Book Club: Monday, January 4, 2027, 2-4pm. Fellows and External Fellows – Zoom only event

January 4, 2026,  2-4 pm – Fellows and External Fellows

Garbage by A. R. Ammons (1993)

Discussion Leader:  Malcolm Woodland

At last, a selection that allows you to say without offense that your book club is making you read garbage! Widely acknowledged as one of the masters of the modern (or postmodern?) long poem, the American poet A. R. Ammons (1926-2001) was inspired to write this, his fourth entry in the genre, by a mountainous waste disposal site that he passed on a road trip to Florida. Published in 1993, Garbage earned immediate critical acclaim and won that year’s National Book Award for poetry. Ammons’s characteristically restless yet plain-spoken style and freewheeling structure bring the work as close as possible to his ideal of a “poem every bit assimilated / into motion”— a significant attainment what with motion and change being the fundamental facts of reality for the scientifically-minded Ammons, and Garbage being a self-proclaimed “scientific poem.” Still, such supposedly scientific ideas also inform one of Garbage’s most intensely personal features, namely the series of informal elegiac meditations on ageing and death—his friends’, his family members’, his own—even a chipmunk’s. This recurring motif is one of several—e.g., poetry and poetics, the sacred and the profane, order and disorder—that help shape the book’s ostensibly digressive progress. As funny as it is moving, Garbage enacts an ongoing struggle to find belief, love, and meaning in the face of mortality and an uncaring universe—”to get” both reader and poet “around to where [they] can say [they’re] glad [they were] here, / even if [they] must go.” (Available in all formats: 128 pages)  (free audiobook download: https://www.bookey.app/audiobook/garbage )

The link to register is https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/A3Mn8Axa2B

The deadline to register is the Monday morning the day of the event at 8 am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.

If you have any questions, please contact the organizer, Mary Jane Ashley at maryjane.ashley@utoronto.ca.