A. R. Ammons, known to most people who ever met him as Archie, was an apparently simple, but in fact complicated and sometimes difficult, person and poet. He could be friendly and interested in people, especially his students; he could also be cool, detached, and at times unfriendly and uninterested in anyone. To hear him talk about writers whose work he liked was often exciting and even inspiring; but he could be cruel and dismissive of those he did not admire. He could be generous, again especially to his students, but he could also on occasion be resentful and even vengeful, refusing to allow certain poets to be invited to teach or even read at Cornell. But we do not ask that a great writer should be a consistently good man; that is not why we value him.
The outward simplicity and modesty of Archie’s verse disguised both great ambition and an ambitious and complex seriousness. Even his earliest poems celebrated the minute and glorious details of the natural world, and also, incidentally, his own gifts of patient observation and dazzling representation. In “Bees Stopped,” for instance, he calls attention to some of the small things that “people never see” but that the poet himself looks at closely enough to rejoice in:
Bees stopped on the rock
and rubbed their headparts and wings
rested then flew on:
ants ran over the whitish greenish reddish
plants that grow flat on rocks
and people never see
because nothing should grow on rocks:
I looked out over the lake
and beyond to the hills and trees
and nothing was moving
so I looked closely along the lakeside
under the old leaves of rushes
and around clumps of dry grass
and life was everywhere
so I went on sometimes whistling
Many readers of this poem, the next time they were outdoors, will have looked more carefully at the life that is everywhere around them, and really seen (perhaps for the first time) bees resting and rubbing their wings, and the plants that grow flat on rocks—I know I did. And then, like Archie, they went on whistling—and by implication, rejoicing.
Even Archie’s shortest poems often contain significant messages, in astonishingly condensed form.
The reeds give
way to the
the wind and give
the wind away
Here he reminds us to look carefully at how reeds move before a wind, and how by this movement they reveal the invisible presence of the wind. But, as most readers know, in classical mythology it was reeds out of which Pan made his pipes, the traditional instrument of the poet. The reeds in this poem “give way to the wind”—that is, they are weaker than it is. But they can also reveal its presence, and they can give it a voice.
Moreover, the very existence of this brief verse reminds us that Archie, though now, alas, invisible to all who loved and admired him—is still present. His poems, in yet another sense of the phrase “give away,” are his gift of himself to us.