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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.

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
Learned
Exposes
Partial
Assurance
Poet
Poetry
Risk

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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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In nature there are few sharp lines
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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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There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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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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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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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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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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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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Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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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.
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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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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
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Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
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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 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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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
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