is in the A.R. Ammons Papers, Reid and Susan Overcash Literary Collection, East Carolina University Joyner Library, Manuscript Collection.