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To be saved is here, local and mortal

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
Mortal
Locals
Local
Mortals
Saved

More quotes by A. R. Ammons

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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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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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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
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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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The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
A. R. Ammons
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In nature there are few sharp lines
A. R. Ammons
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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.
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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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
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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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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A. R. Ammons
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Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
A. R. Ammons
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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
A. R. Ammons
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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
A. R. Ammons
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If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
A. R. Ammons
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Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
A. R. Ammons
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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.
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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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