Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History

A Love Note: A. R. Ammons as Teacher

A Love Note: A. R. Ammons as Teacher and because whatever is moves in weeds and stars and spider webs and known is loved: in that love, each of us knowing it, I love you. —A. R. Ammons, “Identity” I first met A. R. Ammons at the behest of a woman I was dating when I was a freshman at Cornell in 1969. As a black student from Harlem who missed the City, I had begun to write what I then considered to be poems. To be brutally 78 honest, I didn’t know anything about poetry: to me good intentions and a fistful of pain were art; my suffering was enough. That my creations were largely eruptions of my own distress was something I had yet to learn, and most powerfully . Add to that dreary mix the Vietnam War, the deaths of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, my lust-ridden body and my proverbial loneliness, and you now have my mental state. My girlfriend, who understood much more about art and its rigors than I, wanted me to meet “the famous American poet” who taught at the university. I didn’t know who A. R. Ammons was, and the fact that he was a great American writer meant little to me. I simply wanted to be corroborated. In those days, Mr. Ammons’s office was located on the second floor of Lincoln Hall and he was directing the Center for the Creative and the Performing Arts, the last time I believe he ever undertook administration. Later on, Ammons would move to the second floor of Goldwin Smith Hall, where E. B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, and Carl Becker had maintained offices, but that day he was still in Lincoln, sitting behind his unusually large desk, topped with an abundance of scraggly plants and a large ficus angling towards the light, like some paean to survival. Archie tended to love plants that were pot-bound and floundering: he coveted—I think in most things—those things most bedraggled and tossed out. I can vividly recall handing Mr. Ammons a sheaf of poems, which he gracefully accepted, and his offer to read my poems in a week’s time. As a teacher of creative writing, I now understand what a great imposition such requests are; and I know that Ammons—then, as always—was besieged with the irrepressible output of a legion of young who felt that they had something essential to say. That day, Ammons ended our meeting by saying in a very slow southern drawl, “I’ll see you next week.” I did not return. In truth, I felt there was nothing he, a white man, from North Carolina, could tell me. At the time I 79 a l o v e n o t e didn’t know anything about Southerners, and I painted them all with a broad stroke, something of which I am not very proud. To me, Archie was a symbol of that litany of racial violence —beginning in 1619 and moving to Selma—a legacy that had hurt me, in many profound and ill-understood ways. I didn’t know much—I was a head full of the transgressive and the transgressed—and I was angry. That Archie would become my greatest champion was something I had yet to learn; that we would spend hours talking, become friends and later colleagues, forging an alliance that was as strong as it was sometimes difficult, this, too, was all in the future. Little did I know then that Archie and I were beginning that difficult dance which taints all relationships between writers: we had work to do, we had to be self-invested, and the thing which made us care for one another, the art, was as ravenous as a Minotaur. Later, at times, we would have arguments about what a poem could achieve. Here I would argue for writing needing to be political—what else could I believe?—and he, of course, would challenge the narrowness of my beliefs. In truth, I knew he was right; in truth, I suspect, Archie knew I could argue little else. Sadly, at these moments, we were all too human and all too different: our connection made difficult, I submit, because it was a connection. But in 1970, as luck would have it, I would sign up for Creative Writing, and...