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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

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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
Every
Hundred
Years
Poetry
Along
Imagine
Five
Living
Summary
Comes
Statement
Without
Statements

More quotes by 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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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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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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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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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There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
A. R. Ammons
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Only silence perfects silence.
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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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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The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
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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Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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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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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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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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
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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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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