SOURCE: An interview in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 105-17.

In the following interview, which was conducted in March 1988, Ammons speaks about his literary career and his poetry.

[Walsh]: I read an interview the other day where the guest was asked if there was a question he had always wanted to answer, but had never been asked.

[Ammons]: Most of the questions I have been asked have had to do with literary reputations rather than what I considered the nature of poetry, that is, what is poetry and how does it work? In what way is it an action or a symbolic action? In what way does poetry recommend certain kinds of behavior? Questions like that are of absorbing interest to me. What Robert Bly or somebody else is doing is of no interest to me whatsoever. I've written my poetry more or less in...