Latest edition of Epoch celebrates life and artistry of poet A.R. Ammons

By Franklin Crawford

A.R. Ammons, Cornell's legendary bard, is celebrated in an unprecedented 480-page issue of Epoch magazine, Cornell's literary journal.

Fresh off the press is Epoch Vol. 52, No. 3, titled, This is Just a Place: The Life and Work of A.R. Ammons (Cornell University, $12.95).

Ammons

"It's all previously unpublished," said Michael Koch, Epoch's editor since 1989. "Ninety-five percent of the material in here has never appeared in print before."

The new Epoch volume includes 30 previously unpublished poems, prose pieces from all phases of the poet's career, entries from Ammons' Navy diary, logged while he was aboard the USS Gunason in 1945; 21 remarkable watercolors by the poet, plus letters, conversations and other Ammons ephemera.

Ammons, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry, died in February 2001 at age 75. During his career, he won virtually every major prize for poetry in the United States, including two National Book Awards -- one in 1973 for Collected Poems, 1951-1971, and another in 1993 for Garbage.

With an introduction by Roger Gilbert, Cornell professor of English and recipient of a Guggenheim for his upcoming critical work on Ammons, the book-length volume is the longest issue in the 57-year history of Epoch. All of the prose pieces and new poems were culled from the Ammons archive in Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

The book is divided into five sections: New Poems, Early Writings, Painting and Music, Exchanges and Reminiscences. The watercolors appear courtesy of Emily Wilson, a close friend of Ammons. According to Gilbert, Ammons produced hundred of paintings in the 1970s and 1980s.

The 30 new poems are accompanied by short comments from distinguished friends, colleagues and admirers of Ammons, as well as members of his family. Among the admirers is Harold Bloom, noted literary critic and Yale professor, who, in a short critical piece on "Quibbling the Colossal," writes: "I go on mourning for Archie Randolph Ammons, and I keep re-reading his poems."

Ammons was born near Whiteville, N.C., in 1926 and graduated from Wake Forest College in North Carolina, where he received a bachelor's degree in biology. He began writing poetry while serving onboard the USS Gunason during World War II. Before coming to Cornell in 1964, he attended graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley, worked as an elementary school principal in Cape Hatteras, N.C., and worked as a real estate salesman, an editor and as a sales executive at his father-in law's New Jersey glass company. His first book of poetry was published in 1955.

Epoch was founded in 1947 by the late Baxter Hathaway, Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell. The works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo first saw print in Epoch, and Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates also published some of their earliest stories in the award-winning magazine.

The Ammons volume can be purchased by sending $12.95 (first class postage paid) to: Epoch, 251 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853. Copies also soon will be available at the Cornell Store.