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A. R. Ammons Quotes
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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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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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Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
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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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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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It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
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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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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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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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Honor the maggot, supreme catalyst: he spurs the rate of change....
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With the first step, the number of shapes the walk might take is infinite, but then the walk begins to define itself as it goes along, though freedom remains total with each step: any tempting side road can be turned into an impulse, or any wild patch of woods can be explored. The pattern of the walk is to come true, is to be recognized, discovered.
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If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The stones are
prepared: they are round and ready.
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Though I have looked everywhere I can find nothing lowly in the universe.
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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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I don't know about you, but I'm sick of good poems, all those little rondures splendidly brought off, painted gourds on a shelf.
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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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Not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours.
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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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I attended the burial of all my rosy feelings: I performed the rites, simple and decisive.
A. R. Ammons
Quote of the day
We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.
Charles Dudley Warner
A. R. Ammons
Wikipedia
Born:
February 18, 1926
Died:
February 25, 2001
(aged 75)
Bio:
Archie Randolph Ammons was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993.
Known for:
Tape for the turn of the year (1965)
A Coast of Trees (1981)
Ommateum: With Doxology (1955)
Sphere (1974)
The snow poems (1977)
Most used words:
poetry
poem
vague
laws
A. R. Ammons on Wikipedia
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