Quotes from A. R. Ammons

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.

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.'

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.

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

Only silence perfects silence.

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

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

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.

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

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

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.

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