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A R Ammons 1st edit/1 print Sphere the Form of A Motion First Edition 1974 [Hardcover] Ammons, A.R [Hardcover] Ammons, A.R
This rare and vintage book is a perfect addition to any bibliophile's collection
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
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About the author
A.R. Ammons
50Ìýbooks63ÌýfollowersArchie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California at Berkeley.
His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 16, 2013
I fell in love to the sound of this book.
November 9, 2021
In the 1960s A.R. Ammons had written several long poems in which his wide-ranging thoughts, from the loftiest philosophy to the mundane events of his life, went into his typewriter. After being inspired by the first photograph of the whole Earth from space, he aimed at his most epic long poem yet: Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1972�1974) consists of 155 numbered sections, each of which contains four tercets. Certainly the beginning of the poem, where sexual reproduction is used as a metaphor for the creative process, is among Ammons� most impressive achievements as a poet:
The poem then elaborates Ammons� metaphysical and scientific thinking. Though an atheist, he never lost his sense of wonder, he just found it instead in things like the one:many problem and the latest discoveries about the cosmos:
A blurb on the paperback edition of Sphere compares Ammons to Lucretius. That’s certainly an apt comparison, and I would add the Pre-Socratics as well. Ammons shares the same concerns of those writers of antiquity, and he also finds poetry a perfectly reasonable medium for exploring them. Now, I find much hip-hop tiresome because it is so often rapping about rapping, and for the same reason poetry about poetry can be annoying. Yet here, it makes sense for Ammons to write about poetry itself because his poetry is his very way of organizing knowledge and advancing argumentation.
These more abstract motions of metaphysics, physics, chemistry, or biology are repeatedly interrupted suddenly by Ammons� view outside his window or when he did gardening work, where trees and birds marked the passing of the seasons:
In writing on the successive changes in the scenery outside, the poem becomes a record of its own creation. Ammons sometimes explicitly mentions that he is typing in a month much later than the last date that was clearly mentioned. These shifts to the mundane are not entirely irrelevant to the poem’s arguments. Rather, within each of Ammons� local observations are the spark of some new philosophical concern that will rage over the following lines.
Ammons was a red-blooded man and his ordinary sexual urges and humour, too, found their way into this poem, as well as his work in general. I wonder if this would land Ammons in trouble today, when some might be suspicious of male sexuality as an expression of the oppressive or patriarchal, and something unseemly for a professor of poetry teaching young female students.
On the other hand, Ammons might satisfy current mores, as he is remarkably tolerant and welcoming for a middle-aged American poet of his era. As the poem reaches its climax, it is increasingly concerned with hopes for world peace and unity. Here, evoking Whitman (in a rare turn � Ammons rarely alludes to earlier poets) Ammons dreams a republic of poetry open to everyone regardless of background and gay or straight.
In spite of the poem’s many impressive moments, overall it feels like a very flawed work. Many if not most readers are going to have moments when they wish this poem had been edited more tightly, as Ammons was reluctant to leave anything out. (For me it was especially Ammons� banging on about a quince bush in 102). In fact, the overly meandering poem that readers get is already the result of editing, which shaved an entire 100 sections from the original draft! Too bad Ammons didn’t go further, but I know from my familiarity with his poetry in general that he was allergic to that sort of thing, and in fact he lays out his thinking here in Sphere several times, e.g.:
The other problem here is the metric irregularity. Ammons� measure for his lines is the merely width of the typewriter page, not syllable count or stress. The rigor of his thoughts and his rich choice of words are great, yet the sound of the poem is often awkward, and it does not possess the sort of flowing quality and consistency that enable memorization.
Thus Sphere is a book I can admire but never quite love, and all in all I feel that Ammons did his best work in the shorter form (poems like “Mechanism� or “Easter Morning�, say).
