Carolina QuotesIn 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.
Archie Randolph Ammons Carolinian
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No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- form
- interview
- work
- Paris Review interview (1996)
- year
- 1996
no citation recorded
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“In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at th…” Archie Randolph Ammons. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E9F433BC6E. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e9f433bc6e
More from Archie Randolph Ammons
[On inspiration]: I think it comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety.
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 anxiety. I take no credit for all the poems I’ve written. They were a way of releasing anxiety.
Trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains on butterfly wings.