A.R. Ammons Quotes

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

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.'

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

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.

Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.

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.

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines

It was May before my
attention came
to spring and
my word I said
to the southern slopes
I've
missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:
don't worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or if
you can climb, climb
into spring: but
said the mountain
it's not that way
with all things, some
that go are gone

What destruction have I been blessed by?

One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

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.

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

Equilibrations
If you walk back
and forth
through a puddle pretty
soon
you wet the whole
driveway but of
course dry
the puddle up.

Bees die with the burnt honey at their mouths, at least.

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.

The reeds give
way to the
wind and give
the wind away

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.

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.

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.

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.

Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.

The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful,
wonderful: I'm surprised half the time

I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished

Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.

Only silence perfects silence.

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.

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 ...

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

In nature there are few sharp lines.

The oppressed grows weightless: doze/n th/rough c/and/or man/aged leg/ions stud/ents

Plant the seed whose vine or tree may hang you.

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.

It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.