INTERVIEWER
I’ve always been curious about why you’ve traveled so little. I think you spent a year in Italy.
AMMONS
Three months. We had the traveling fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which was for a year, but we came back after three months. I lost twenty pounds and I couldn’t wait to get home.
INTERVIEWER
You didn’t care for the experience of being an expatriate?
AMMONS
I hated it. I’m not interested in all that cultural crap. It was just a waste of time for me.
INTERVIEWER
Maybe this is part of what you were talking about before when you spoke of your rejection of Western culture, by which I take it you mean more specifically a rejection of Europe or of European cultural domination.
AMMONS
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
But it occurred to me that one reason you have traveled very little is . . .
AMMONS
There’s no place to go.
INTERVIEWER
There’s no place to go?
AMMONS
Yeah, that’s a good reason not to travel. Well, I’m interested in the Orient, but I’m really not interested in going there. I’m not interested in Europe. I have no interest whatsoever in going there. Every now and then I go to Owego and sometimes I go to Syracuse, sometimes to Geneva, Binghamton—all over the place.
INTERVIEWER
Geneva, New York, rather than Geneva, Switzerland.
AMMONS
Geneva, New York, right.
INTERVIEWER
It occurred to me that another reason might be that you’d already done a considerable journey in going from your origins on the coastal plain of North Carolina to the hills and lakes of central New York state. A critic could spin a parable about the northward progression of your life—from a state that was part of the Confederacy to a university town in . . .
AMMONS
In the Emersonian tradition. In fact there is an essay about how I came to the north and took over the Emersonian tradition.
INTERVIEWER
I thought you had decided to become influenced by Emerson only after Bloom told you that you’d been.
AMMONS
That’s basically correct, except that I did have a course on Emerson and Thoreau at Wake Forest. The professor was basically a preacher, however, who treated the hour as an occasion for sermonizing. But yes—it’s a marriage of the South to the North.
INTERVIEWER
What is?
AMMONS
The movement of my life.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve spent more time in the North.
AMMONS
Much more. I lived my first twenty-four years in the South. I’ve been in Ithaca more than thirty years.
INTERVIEWER
Are you conscious of being a southerner here?
AMMONS
I don’t hear my own voice, but of course everyone else does and I’m sure they’re all conscious of the fact that I’m southern, but I am mostly not conscious of it. In the first years, I was tremendously nostalgic, constantly longing for the South—for one’s life, for one’s origin, for one’s kindred. Now I feel more at home here than I would in the South. But I don’t feel at home—I’ll never feel at home—anywhere.
from The Paris Review: "The Art of Poetry," No, 73. For more about this major American poet, click here.
