The Paris Review

“See, I haven’t led a literary life. These fellows, they really work away with their prose trying to describe themselves and understand themselves, and so on. I don’t do that. I don’t want to know too much about myself.” —Robert Frost, the Art of Poetry No. 2

We were excited to learn, on this the fiftieth anniversary of his death, of the new cache of Robert Frost documents that has come to light. The letters, photographs, and recordings come from the personal collection of Jonathan Reichert, a friend of the poet’s, and will be on display at State University of New York at Buffalo starting Thursday. Just to whet your appetite, here’s Frost reading “The Road Not Taken.” It’s good, for those of us who have come to take the poem for granted, to take the words out of the yearbook context and rediscover its forthright beauty.

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My first date with Luke started at four in the afternoon—and at midnight, we were still going. Sitting on stools at Frank’s Cocktail Lounge (a bar that feels like a holdover from the seventies, right down to the occasional fedora-wearing patron), we were bent over the carefully folded piece of paper Luke had just taken out of his wallet. As he smoothed it out on the bar, I saw the seven poems, in tiny font, that he carried with him at all times—and I braced myself.

This guy wasn’t just so charming and handsome that I’d already trembled once or twice, near him. He was also “haunted by verse.” That was a description an English professor had once applied to me, after I’d run into her while crossing campus one night; drunkenly, I’d begged her to remind me which poet had written, “Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball.” (Andrew Marvell, for the record.)Read More »

A. R. Ammons.

“Locality,” said Frost, “gives art.” It’s an aphorism that directs us toward, well, directions. But when we’re talking about space, we’re also usually talking about time—which means it’s important to think about when, not just where, an artist finds the locality that’s going to be doing the giving.

These questions have particular relevance to the Summer 1996 issue of The Paris Review because the subject of “The Art of Poetry” interview is A. R. Ammons. Ammons has been slightly out of fashion since his death in 2001—fame, as Emily Dickinson observed, is fickle food—but he was a bracingly intelligent writer, and his relationship to the idea of place is intriguing. In part, it’s intriguing because he can’t seem to determine whether he is actually Southern after having lived for three decades in the north. Consider:

INTERVIEWER: You’ve spent more time in the north [at Cornell].

AMMONS: Much more. I lived the first twenty-four years in the South. I’ve been in Ithaca more than thirty years.

INTERVIEWER: Are you conscious of being a Southerner here?

AMMONS: I don’t hear my own voice, but of course everyone else does, and I’m sure they’re all conscious of the fact that I’m Southern, but I am mostly not conscious of it. In the first years, I was tremendously nostalgic, constantly longing for the South: for one’s life, for one’s origin, for one’s kindred. Now I feel more at home here than I would in the South. But I don’t feel at home—I’ll never feel at home—anywhere.

On one hand, this is the kind of thing poets like to say because it recalls the expatriate glamour of the early twentieth century (“I have beaten out my exile,” announced Pound, in the most self-satisfied formulation of this maneuver). On the other hand, Ammons wasn’t just a poet. Read More »