The sexual basis of all things rare is really apparent
and fools crop up where angels are mere disguises:
a penetrating eye (insight), a penetrating tongue (ah),
a penetrating penis and withal a penetrating mind,
integration’s consummation: a com- or intermingling of parts,
heterocosm joyous, opposite motions away and toward
along a common line, the in-depth knowledge (a dilly),
the concentration and projection (firmly energized) and
the ecstasy, the pay off, the play out, the expended
nexus nodding, the flurry, cell spray, finish, the
haploid hungering after the diploid condition: the reconciler
of opposites, commencement, proliferation, ontogeny:
The poem then elaborates Ammons� metaphysical and scientific thinking. Though an atheist, he never lost his sense of wonder, he just found it instead in things like the one:many problem and the latest discoveries about the cosmos:
the billion-year-old flint light striking chemical changes
into the eye: behold: the times break across one
another like waves in surfy shoals and explode into the
white water of instantaneous being: each of us stands in
the cone of ages to collect the moment that breaks the
deeper future’s past through: each of us peak and center:
A blurb on the paperback edition of Sphere compares Ammons to Lucretius. That’s certainly an apt comparison, and I would add the Pre-Socratics as well. Ammons shares the same concerns of those writers of antiquity, and he also finds poetry a perfectly reasonable medium for exploring them. Now, I find much hip-hop tiresome because it is so often rapping about rapping, and for the same reason poetry about poetry can be annoying. Yet here, it makes sense for Ammons to write about poetry itself because his poetry is his very way of organizing knowledge and advancing argumentation.
These more abstract motions of metaphysics, physics, chemistry, or biology are repeatedly interrupted suddenly by Ammons� view outside his window or when he did gardening work, where trees and birds marked the passing of the seasons:
there’s a
bluish small roll of garden wire in the edge of the woods
that shows no sign of sprouting, however naturalized,
the robin striking leaves over by it and staring: leave
it there long enough, it will start to function, a
protective tangle, a harbor or arbor to centipede or
vine, a splinterer of gusts
In writing on the successive changes in the scenery outside, the poem becomes a record of its own creation. Ammons sometimes explicitly mentions that he is typing in a month much later than the last date that was clearly mentioned. These shifts to the mundane are not entirely irrelevant to the poem’s arguments. Rather, within each of Ammons� local observations are the spark of some new philosophical concern that will rage over the following lines.
Ammons was a red-blooded man and his ordinary sexual urges and humour, too, found their way into this poem, as well as his work in general. I wonder if this would land Ammons in trouble today, when some might be suspicious of male sexuality as an expression of the oppressive or patriarchal, and something unseemly for a professor of poetry teaching young female students.
On the other hand, Ammons might satisfy current mores, as he is remarkably tolerant and welcoming for a middle-aged American poet of his era. As the poem reaches its climax, it is increasingly concerned with hopes for world peace and unity. Here, evoking Whitman (in a rare turn � Ammons rarely alludes to earlier poets) Ammons dreams a republic of poetry open to everyone regardless of background and gay or straight.
In spite of the poem’s many impressive moments, overall it feels like a very flawed work. Many if not most readers are going to have moments when they wish this poem had been edited more tightly, as Ammons was reluctant to leave anything out. (For me it was especially Ammons� banging on about a quince bush in 102). In fact, the overly meandering poem that readers get is already the result of editing, which shaved an entire 100 sections from the original draft! Too bad Ammons didn’t go further, but I know from my familiarity with his poetry in general that he was allergic to that sort of thing, and in fact he lays out his thinking here in Sphere several times, e.g.:
the poem insists on
differences, on every fragment of difference till the fragments
cease to be fragmentary and wash together in a high flotation
interpenetrating much like the possibility of the world: the
poem wants every fragment clear but a fragment until, every
fragment taken into account, the fragments will be apprehended
to declare a common reality past declaration
The other problem here is the metric irregularity. Ammons� measure for his lines is the merely width of the typewriter page, not syllable count or stress. The rigor of his thoughts and his rich choice of words are great, yet the sound of the poem is often awkward, and it does not possess the sort of flowing quality and consistency that enable memorization.
