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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.
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
Rational
Plenitude
Beings
Refreshed
Poetry
Structured
Return
Selves
Source
Returns
Self
Sources
Unknown
Leads
Unstructured
More quotes by A. R. Ammons
It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
A. R. Ammons
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
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
A. R. Ammons
Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
A. R. Ammons
Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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.
A. R. Ammons
One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
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
In nature there are few sharp lines
A. R. Ammons
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without
A. R. Ammons
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
The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
A. R. Ammons
Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
A. R. Ammons
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A. R. Ammons
The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
A. R. Ammons
Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
A. R. Ammons
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
A. R. Ammons
I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
A. R. Ammons
Only silence perfects silence.
A. R. Ammons
I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines
A. R. Ammons
