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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
Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
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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.'
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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.
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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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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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Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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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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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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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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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
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The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
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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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Only silence perfects silence.
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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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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 take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.
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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
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
Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
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