Bosh and Flapdoodle

Thursday June 02, 2005 Category: Campus/Faculty Permanent Link

This is the title of a recent book of posthumously published poems by Cornell poet A. R. Ammons. A. R. (short for Archie Randolph) Ammons passed away in February 2001. According to this Cornell press release, he “won virtually every major prize for poetry in the United States, including two National Book Awards—one in 1973 for Collected Poems, 1951-1971 and another in 1993 for Garbage.”

The publisher, W.W. Norton, has this to say about the book:

Written over a six-week period, the book offers a series of candid, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking ruminations on age, illness, and death, while still finding room for the poet’s always penetrating observations of daily life and natural events.

Perhaps more interesting to our generation are his poems from Collected Poems 1951-1971, or The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons.

Here are two short, funny poems, and a link to a page at poets.org with a few longer verses.

Their sex life
One failure on Top of another

Coward
Bravery runs in my family