Thus Sphere is a book I can admire but never quite love, and all in all I feel that Ammons did his best work in the shorter form (poems like “Mechanism� or “Easter Morning�, say).
August 31, 2024
Just finished this for the third time, or more accurately the 3+rd time, considering how many times I've picked it up to re-read sections or entire sections of sections, again. Without a doubt, one of the greatest American poems of the 20th Century - in its own right, for 100s of reasons - and for how it responds to Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, and Crane. In any case, I personally cannot get enough od ir and will probably (re)start it again in the next couple of days. Or take up Ammons' other late book-length poem, Garbage, once again.
December 28, 2007
My most memorable experience about this book was when reading it while waiting at the bus stop. I met a guy who was also waiting for the bus to go home with his groceries. He had broken into his 12-pack of beer and I did not think that he was gonna make it home with any left. But, he fancied himself a barder. He grabbed my book, stood on the bench and belted out a few lines. Yes, poetry too is art.
May 18, 2020
Sometimes willfully awkward, burdened with a blend of gender essentialism and one-world-ism that seems earnest, if knowing—and yet the poem is so often revelatory and true-seeming (thoughts on taxonomy and divinity, remarkably fresh environmental images) that those quirks serve mostly to locate him in cultural spacetime. Ammons so often undercuts himself, but under the auspices of half-jokes he lets himself aphorize more freely, a kind of overtly YMMV approach to performing the poet-metaphysician that ends up yielding more, not less.
January 6, 2008
Sick of the blustery Bloomian readings of Ammons as another great 20th century Emersonian, a couple of scholars have started to historicize his work. It's about time. This poem is the most literal proof, so far as I've read, that Ammons is THE poet of the American Cold War, with all the good and bad that this implies. This long, messy poem - inspired by the newly iconic globalism that was implied by the first photos of earth from space - is also Ammons trying to account for his literary celebrity, to take on Whitman and Stevens at their own games, and to find a poetics for the founding of the U.N. It's distracted and journalistic and pompous and glorious by turns, but comes to a great, hyperbolically contextualized conclusion in which he lays out the stakes: to "correct much evil in the dark edges of dislocation" (78). A frontier poetry of the New Frontier. Anyone else find Ammons's sexual politics deeply weird?
Recommended for fans of science and Buckminster Fuller.
Recommended for fans of science and Buckminster Fuller.
July 25, 2011
A massive, free-flowing poetic epic based on the Whitmanic concept of organic totality: Ammons is trying to encapsulate everything, the cosmos within and without. In three line connected stanzas....
I read it out loud, in public, through the course of a day. An excellent way to read it, out loud and in private, as it happens.
If someone asks, I'll forgo the usual third party interpretation and just post specifically selected selections from the text itself.
I read it out loud, in public, through the course of a day. An excellent way to read it, out loud and in private, as it happens.
If someone asks, I'll forgo the usual third party interpretation and just post specifically selected selections from the text itself.
November 1, 2007
could give the top rating to almost anything he's written. This might be his toughest one - I actually didn't even finish it, though I suspect that's more my problem than his. Probably the most wide-ranging topically, relentless and dense.
December 18, 2015
Messy, meandering, the form of this long poem is almost more interesting than the content with its stilted jumps and spaces inbetween ":nothing is separate:" and it jumps to space and back to birds and tables and roadtrips to "numb nonchalance" and wonder.
October 30, 2016
DNF at 50%. I'll talk more about this in my sbooktober wrap-up, but I really just couldn't get into this. It was really trying my brain to read through such a dense collection of stream of consciousness thoughts.
June 26, 2007
My favorite long poem by Ammons. Beautifully balanced between order and chaos, and profoundly dedicated to the perfectness of organic process.
March 19, 2011
Not as beautiful as Garbage, but still a radiant work from a profound yet humble poet.
September 10, 2016
"the strangling through into the darkness of futurity"
February 2, 2015
Extraordinary. Probably his masterpiece.
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