“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.”

—  A.R. Ammons

Paris Review interview (1996)

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A.R. Ammons17
American poet 1926–2001

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