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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.

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
Thoughts
Anticipation
Walk
Imagined
Health
Fears
Events
Mood
Anticipations
Walks
Exactly
Sonnet
Cannot
Sight
Moods
Even
Poet
Route
Time
Along
Routes

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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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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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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
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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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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
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The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
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There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
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Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
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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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Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
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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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Only silence perfects silence.
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Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
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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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To be saved is here, local and mortal
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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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If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
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