A. R. Archie Ammons - The Spirit in the World

I recently ran cross one of my old copies of the American Poetry Review (published right here in Philly - one of the cities small treasures - cities are great that way, no?) with a profile on A.R. Ammons. The Profile was written by David Lehman and was included as the Introduction to his A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems.

I was struck, and inspired with the following vivid image:

"Around the time of President Roosevelt's death in April 1945, while serving aboard a destroyer escort in the South Pacific, the 19-year-old sailor had an experience of almost religious intensity. Sitting on the bow of the ship anchored in a bay, he found himself staring at the land, the water level and the life beneath it, and "the line inscribed across the variable land mass, determining where people would or would not live, where palm trees would or could not grow." It suddenly struck him that "the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power, but because of an average result of a host of actions – run-off, wind currents, melting glaciers." In that moment Ammons felt all the mystery and faith and passion of religion attached to a scientific explanation of the universe. He wrote his first serious poems as a result of this 'interior illumination.'"

I find this image mesmerizing. It fuses the idea of "intellignet design" (don't we all have a feeling that glimmers - that behind (or, as my Anna insisits, is it "deeply, inherently within - central to"?) this everyday world of ours something mysterious and powerful, something awesome moves?) - with the bracing, vigorous, physical world that science explores and tries to explain.

Is this the New Alchemy?

Policy Matters - a lesson from an Inconvenient Truth

To me, the most striking moment in An Inconvenient Truth is when a scientist, drilling into the Antarctic ice, can point to a line in the ice core and say "This is where the US passed the Clean Air Act." The ice visibly clearer above
Policy matters

Sam Hamill & Poets Against War

Reading a last fall issue of The American Poetry Review, published right here in Philadelphia, and the page fell to a tribute to Sam Hamill - American Poet, American warrior, co-founder of Copper Canyon Press. www.coppercanyonpress.org

Sam helped found www.poetsagainstwar.net which is at the core of a worldwide network of poets stadning for peace and injustice.

fyi