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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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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
World
Workings
Surprised
Surprise
Wonderful
Half

More quotes by A. R. Ammons

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Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
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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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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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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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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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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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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.
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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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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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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
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.'
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To be saved is here, local and mortal
A. R. Ammons
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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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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
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Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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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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The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
A. R. Ammons
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Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
A. R. Ammons