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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

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
Lead
Taken
Chance
May
Fulfillment
Time
Poem
Disaster
Necessarily
Discovery

More quotes by 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.
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Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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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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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
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Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
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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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To be saved is here, local and mortal
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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.
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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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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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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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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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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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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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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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Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values
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Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
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In nature there are few sharp lines
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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.
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