♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ELISA NEW: After coffee with students and friends at Cornell University's Temple of Zeus Cafe, the poet A.R.

Ammons-- Archie to his friends-- often went out walking.

A.R.

AMMONS: I wander around, and for my own amusement and edification, I notice things and I find that writing about them helps me to capture them and clarify them for myself.

♪ ♪ NEW: Like the 19th century Romantic poets before him, Ammons was inspired by nature, which also inspired him as a painter of luminous and often witty watercolors.

But as a mid 20th-century poet, Ammons' interest in nature was also influenced by new developments in science.

AMMONS: When the image of the earth began to appear on television from outer space and you knew you were actually not looking at a globe anymore, but at an actual photograph of the world, it was just so striking how we are little inhabitants all together here on this little dot in space.

♪ ♪ It's always awe underneath the poems with Ammons.

And a kind of sublime contemplation of our place in the galaxy.

It's that feeling of expansion out into something that is not yourself.

(birds chirping) ♪ ♪ NEW: To come to better understanding of Ammons' poetry of awe, I gathered six interpreters: a planetary scientist and the primary investigator of the Psyche mission; and a science education C.E.O.

; a poet and professor writing books on the Black environmental imagination; and a philosopher of science and winner of the National Humanities Medal; a multimedia composer who creates music out of ice floes and algorithms; and a geologist and leader of Harvard University's Center for the Environment.

Together, we'd explore the mix of poetry and science in A.R.

Ammons' great work, "Cascadilla Falls".

(water flowing) ♪ ♪ "I went down by Cascadilla Falls this evening, "the stream below the falls... "And picked up a handsized stone, "kidney-shaped, testicular... "And thought all its motions into it, "the 800-mile-per-hour "earth spin, the 190-million-mile "yearly displacement around the sun... ELKINS-TANTON: "The overriding grand haul "of the galaxy "with the 30,000 mile per hour of where the sun's going... "Thought all the interweaving motions into myself: "dropped the stone to dead rest: "the stream from other motions broke rushing over it... "Shelterless, I turned to the sky "and stood still: "Oh I do not know where I am going that I can live my life by this single creek."

♪ ♪ NEW: "Cascadilla Falls" incorporates the language of many fields: astronomy, physics, anatomy, philosophy, but it begins with a stroll to a well-known gorge wrought by geology.

SCHRAG: "I went down by Cascadilla Falls this evening, "the stream below the falls, and picked up a handsized stone."

BERGER: To say "I went down by Cascadilla Falls this evening," comma, "the stream below the falls," is exactly the way you would describe to someone in Ithaca this quiet stream down below.

ELKINS-TANTON: So if you go to Ithaca and you start down at the flats, you can actually walk up Cascadilla Creek exactly as he did at the poem.

I try and put myself in his shoes as he's walking or, you know, descending or kind of moving through or going down.

He's kind of trying to figure out and locate himself in the landscape.

And he sees stones that have been shaped by water flowing over them for probably millions of years.

ELKINS-TANTON: That's the first part of the poem that really speaks to me from my earliest childhood.

We were always walking around in the creeks and talking about how old the rocks were and what was this fossil and how was it formed.

You know, as a geologist, I pick up a rock.

Here we are in Cape Cod.

You can pick up a rock and you know that it was transported in a glacier from somewhere up in Canada, carried maybe thousands of kilometers.

MILLER: If you think about the earth, it's sculpted.

A glacier field, when it retreats, it leaves mountains, plains, open lakes, and stones.

ELKINS-TANTON: Water's running off the top of the waterfall.

And so it's gonna run across, finally, a layer that's erodable and that rock will be carried away and the waterfalls actually creep backward over time as the rocks are gradually broken off and carried away.

And so there's a, a kind of history in every rock.

(water flowing) ELKINS-TANTON: But here's the thing about it.

Almost all the rocks around Ithaca, New York, and in that stream in particular are flat, sharp shards.

It's shale.

And so most of the rocks are not really rocks you'd want to pick up and put in your pocket, because they have sharp corners.

And so there was something about this rock.

It was rounded, I gather, it was somehow speaking differently.

