A. R. Ammons

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.”

“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.”

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

“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.”