by Alex Albright, Founding Editor
Despite his many successes, A.R. Ammons lived with insecurities and complexities so great that he hid his interest and talent with watercolors for much of his life. But not long before he died, he summoned his longtime friend Emily Herring Wilson to his home in Ithaca, New York; she and her husband, Ed, returned to Winston-Salem with a carload of watercolors. He also left Emily with the task of making him known as an artist.
To that end, she wrote When I Go Back to My Home Country: A Remembrance of Archie Ammons, which my small press, R.A. Fountain, published in 2019. The dramatic self-portrait on its cover is one of his most self-critical: he looks as angry as he often felt: “I was angry,” he explained of his first period of obsessive painting, during the winter of 1976-77, “sizzlingly angry.”
For a poet like Archie, who was intrigued by the complexities of coincidence as much as of motion, it’s perfect that the art critic John Hallmark Neff became the Reynolda House Museum director in 2001, soon after Archie died. Neff, who had not heard of Ammons the artist, became his early champion after Emily showed him Archie’s work. Neff writes: “To encounter paintings so unfamiliar and compelling was rare and exciting. From tentative beginnings into remarkable fluency,” his imagery, Neff adds, becomes “cosmic, microcosmic, down home,” his paintings “complex, indescribably beautiful, and often visionary.”
Thanks to Emily, Archie’s art has found homes in several major galleries and collections. But, she has lamented, back home in Carolina, it’s still a surprise to many that Archie had this amazing talent and the seemingly tireless compulsion, during three brief periods of his life, to investigate how painting could do what words could not: express “on paper” a meaning beyond words, which he thought to be an “interfering means.” As a visual artist, Archie sought an alternate to language for understanding the “Form of Motion,” as he subtitled the collection Sphere (1974).
A parallel linguistic quest for that meaning beyond words begins well before he became known as a poet; still struggling for voice and aesthetic, he had begun, in 1953, one of the best of these poems, “I broke a sheaf of light,” and for the rest of career his poetry will often return to explorations of natural phenomena transformed into the visual and tangible.
Despite his renown as a poet, though, the only thing he ever wrote called “Poetics” is not an essay but a poem:
I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in. . .
I look for the forms
things want to come as . . .
how a thing will
unfold:
. . . not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself through me. . . .
The process created in that summoning dominates his watercolors. Eccentric and personal visions, they are rarely titled: forms–lots of spheres and partial spheres and colors, sine waves, explosions of energy. Elizabeth Mills’ essential essay in a 2004 Ammons issue of Epoch introduces a beautiful portfolio of Archie’s watercolors; her careful study of Archie’s art, poetry, journals and notebooks shows a complex and inquisitive genius working out his visions and explaining, in the process, how he receives and projects them– how and why he so often prefers visual expression.
It was Emily’s idea to celebrate what would have been Archie’s 100th birthday with a sale of 100 of the watercolors he had gifted her. So in Fountain on Valentine’s Day ’26 we gathered to celebrate Archie’s centennial and his art. Emily charmed us with her tale of how it all came to be. We ate some B’s barbecue and enjoyed the show: 100 Archie watercolors spread about a vintage small town general store.
NCLR subscribers were among those first offered our birthday package–a watercolor of choice plus copies of Emily’s memoir and the first NCLR, which introduced Archie as our staff poet. Because a lot more folks from outside North Carolina bought the watercolors–and none from Columbus County–Emily and R.A. Fountain are offering an additional tranche of watercolors up for sale, our primary audience this time being his Columbus County home country, though anyone might take advantage of it, through Poetry Month ’26.
Sources used
Ammons, A.R. Ammons. Changing Things. Palaemon, Winston-Salem, 1981.
—. “I broke a sheaf of light.” draft. Ithaca, NY: Box 8, Journals of Archie Ammons. Archie Ammons Collection. 3 Feb. 1953. www.library.cornell.edu, 15 Mar. 2026.
—. Sphere: The Form of a Motion. Norton. New York: Norton, 1974.
—. “Poetics.” Collected Poems: 1951-1971. New York: Norton, 1972.
Mills, Elizabeth. “An Image for Longing.” Epoch 52.2 (2003): 487-534.
Neff, John Hallmark. “A.R. Ammons: Poet-Painter.” 2019. www.rafountain.com/art/gallery/archie. 17 Mar. 2026.
Wilson, Emily Herring: When I Go Back to My Home Country: A Remembrance of Archie Ammons. Fountain, NC: R.A. Fountain, 2019.