♪ ♪ That stone, which could have been, you know, thousands of years old, was there, and he picked it up and he read it and, there's a kind of inheritance, you know, that extends beyond us.

♪ ♪ NEW: Picking up the stone, the speaker begins to observe and record its characteristics, but his language is not that of geology, but a rounder, softer, more organic language closer to the human.

The thing about the rock in this poem that really got me was the anatomy that he imbued it with.

MILLER: So we're projecting the human quality onto these rocks.

There's the term which I always love to say: "pareidolia."

It's when we, when we attribute human features to like a pile of rocks and you see a face.

Or the face on the moon.

Human beings are always projecting and then trying to condense meaning.

It starts out as just a stone, and in that moment it's a hand fashioning things, kidney-shaped, and it's testicular.

It's the organ of conceiving of things.

And "testicular," such an interesting, wonderful word, you know.

These are emblematic of manliness, you know.

I mean, if you grab a stone that's testicular, you are grabbing the world by the balls.

- Perhaps, yes.

- You know, maybe this is a power, a gesture of power.

- Yeah.

GOLDSTEIN: We say, you know, he has real great cajones, which I think means stones.

BENNETT: The stone seems like the best possible metaphor for you know, the hardness, the solidity of masculinity.

GOLDSTEIN: It's also the point of greatest vulnerability of men.

BENNETT: Vulnerability definitely strikes me there.

On the one hand, a very masculinist metaphor, but it's also about the sort of necessary tenderness of masculinity, too.

♪ ♪ BERGER: So there is a very natural motion of this poet who's walking along a stream at sunset and he picks up this stone, he thinks into it a kind of motion, but the motion is at a whole 'nother scale.

It's like, "Oh, wow, "he's thinking the motions of the universe into this small, you know, picnic spot."

- Yes.

- So he gives us the hand-sized stone, then he fans out to the earth.

(mechanical noise) ♪ ♪ ELKINS-TANTON: "And picked up a hand-sized stone and thought all its motions into it."

BENNETT: "The 800 m.p.h.

earth spin, the 190-million-mile yearly displacement around the sun."

♪ ♪ BERGER: He realizes that stone is on an Earth that's circling around-- as Earth's rotations do-- in a near-perfect circle.

♪ ♪ SCHRAG: All correct.

We are indeed rotating 800 miles an hour, and then suddenly we're in Kepler's and Newton's framework.

BERGER: Earth is on an extended ellipse, an irregular shape, in its journey around the sun, and then the whole sun is hurtling along a spiral in some circle that never closes.

♪ ♪ ELKINS-TANTON: He's talking about how our solar system is traveling around the spiral arm of our galaxy.

"The overriding grand haul of the galaxy with the 30,000 miles per hour of where the sun's going."

When we put it in our heads, we're in the fastest roller coaster we've ever been on.

SCHRAG: I think that's what he wants.

He wants to shock you into something that we don't think about normally.

Out there, you know, are all these hidden forces that I don't even recognize are working on me.

MILLER: So much science we take for granted.

We have gravity all around us.

We have electricity all around us.

Our atoms are held together by very specific forces of nature.

Because we are surrounded by all of these things, we don't think about them, and we give them the privilege of invisibility.

AMMONS: I think what happens is that you enter into a kind of possibility that you imagine in your mind and, and you just go with it.

♪ ♪ (chickens clucking) ♪ ♪ (rooster crows) AMMONS: I've usually have written basically for myself and usually about matters that are completely unimportant, that is: birds and streams and brooks and stumps.

♪ ♪ NEW: Ammons grew up poor on a North Carolina tobacco farm, and the rhythms and tone of his poems stay true to these rural, humble origins.

At the same time, though, his language takes on science's modes of expression: the symbols, acronyms, icons, and abbreviations that our scientific age has made part of everyday speech wherever you live.

Just lays it out here with the numbers and the miles per hour, or "m.p.h."

He doesn't actually write out "miles per hour," he just does "m.p.h."

the way you might see it on the car or something like that.

It's a little bit anti-poetic.

You don't use three-letter acronyms in, in poems.

I actually wasn't sure when I read it whether to say "miles per hour" or "m.p.h."

BERGER: It's not lofty language.

