"If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster"
About this Quote
Ammons is making a pitch for poetry as risk, not craft-workmanship polished to a safe shine. “If a poem is each time new” sounds like a simple premise, but it’s really a refusal of formula: the poem that arrives already knowing what it will say isn’t a poem in his sense, it’s an arrangement. Newness becomes a moral stance. The writer has to enter without guarantees, and the reader has to accept that the meaning won’t come prepackaged.
The sly power of the line is how it demystifies inspiration while keeping its danger intact. He calls the poem “an act of discovery,” not self-expression. That shifts the center of gravity away from the poet’s feelings and toward the poem as a method: a way of finding out what you think, what you can see, what language can carry. The repetition of “chance” tightens the screw. It’s not romantic chance as in fate; it’s chance as in gambling, experimentation, walking out onto thin ice. Ammons is honest about the downside: the same openness that can produce “fulfillment” can just as easily yield “disaster” - confusion, banality, a poem that collapses under its own reaching.
Context matters here. Ammons came up in a postwar American poetry world suspicious of grand pronouncements and increasingly fascinated by process: composition as attention, perception, improvisation. His best work often feels like thinking in real time, language tracking the mind as it turns. This quote is a compact manifesto for that ethos: the poem’s value is inseparable from its vulnerability. If it can’t fail, it can’t discover.
The sly power of the line is how it demystifies inspiration while keeping its danger intact. He calls the poem “an act of discovery,” not self-expression. That shifts the center of gravity away from the poet’s feelings and toward the poem as a method: a way of finding out what you think, what you can see, what language can carry. The repetition of “chance” tightens the screw. It’s not romantic chance as in fate; it’s chance as in gambling, experimentation, walking out onto thin ice. Ammons is honest about the downside: the same openness that can produce “fulfillment” can just as easily yield “disaster” - confusion, banality, a poem that collapses under its own reaching.
Context matters here. Ammons came up in a postwar American poetry world suspicious of grand pronouncements and increasingly fascinated by process: composition as attention, perception, improvisation. His best work often feels like thinking in real time, language tracking the mind as it turns. This quote is a compact manifesto for that ethos: the poem’s value is inseparable from its vulnerability. If it can’t fail, it can’t discover.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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