A.R. Ammons Will Present Silverman Reading At UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A.R. Ammons, one of the nation's most distinguished poets and winner of numerous literary awards during his extraordinary career, will present the 1997 Oscar Silverman Memorial Reading at the University at Buffalo at 8 p.m on Friday, Nov. 14, in 250 Baird Hall on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

The reading is free of charge and open to the public.

Ammons will read in the place of poet David Ignatow, who was scheduled to present his work before he suffered a stroke last month.

Ammon's creative genealogy is in the romantic tradition. Besides the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the influences most frequently attributed to him by critics are those of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.

Among his concerns are the implications of change in nature and in daily life, the tension between the individual's sense of self as bound to the particulars of space and time, and the sense of self as part of a larger continuum, a sense derived from nature itself.

Daniel Hoffman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, cited Ammons' "fidelity to the details of nature" and a "contemporary, conversational tone that has revitalized a significant portion of traditional American literature."

Jascha Kessler writes more critically in Kayak that "(Ammons) makes his daily American rounds about lawn and meadow, wood, hill, stream, in an easy, articulate, flat, utterly uneventful expository syntax that is altogether unlike Thoreau's sinewy, exacting, apothegmatic prose, and unlike that suavely undulant later Stevens, from whom he borrows some of his stanza structures or envelopes, transmogrifying the Master of Imaginations."

Whatever the individual response to his writings over the years, Ammons has garnered many major literary awards and has been praised lavishly by his peers.

Medal from the Poetry Society of America the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for 1981-86, Yale University's Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Poetry, a American Book Award nomination, the National Book Critics Circle Award, both in 1982 for "A Coast of Trees" and Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize.

His many notable books include "Ommateum, with Doxology," "Uplands," "Vistas," "The Snow Poems," "Worldly Hopes," "Lake Effects Country" and "A Coast of Trees," considered by many critics one of his best collections.

Ammons is a former poetry editor of Nation and a contributor to Hudson Review, Poetry, Carleton Miscellany and other notable journals and periodicals.

He is a painter as well as a poet, and his career took many turns before he was able to devote himself principally to his art. As a young man, he taught at an elementary school in Hatteras, N.C. He went on to become the executive vice president of a company that manufactured biological glassware. He has been a member of the faculty of Cornell University since 1964 and previously was Cornell's Goldwin Smith Chair in Poetry.