Annal:1994 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Bobbitt National Prize in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Garbage: A Poem
- 1994 Bobbitt Prize winner
- 1993 NBA–Poetry winner
- Score: 20.44
In his first book of new poetry since Sumerian Vistas (1987), A. R. Ammons, one of America’s greatest living poets, uses an unlikely subject - garbage - as the occasion for a profound and often funny meditation on nature and mutability. Driving along I-95 in Florida the poet sights a smoldering mountain of the stuff and is moved to muse: “garbage has to be the poem of our time because / garbage is spiritual, believable enough to get our attention, getting in the way, piling up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and / creamy white: what else deflects us from the / errors of our illusionary ways…” Ammons proceeds to evoke with his unique blend of intellectual rigor and American sublimity the impersonal beauties of natural processes both microscopic and cosmic, including ruefully amusing observations on the vagaries of aging. He asks what place poetry and language might have in this vast system and finds startling correspondences: “our language is something to write home about; / but it is not the world: grooming does for / baboons most of what words do for us.” Never has the…
