A. R. Ammons Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

To be saved is here, local and mortal

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

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

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

If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.