Uplands

by A.R. Ammons

This book collects many of the poems that A. R. Ammons wrote between 1964 and 1970. The poems here include brief lyrics and such longer works as "Summer Session 1968" and "Guitar Recicativos." The critic Harold Bloom writes, "With the publication of his Selected Poems (1968), soon after turning forty, A. R. Ammons quietly demonstrated a unique and central position in recent American poetry. . . . Recognition, as is always the case with a poetry difficult and central, has come slowly, but critics now begin to see in Ammons what he the maker of a body of poetry that fulfills Emerson's prophecy by addressing itself to life 'with sufficient plainness and with sufficient profoundness.'"

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Archie 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.

Reviews

[Steve]

A.R. Ammons (1926 - 2001), like so many contemporary American poets, was for most of his adult life a university professor (in his case, 34 years at Cornell), since poets must eat but poets do not sell. Archie had a fairly successful career - he won the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award and also the Bollingen Prize - if such things are the mark of a successful career. Harold Bloom championed Ammons as a transcendentalist: "the most direct Emersonian in American poetry since Frost"; well, maybe, but not in this collection of poems.

Uplands is a relatively early entry (1970) into Ammons oeuvre , written during a particularly productive period culminating in his prematurely named Collected Poems, 1951-1971 , for which he received his first National Book Award. In the merely 68 pages of this collection the poems range from a few lines to the 16-page "Summer Session", about which more later. In theme, line and stanza form the poems also manifest a broad range. Perhaps Ammons was testing himself or stretching himself. But because of this range, it is not possible to give a characterization of these poems in a short review. However, I can say that although there are some rather earnest descriptive poems, he is often playful, and in his play sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, sometimes just enjoying word play. Here's an excerpt from "Guitar Recitavos":

I can tell you what I think of your beauty, baby,
you have it, it's keen and fast, there's this
glittery sword whipping about your head all day
and, baby, you make people snap - you condescend

and a surprised little heart splatters or you turn your
cold head away and a tiny freeze kills a few
cells in some man's brain - I mean, baby, you
may be kind but your beauty, sweetie, is such

many a man would run himself through for
hating your guts every minute that he died for you

(If there is a lonesome "your" not at the end of the preceding line, it is an artifact of GR's formatting.) From "Needs":

I want something suited to my special needs
I want chrome hubcaps, pin-on attachments
and year round use year after year
I want a workhorse with smooth uniform cut,
dozer blade and snow blade & deluxe steering
wheel
I want something to mow, throw snow, tow
and sow with

[...]

(The lonesome "wheel" is Ammons' artifact.)

"Summer Session 1968" ends the book and is a ragbag of a professor's summertime life. Later he would write well-received book length poems. Here is a taste of his play in this poem:

I'm 42:
the rank & file has
o'errucked me & cloddled on:
I'm not going
any longer officially
to delay my emergence:
I want the head of the matter to
move out of skinny closure:
I want a pumping, palpable turgidity:
I want the condition to take on flare:
I want manifestation silk-dry:

Yes, he loves his colons...

I might have over-emphasized the play aspect of this book, but I find the earnest poems in this collection to be less felicitous. Though Ammons was well received by the literary establishment, I don't see anything really compelling in this book. But it is sometimes entertaining...

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 4 out of 5]

The inside front and back covers of my 43-year old copy of Uplands are imprinted with a yellowed, ghostly offset of the facing text. An accidental exposure, like a sunprint, but still illegible, backwards. In the same way this writing makes its prints, glyphs of walking feet and thoughts tangled in the movements of the natural world. Nature is a place where words are strung together to recognize the geometries of geology - what happens in a rockslide; what oaks mean to slopes; the dynamics of burning underbrush. The earth is reading you. You are drawn planted, organic, but shaded with the slanted crayons of nothingness.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 A521u 1970