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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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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
Wisdom
Keep
Find
Mind
Life
Identity
More quotes by A. R. Ammons
Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
A. R. Ammons
It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
A. R. Ammons
The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
A. R. Ammons
Only silence perfects silence.
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
Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
A. R. Ammons
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.
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
What destruction have I been blessed by?
A. R. Ammons
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
Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
A. R. Ammons
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
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
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
Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
A. R. Ammons
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
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
The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
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
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
