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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.'

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
Poetry
Linguistics
Question
Linguistic
Answers
Correction
Asks
Corrections
Words
Vague
Music
Disorder
Expect
Answer

More quotes by A. R. Ammons

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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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Only silence perfects silence.
A. R. Ammons
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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
A. R. Ammons
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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
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Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
A. R. Ammons
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To be saved is here, local and mortal
A. R. Ammons
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What destruction have I been blessed by?
A. R. Ammons
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There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
A. R. Ammons
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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.
A. R. Ammons
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The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
A. R. Ammons
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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
A. R. Ammons
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Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
A. R. Ammons
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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
A. R. Ammons
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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
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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
A. R. Ammons
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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.
A. R. Ammons
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You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind ON, but what you can't keep your mind OFF.
A. R. Ammons
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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.
A. R. Ammons
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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
A. R. Ammons
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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.
A. R. Ammons