He does the 30,000 miles per hour of where the sun's going-- "apostrophe S." ELKINS-TANTON: His language is imprecise and colloquial.

And, of course, all these numbers have changed as we've measured them better over time.

And by the way, if I wish to be pedantic, we're actually going about 500,000 miles per hour around our galaxy.

And I think I could safely assert that none of us has a sense of what that means.

So there's like the "gee whiz" science kid.

- (laughs) - So we go from these very mathematical figures to the farm boy, right?

Also comes out.

Even just the language of the haul, right.

It almost sounds like a, a crop or something that's being pulled in, but it's the galaxy.

♪ ♪ BERGER: It's like the moving company picking up for the grand haul cross-country or something like that, except it's at the scale of the galaxy.

ELKINS-TANTON: I love the notion that he's groping with these words, with these hyphens and with his changes in the way he's talking about it and the beautiful cadence of that phrase, "the overriding grand haul of the galaxy," it's almost the kind of stuttering that one makes when one is trying to tell a story that is too exciting to be told in a calm way.

BERGER: He's a guy from North Carolina.

He just won't partake of pretentiousness until there's an idea or a word that kind of catches his imagination, and then you can feel him locking in on it, not quite as a scientist, but as a person who's curious about science.

And I think it shouldn't be lost on us too, that, you know, he's at Cornell, which is where all those ways of knowing intersect.

♪ ♪ BERGER: I mean, Ithaca is the center of physics after World War II.

All the German scientists following Hans Bethe are there trying to figure out the universe.

I mean, he is surrounded by literally a Nobel Prize winner that he has coffee with and great scholars of Romantic poetry happen to be at Cornell at that time.

And I always feel like Ammons is in that mode.

It's like, "If you give me a good new idea, it'll be in the next poem that I write."

He could never layer on all of the numbers and the speeds and this rhythm and all the units had there not been all of these scientists trying to measure these things about ourselves.

This knowledge that is not authentic to him, but that he's read and imagined and somehow internalized to the point that he feels it, it becomes a major part of his experiencing a walk in a stream.

GOLDSTEIN: I think this poem was very much about our accommodation to science, to recognizing how much of the science is in us, is us, right?

Displacing our grand vision of ourselves.

♪ ♪ AMMONS: I see a poem as a kind of theater, you know, in which I am the lyrical speaker, but there are other forces present.

♪ ♪ GOLDSTEIN: "Thought all the interweaving motions into myself."

BENNETT: "Thought all the interweaving motions into myself."

AMMONS: I think I have certain basic concerns which I derive from seeing natural phenomena, and that certainly is what controls this poem.

The concerns are actually fairly metaphysical or philosophical.

It's about the past and the future.

NEW: Standing in a stream, the ancient philosopher Heraclitus gave the term "flux" to what Ammons calls motion, and he linked that flux to the unstoppable onrush of time.

The whole history of philosophy and much of the history of poetry begins in that stream, where a human knower seeks to align his inner thoughts with the impersonal motions of the world outside.

♪ ♪ Ammons' earliest college notebooks show him taking on these philosophical ideas that drive all of his writing henceforth.

ELKINS-TANTON: We are completely riding an exercise of mind throughout this poem.

MILLER: There's the infamous term "stream of consciousness," you know, resonant with this.

GOLDSTEIN: It's an extremely philosophical poem.

We're presented with a falls, a rock, myself standing there, contemplating it, thinking these motions into these things.

Oh, he makes this connection between the mind and nature, which I think is really interesting.

Somehow he picks up a rock at Cascadilla Falls and it evokes in him this grand physics of the solar system and the galaxy.

And he abstracts it and all those motions become real.

But does that only happen when he's thinking about the stone?

GOLDSTEIN: First thing I thought when I reread the poem was this passage in Spinoza, who's a great determinist, everything is determined.

And he says: "A stone thrown through the air "would think, if a stone could think, that it was the author of its own motions."

We are like that stone in thinking ourselves free.

And I feel a little bit that Ammons was also experiencing that comparison between the inhumanity of time and length in the solar system, in the galaxy, compared to the desperate finiteness of human time and length scales.

♪ ♪ (water splashing) GOLDSTEIN: It's almost too much.

"I drop the stone to dead rest."

