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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
Past
Reason
Recognised
Men
Poem
Burning
Telling
Purpose
Comes
Tell

More quotes by A. R. Ammons

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Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
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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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Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
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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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I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.
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The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
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To be saved is here, local and mortal
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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
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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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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
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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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Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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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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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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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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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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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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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.
A. R. Ammons