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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

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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
Telling
Purpose
Comes
Tell
Past
Reason
Recognised
Men
Poem
Burning

More quotes by A. R. Ammons

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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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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
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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
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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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To be saved is here, local and mortal
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Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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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.
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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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Only silence perfects silence.
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The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
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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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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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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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There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
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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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Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
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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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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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In nature there are few sharp lines
A. R. Ammons