The Unsung Heroes of Holy Garbage: An Analysis of Waste in A.R. Ammons’s Garbage

Abstract

This essay analyzes A.R. Ammons Garbage (1993) through the lens of Waste Studies by focusing on the interactions between the material and metaphorical uses of waste, scrutinizing the complex trope of the dump-ziggurat, and paying special attention to the neglected figure of the waste collector or garbage worker. In the 1990s, when Ammons published his long poem, waste and garbage were becoming pivotal tropes in American poetry. While Ammons deals with the inescapable presence of garbage in his homonymous poem, he also goes beyond the materiality of waste in order to incorporate more metaphorical resonances. Arguably, the most valuable insights that Garbage has to offer derive precisely from its striking juxtaposition of the material and the immaterial, the scatological and the eschatological. Most importantly, Ammons not only sings a hymn to the huge garbage dump and its implications, but also to the “unsung heroes” of modernity (Bauman 2004): the anonymous workers who collect the garbage and maintain the landfill.