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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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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
Astonished
Aside
Stopped
Turned
Become
Life

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.
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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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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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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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The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
A. R. Ammons
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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.
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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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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There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
A. R. Ammons
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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
A. R. Ammons
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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
A. R. Ammons
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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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
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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.
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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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.
A. R. Ammons
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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
A. R. Ammons
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In nature there are few sharp lines
A. R. Ammons