“Near enough / to be knowingly away”: Cornell ’69 and the Ammons Poetic

Abstract:I read the poetry of A.R. Ammons at a critical moment in his career, the late 1960s and early 1970s, by putting it in contact with some contiguous material related to an equally critical moment in American social history. At the center is a “spatial event”: the occupation of the Cornell University student union (Ammons’s institutional ground) by Cornell’s Afro-American Society in April 1969. This “seizure of space” provides the occasion for reflecting on Ammons’s spatial poetics and his persistent adverting to emptiness or nothing, a kind of ontological furthest reach of space, in order to identify the anxious ways in which, often in minor poems on the margins of his practice, he attempts to take in “the Sixties.” I put in dialogue his evolving Daoism and some thinking about space, “social space,” and event, to account for one Sixties poet’s handling of political and aesthetic crisis.