“Poetry is everlasting. It is not going away. But it has never occupied a sizeable part of the world's business, and it never will.”
AR
“I’ve always been highly energized and have written poems in spurts. From the god-given first line right through the poem. And I don’t write two or three lines and then come back the next day and write...”
A. R. Ammons
“Unless I have something already moving through the mind, I don’t go to the typewriter at all. The world has so many poems in it, it has never seemed to me very smart to force one more upon the world. ...”
A. R. Ammons
“I write for love, respect, money, fame, honor, redemption. I write to be included in a world I feel rejected by. But I don’t want to be included by surrendering myself to expectations. I want to buy m...”
A. R. Ammons
“I couldn’t avoid being a poet. I was really having a pretty rough time of things, and I had a lot of energy, and poems were practically the only recourse I had to alleviate that energy and that anxiet...”
A. R. Ammons
“Trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains on butterfly wings.”
A. R. Ammons