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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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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
Needs
Unknown
Limited
Large
Small
Restored
Though
Reminded
Often
Unlimited
Certain
Vague
Need
Concrete

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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.
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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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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
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Only silence perfects silence.
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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.
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Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
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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.
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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
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Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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To be saved is here, local and mortal
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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.
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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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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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
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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.
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