Quotes from A.R. Ammons

intellections have a use, don't think they don't: if the vine couldn't find a natural tree, what would become of it? if structure without life is meaningless, so is life without structure: we're going to make a dense, tangled trellis so lovely & complicated that every kind of variety will find a place in it or on it: you just be surprised: & forgive us: who mean song direct & fierce:

Flux has heightened us into knots of staid tension.

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognized by burning. from A Poem is a Walk, Epoch 18 (Fall 1968): 114-19.