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I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
A. R. Ammons
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A. R. Ammons
Age: 75 †
Born: 1926
Born: February 18
Died: 2001
Died: February 26
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Whiteville
North Carolina
A.R. Ammons
A R Ammons
AR Ammons
Change
Appreciate
Provisional
Must
Necessary
Gradual
Meaning
Rationality
Successful
Stability
Whatever
Clarity
Purpose
Agents
Point
Stress
Order
Structure
More quotes by A. R. Ammons
Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
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Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without
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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.
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Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
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If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
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The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
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The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
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Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values
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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
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Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
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Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
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Thats a wonderful change thats taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
A. R. Ammons
Only silence perfects silence.
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Where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption: as where but brought low, where but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: where but in the arrangements love crawls us through
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If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'
A. R. Ammons
The walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight.
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I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
A. R. Ammons
