SOURCE: "Stanzas, Organic Myth, and the Metaformalism of A. R. Ammons," in American Literature, Vol. 59, No. 4, December, 1987, pp. 513-27.

Cushman is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he attempts to define the structural principle of Ammons's verse, focusing on such features as stanza shape and length, typography, and linguistic patterns.

In his long poem "The Ridge Farm" (1983), A. R. Ammons continues his persistent meditation on poetic form:

 don't think we don't
know one breaks
form open because he fears
its bearing in on him …
and one hugs form because
he fears dissolution, openness,
we know, we know:
one needs stanza to take
sharp interest in and
one interest the stanza
down the road to the wilderness: 

This passage uses the word "form" in suggestive ways. Unlike the "completed, external form" Ammons renounces in the "Foreword" to Ommateum (1955), where "external" suggests nonorganic rigidity and "completed" implies...