remember that time i was reading a 121-page poem?
and i loved it?
and i wanted to share it with you?
but it was too long?
well here's the highlights.
enjoy.
hopefully as much as i did.
"...it just
goes to show you: moderation imposed is better
than no moderation at all: we tie into the
lives of those we love and our lives, then, go
as theirs go; their pain we can't shake off;
their choices, often harming to themselves,
pour through our agitated sleep, swirl up as
no-nos in our dreams..."
"garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish..."
"the new's an angle of emphasis on the old:
new religions are surfaces, beliefes the shadows
of images trying to construe what needs no
belief; only born die, and if something is
born on new, then that is not it, that is no
the it: the it is the indifference of all
differences, the nothingness of all the poised
somethigs, the finest issue of energy in which
boulders and dead stars float..."
"...because while the
prodigal stamps off and returns, the father goes
from iron directives that drove the son away
to rejoicing tears at his return: the safe
world of community, not safe, still needs
feelers send out to test the environment, to
to bring back news or no news; the cnetral
mover, the huge river, needs, too, to bend,
and the son sent away is doubtless welcomed home:
we deprive ourselves of, renounce, safety to seek
greater safety: but if we furnish a divine
sanction of theology to the disposition, we
must not think when the divine sanction shifts
that there is any alteration in the disposition..."
"...we
need nothing more, except the spelling out of
these for those inattentive or too busily lost
in the daily elaborations to prize the essential:
(1) don't complain -- ills are sufficiently
clear without reiterated description: (2) count
your blessing, spelling them over and over into
sharp contemplation: (3) do what you can --
take actionL (4) move on, keep the mind
allied with the figurations of ongoing..."
"...I've discovered
at sixty-three that the other thing I wished of
poetry, that it prevent death, has kept me a
little strange, that I have not got my feet out
of the embranglements of misapplication and out
into a clear space to go; that I have to start
again from a realization of failure: in fact,
having learned about commanding silence and
having, mostly by accident, commanded it a few
times, i've become afraid of convincingness..."
"it is the law of the jungle we have learned so
much from: but some would say the purpose of
living is to serve others or rule them, or to
write music, and some would say that being alive
is like being dead, but I would say that the
purpose though it might not always--or but
seldom--come through is still being alive..."
"even in the midst of passion plant the seed
whose vine or seed may hang you: things
not followed as risks are risky: being alive
means being alive to mischance's chances."
-garbage
A.R. Ammons
