Trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains on butterfly wings.
Archie Randolph Ammons Carolinian
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- form
- interview
- work
- Paris Review interview (1996)
- year
- 1996
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“Trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains o…” Archie Randolph Ammons. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-8F60BF1637. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/8f60bf1637
More from Archie Randolph Ammons
Artist should be left alone to paint or not to paint, write or not to write.
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In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at the center, then anything can fit around it, meanwhile allowing for a lot of fragmentation and discontinuity on the periphery. Short poems, for me, are coherences, single instances on the periphery of a nonspecified center. I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment.