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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
Music
Disorder
Expect
Answer
Poetry
Linguistics
Question
Linguistic
Answers
Correction
Asks
Corrections
Words
Vague
More quotes by A. R. Ammons
If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
A. R. Ammons
There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
A. R. Ammons
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
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
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
To be saved is here, local and mortal
A. R. Ammons
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
Only silence perfects silence.
A. R. Ammons
Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
A. R. Ammons
Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
A. R. Ammons
Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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
Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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
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
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
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
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.
A. R. Ammons
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
A. R. Ammons
What destruction have I been blessed by?
A. R. Ammons
