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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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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
Included
Stillness
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Greatest
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Motions
More quotes by 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.
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Only silence perfects silence.
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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
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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
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Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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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
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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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.
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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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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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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
It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
A. R. Ammons
Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
A. R. Ammons
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
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
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
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without
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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