A. R. Ammons Quotes
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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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Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
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Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
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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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To be saved is here, local and mortal
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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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Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
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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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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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In nature there are few sharp lines
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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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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
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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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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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Only silence perfects silence.
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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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Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.
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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 wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
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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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Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
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There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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What destruction have I been blessed by?
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