The Ridge Farm Critics Flashcards
When was it published?
The Ridge Farm originally appeared in the Hudson Review in 1983, then appeared in his collection in 1987
What does the title mean?
Title references the natural world - farm is the cultivated side of nature - not existing in its raw form like the river dart.
Symbolically oxymoronic - farm in man made but ridge acts against this - conflict between authenticity
What does the collection title mean?
Sumerian Vistas - Earliest known civilisation - people of southern Mesopotamia whose civilisation flourished between c. 4100 and 1750 BCE
A vista is a pleasing view
What is the form of the poem?
It is a sequence poem - it was made out of a large collection of unpublished poems that were edited down by a friend and placed together (Gerald Bullis)
It is split into numbered sections - some are free verse, some are arranged into neat stanzas, some are couplets - it is held together by the striking enjambment and sparsity of punctuation
Some sections feel like diary entries - they are fragmentary
51 sections does not fill neat formularity - feels unfinished - the final week of the year is unwritten
How does he change the use of a stanza?
Howard Bloom - ventilator stanza - his poetry is a device for letting the world breathe through
He reforms how it is used not what it is
How should we read eco poetry?
Environmental historian William Cronon - “[W]e need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it,”
Anthology wars?
In the final decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. poetry scene was divided in ways that extended the oppositional dynamics of the “anthology wars” of the 1960s: poetry aligned with poststructuralist thought, such as Language poetry, was positioned against the mainstream personal lyric, which treated language as a transparent vehicle for conveying feeling
Allied with mainstream poetics, ecocritics attended primarily to straightforwardly representational writing
How do critics see Ammons’ poetry?
Evidently, critics still tend to think of environmental poetry first and foremost as nature poetry
Daniel Tobin and others have persuasively presented Ammons’s capacious and seemingly rambling meditations as “reconfiguring patterns across multiple scales of experience” (132), linking his poetic structures to the fractal forms now understood to be pervasive in nature
Did Ammons identify with the term ecology?
As early as 1963, Ammons identified the principle underlying his dynamic poetics as ecology in his poem of infinite variety Tape for the Turn of the Year: ‘ecology is my word: tag / me with that’
Public responsibility?
At a sixtieth-birthday convocation in 1986, the poet A. R. Ammons was asked, “Do poets have a public responsibility?” He replied, without hesitation, “No.”
But he then said that poetry was ‘deeply subversive’
Is he an ideological writer?
Helen Vendler - Like Ashbery and Merrill, Ammons is a nonideological writer who takes long views
Opinion or fact?
Helen Vendler - Ammons is a poet of determined factual exactness
Different lengths of poem?
He has said - “In short poems, I’m on a tightwire, and in long poems, the plain is wide and the direction uncertain,”
Where was he born?
February 18, 1926, in a farmhouse south-west of Whiteville, North Carolina.’ This was the farm on which his grandfather had raised 13 children, and on which Ammons would grow up during the Depression. The house had neither electricity nor an indoor toilet, and the family had no money.
The themes in his poetry?
‘Mourning the loss of life, in life and in death,’ he confessed in a late essay, ‘has been the undercurrent of much of my verse’
What his editor wanted?
‘Harold [Bloom] wants me to be intense, mad, consistently high,’ Ammons wrote in his journal in 1973. ‘I want to be ordinary, casual, a man of this world.’