Dead rest... dead rest.

ELKINS-TANTON: When that rock gets dropped back into the creek, I feel like I can hear the sound, the clunk... (stone dropping, water splashing) ...then, you know, the clonk of the going through the water and landing on the bottom again.

"Oh, we're done."

I mean, it's down, down, down.

Everything falling, falling.

♪ ♪ NEW: One way that Ammons establishes this downward motion is through the technique of enjambment, where the line endings break the flow of thought and the reader's attention is drawn down, down, down by the syntax, not unlike the way water sluices over ledges of rock.

When I was thinking about composing some music for this, the things that inspired me a lot is the motion.

The whole thing's about sort of cascading and water rushing and moving that creates like a staggered fall to the way the words work.

BERGER: All these descriptions of motion are also descriptions of time, like each of the units of motion is a "miles per hour," there's the sense it's all moving way too fast.

(water flowing) AMMONS: It is about sort of being swept away with too much energy, a kind of manic situation in which you feel in danger of being taken away.

GOLDSTEIN: If I can introduce just another physical law that is always in my mind, and this is the second law of thermodynamics, the law that says that entropy increases, entropy being the measure of disorder.

We carry within ourselves the force which is going to undo us.

♪ ♪ That's why, you know, we grow weaker with age, forgetful with age, things sag with age.

♪ ♪ AMMONS: There's a kind of loss of coherence or significance takes place, and things wind up as kind of debris, a metaphysical debris, I call it, and that's rather sad.

♪ ♪ (typewriter keys clacking) NEW: One dark December, a few years before he wrote "Cascadilla Falls," Ammons had sought to slow down that downward motion by typing a poem on a spool of adding machine tape over 100 feet long, as if to hold or at least divert the momentum of that downward motion.

♪ ♪ AMMONS: Poems allow you to introduce a kind of small form into this passion, and by giving it some shape, you, you control it enough to get by yourself.

BENNETT: "Shelterless, I turned to the sky and stood still."

SCHRAG: To me, there's a turning with the word "shelterless."

I mean, you could almost say that last bit is not about him at all, but it's about the stone.

It is very unclear, that "shelterless."

For a moment, I thought, "is the... the rock is sheltered by the stream?"

No, not really.

And so what is the shelter that's now suddenly gone?

"And the stream from other motions broke over...

it."

It's there in all its passivity.

It embodies passivity.

The stone is shelterless.

And yet, as he switches to himself, he's shelterless and he has to sort of stop and look up at the sky.

(water flowing) BENNETT: "Oh I do not know where I am going that I can live my life by this single creek."

GOLDSTEIN: "Oh."

Oh!

(laughs) - (laughing): Oh!

- Now why does that "oh" get its own line?

- "Oh," it's got to get its own line.

It's such a cry, isn't it?

♪ ♪ All those feelings flooded in for me when he was left standing there, living his life by that tiny creek.

And all he can say is "oh."

BERGER: "Oh "I do not know where I am going that I can live my life by this single creek."

I guess there are multiple ways of reading that ending, "I do not know where I am going."

He's asking himself a question of where he's going in life.

A human being in this vast, cold, unknowing universe.

Suddenly he's thinking about his future.

"Why do I live here, by this single creek, given all the possibility of what might have been," but also, "How do I do it, "given that everything is in motion?

"How is it that I get to have "these sublime, intimate, local moments of a life lived by a single creek?"

(water flowing) GOLDSTEIN: He sees himself as a creek rushing along, the pull of gravity pulling him, all these forces.

But he's also this objective observing self that knows himself.

(birds chirping) There is the singularity of the individual; it comes back to the importance of the individuals that all of us are.

(chuckles) I am the singularity.

I am me.

BENNETT: Even though he is standing still at the end of the poem, still as a stone, you know, he's still a part of this much larger moving thing that will never stop.

We're made of star stuff, right?

(laughs) - So it's almost like the, the universe contained in miniature, you know, which is why I think he ends up the single person by a single creek.

AMMONS: Well, the word "unit" and "universal" have the same "one."

And each of us is a, is a single person, and yet we're universal.

And so I tried to write a poem around the fact that that we are units, individuals, and universals at the same time.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