Quote

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
Time
Poem
Disaster
Necessarily
Discovery
Lead
Taken
Chance
May
Fulfillment

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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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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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The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
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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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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
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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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Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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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.
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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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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
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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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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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The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
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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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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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To be saved is here, local and mortal
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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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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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