Critical Essay | Critical Essay by D. R. Fosso

SOURCE: "Poetic Metaphysic in A. R. Ammons," in Pembroke Magazine, No. 18, 1986, pp. 158-63.

In the following essay, Fosso analyzes the ontological and cosmological concerns in Ammons's poetry.

His poems witness that A. R. Ammons knows what he is about and we who relish reading him are finding him out. Take a small poem of 1975, scarcely even one of his "rondures":

     Metaphysic
 
     Because I am
     here I am
     (nowhere)
     else

A "metaphysic," of course, is one whose epistemological concerns are especially with ontology and cosmology. If one reads "Because I am / here I am," the statement is reflexive and ontological, doubly recalling the familiar causality of "I think; therefore I am." On the other hand, if one reads "Because I am here / I am (nowhere) else," the statement is relational and squints toward the enlargingly cosmologic. Since "(nowhere)" isn't anywhere, it gets shunted into parentheses and the word quickens in...
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