SOURCE: An interview in Diacritics, Vol. III, No. 4, Winter, 1973, pp. 47-53.

In the following excerpt, Ammons discusses his ideas about poetry.

[Grossvogel]: You seem to be suspicious of mentalisms. In your poem "Uh, Philosophy," isn't that "uh" a disclaimer?

[Ammons]: Yes. At the first level of the critical I tend to think of the discursive as assuming limits which then prevent it ever from encompassing the work that is before it. So I always think of that mode as a lesser mode than the imaginative. There is nothing new about that; most people grant it, I believe. Along the same lines as when Laotse says that nothing that can be said in words is worth saying. He means, I think that by the time we have embodied into limitation any sort of reality, it has limited itself out of the total adumbration. It is true that I use...