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A.R. Ammons: Nothing Lowly in the Universe

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This Poetry Foundation podcast, distributed by alt.NPR, features an excerpt from a lively 1996 reading by the late poet A.R. Ammons at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center. In the excerpt, Ammons reads a poem entitled “Still,” in which he determines that there are no hierarchies in nature. Here is the poem:

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

Ammons had a background in chemistry, and critics put him in the company of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in tracing his creative genealogy. Check out the Poetry Foundation’s excellent reading guide to Ammons for more on his work.

The new Poetry Center season will be available online July 31. Season memberships and subscriptions to our Afternoon Night Table series with Walter Mosley, E.L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick, Ann Beattie and Richard Wilbur are available now. 

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