Science, Michel Serres, and the Topological Poetics of A. R. Ammons

Abstract:

This essay interprets the poetry of A. R. Ammons through the mathematics of topology as theorized by Michel Serres. Focused on the bending, stretching and twisting of geometric forms to reveal new, unexpected shapes and areas of equivalence, topology provides Serres a conception of culture that challenges the static, Euclidian mindset that for him predominates Western thought. Viewed topologically, Ammons’s poems, with their rapidly changing, seemingly incongruous, subject matter, meter, and diction, create surprising structural analogies or points of contact between discourses often regarded as separate, such as the literary and scientific. I trace the relations between science and poetry in two of Ammons’s more ambitious works that span his mature period: the “Essay on Poetics” (1970) and the book-length Garbage (1993), examining the innovative strategies Ammons develops to locate the hidden passageways between disciplines that modern culture obscures.