A.R. Ammons Quotes

#1. Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#2. Reflective

I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it - Author: A.R. Ammons

#3. A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#4. One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#5. 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 - Author: A.R. Ammons

#6. Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#7. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#8. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#9. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#10. I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished - Author: A.R. Ammons

#11. Equilibrations
If you walk back
and forth
through a puddle pretty
soon
you wet the whole
driveway but of
course dry
the puddle up. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#12. Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#13. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#14. That's a wonderful change that's 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#15. Things go away to return, brightened for the passage - Author: A.R. Ammons

#16. There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#17. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#18. The oppressed grows weightless: doze/n th/rough c/and/or man/aged leg/ions stud/ents - Author: A.R. Ammons

#19. Plant the seed whose vine or tree may hang you. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#20. 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.' - Author: A.R. Ammons

#21. I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines - Author: A.R. Ammons

#22. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#23. Like the hills under
dusk
you fall away
from the light:
you deepen: the green
light darkens
and you are nearly lost:
only so much light as
stars keep
manifests your face:
I feel the total night
in myself rave
for the light along your lips. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#24. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#25. Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#26. To be saved is here, local and mortal - Author: A.R. Ammons

#27. What destruction have I been blessed by? - Author: A.R. Ammons

#28. It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#29. 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 ... - Author: A.R. Ammons

#30. Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#31. Only silence perfects silence. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#32. Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#33. The reeds give
way to the
wind and give
the wind away - Author: A.R. Ammons

#34. The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#35. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#36. Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#37. If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#38. Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#39. I've pressed so
far away from
my desire that
if you asked
me what I
want I would,
accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,
probably. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#40. In nature there are few sharp lines. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#41. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#42. The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful,
wonderful: I'm surprised half the time - Author: A.R. Ammons

#43. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#44. You came one day and
as usual in such matters
significance filled everything-
your eyes, the things you
knew, the way you turned,
leaned, stood, or sat,
this way or that. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#45. 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. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#46. Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful. - Author: A.R. Ammons

#47. Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values. - Author: A.R. Ammons