Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Category Archive: A. R. Ammons
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
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.
In nature there are few sharp lines.
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.
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
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.
Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.
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.