A.R. Ammons Quotes

Only silence perfects silence.

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.

Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

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

Things go away to return, brightened for the passage

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

In nature there are few sharp lines

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.

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

What destruction have I been blessed by?

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

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

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.

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

To be saved is here, local and mortal

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.

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

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

In nature there are few sharp lines.

I’ve pressed sofar away frommy desire thatif you askedme what Iwant I would, accepting the harmoniouscompletion of thedrift, say annihilation, probably.