A.R. Ammons

Archibald Randolph (A.R.) Ammons (1926-2001) was born in rural North Carolina. Ammons wrote his first poems while serving aboard a Navy destroyer during World War II. After the war, he earned a BA from Wake Forest University and an MA in English from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York from 1964 to 1998. Ammons’s many honors include two National Books Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. He is the author of numerous poetry collections.

Rectitude

Last night’s thunderstorms

glancing quick shifts of strong wind and

heavy sheets of tensed up

beating down rain

have left the snapdragons

velvet-hung in red bead 

bedraggled, a

disorientation extreme:

but this morning

the clouds clearing, the sun

breaking its one source out,

light is working in the stems’ cells,

drawing up, adjusting soft alignments

coming true, and pretty soon

now the prevailing command “attention!”

will seem to have been uttered suddenly.

— A.R. Ammons