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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
Must
Necessary
Gradual
Meaning
Rationality
Successful
Stability
Whatever
Clarity
Purpose
Agents
Point
Stress
Order
Structure
Change
Appreciate
Provisional
More quotes by A. R. Ammons
For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown
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To be saved is here, local and mortal
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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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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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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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You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind ON, but what you can't keep your mind OFF.
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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition
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I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines
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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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A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
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Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster
A. R. Ammons
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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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
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
A. R. Ammons
Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
A. R. Ammons
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.
A. R. Ammons
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.
A. R. Ammons
