2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTESY OF ALEX ALBRIGHT, R.A. FOUNTAIN AND JOHN AMMONS
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ABOVE TOP Emily Herring WIlson
(right) and Ed Wilson with Vida Ammons Cox, 2017
do-you-do, I observed that “my mother’s a Clark from Clarkton,” and the two of us started spinning a web of various Cox connections (Ammons’s sister Vida married a Cox and lived in Clarkton) all over Bladen and Columbus counties (“Yes, Great Aunt Eva married Nathan Cox . . .”) COURTESY OF ALEX ALBRIGHT, R.A. FOUNTAIN AND JOHN AMMONS
during Ammons’s sabbatical year at Wake Forest, the poet Howard Nemerov was booked for a campus reading. I was a senior down the road at Davidson, busy on an honors thesis on Virginia Woolf. A close friend and classmate from “up North,” as we used to say, was writing his thesis on Ammons and scored an interview in Winston-Salem. After his appointed talks with Ammons during the day, I caught up with my friend for the Nemerov reading that evening and piggybacked on his invitation to a reception (at the Wilson home, I’m now guessing – belated thanks to the gracious hosts!). Soon my very Northern friend worked me across the room to prove the harvest of his day by introducing me to his trophy, the famous poet A.R. Ammons. I could sense my friend’s rising confusion as Archie and I, to that point strangers, immediately slipped into an old Southern dance like an old familiar pair of shoes: after a polite how-
and so on. I caught a ride with my friend back to Davidson. He had lost his voice by now, but he managed to mutter, “Are all you people down here kin to each other?” Well yes, sort of. (He had missed the Faulkner seminar.) Several weeks later Ammons came and read to a small group at Davidson, on the basis of which I’ve never entirely bought the many stage-fright stories that stalk him, although I understand the steep cost to a very private person of staged public events. But on that evening, he read “Corson’s Inlet” in a voice that kept us all spellbound. Emily Herring Wilson wraps her excellent book with this great blessing: “This is what I have to give in return for his many gifts to me: my love” (13). Like an Ammons poem or painting, her book is the fine accomplishment of a “still completed thing.” n
ABOVE BOTTOM A.R. Ammons in his Ithaca, NY, home, circa 1970