Ammons, A. R. (1926-2001), was an American poet whose verse explores natural processes, from the cosmic to the microscopic. Trained in science, Ammons brought to his poetry a subtle understanding of how organisms and events interact in nature to produce endless complexity. In one poem, “Cascadilla Falls,” he contemplated a single stone while trying to imagine all the forces that affect it: gravity, the spinning of the earth and its orbit around the sun, and the movement of the solar system and galaxy.
The form and language of Ammons’s poems often reflect the complexity he saw in nature. Some of his poems adopt a loose, wandering format with lines and phrases scattered across the page in patterns that suggest the uneven beauty of a wild landscape. Others unroll in regular groups of lines that resemble the rapid flowing of a stream. In their complex sentence structure and surprising shifts of vocabulary, his poems remind readers of the intricacy and variety of nature.
Archie Randolph Ammons was born on Feb. 18, 1926, in Whiteville, North Carolina. His Selected Poems were published in 1969, 1977, and 1986. The collection Bosh and Flapdoodle was published in 2005, after his death on Feb. 25, 2001. The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons was published in two volumes in 2017.
