"Ammonsfest," a celebration of the life and work of acclaimed poet A.R. Ammons, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry, will be held on the Cornell campus April 3 and 4.

The two-day event will include poetry readings for Ammons by former students; the opening of an exhibition in Cornell's Kroch Library called "A.R. Ammons: The writing life"; lectures by poet Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Prize-winning chemist and the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell, and by noted poetry critic and Harvard University English Professor Helen Vendler; and a poetry reading by Ammons, with an introduction by Cornell President Hunter Rawlings.

In part, Ammonsfest marks the gift by Ammons of his papers to Cornell Library; a gift of 25 cubic feet of documents covering virtually every aspect of Ammons' life and literary endeavors from the early 1940s to the present. The collection contains journals, notebooks, correspondence, a card file, manuscripts for published and unpublished poems, articles and reviews, publicity and promotional material, evidence of his various professional activities, artwork, photographs, videos, cassettes, awards and other memorabilia.

Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections holds a number of literary manuscript collections, including papers of William Wordsworth, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, E.B. White and Laura (Riding) Jackson.

Ammons' first book of poetry appeared in 1955, and since then he has published nearly 30 more. He came to Cornell in 1964 and has taught generations of students, including poets Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. Dubois Professor of Literature at Cornell, Cynthia Bond, Nancy Viera Couto, Alice Fulton and Angela Shaw, all of whom will be reading at Ammonsfest.

During his career, Ammons has won two National Book Awards in Poetry, one in 1973 for Collected Poems, 1951-1971, and one in 1993 for Garbage, and he has won virtually every other major prize for poetry in the United States, including: the Frost Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Poetry over a Lifetime, given by the Poetry Society of America; the Bolligen Prize from Yale University; the National Book Critics Circle Award of Poetry; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; as well as a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur "genius award" Fellowship. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ammons was born near Whiteville, N.C., in 1926 and graduated from Wake Forest College in North Carolina. Before coming to Cornell, he worked as a real estate salesman, an editor and as an executive in a glass company.

The citation for Ammons' 1973 National Book Award in Poetry reads in part: "In the enormous range of his work, from the briefest confrontations with the visual to long powerful visionary poems he has extended into our present and our future the great American tradition of which Emerson and Whitman were the founders."

Yale literary critic Harold Bloom said, "No contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A.R. Ammons."

Ammonsfest begins Friday, April 3, at 4 p.m. with the poetry readings by Ammons' former students in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, followed by the exhibition opening and reception at 5:30 p.m. in 2B of the Carl A. Kroch Library.

On Saturday, April 4, at 2 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Roald Hoffmann and Helen Vendler will give their lectures, followed at 3:45 p.m. by a reception and at 4 p.m. by President Hunter Rawlings' introduction of the reading by Ammons.

Ammonsfest is sponsored by Cornell's Department of English, Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and the University Lectures Committee, and it is free and open to the public.