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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

John Ashbery

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John Ashbery
Age: 90 †
Born: 1927
Born: July 28
Died: 2017
Died: September 3
Journalist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Rochester
New York
G'on Ashberi
John Ashberry
Jonas Barry
Jon Asshuberī
John Lawrence Ashbery
John Ashbery
Places
Poetry
Like
Tack
Hammer
Hammers
Hollow
Poems

More quotes by John Ashbery

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Extreme patience and persistence are required, Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.
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Life is not at all what you might think it to be A simple tale where each thing has its history It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.
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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse. Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.
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Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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Life is beautiful. He who reads that As in the window of some distant, speeding train Knows what he wants, and what will befall.
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And the way Though discontinuous, and intermittent, sometimes Not heard of for years at a time, did, Nonetheless, move up, although, to his surprise It was inside the house, And always getting narrower.
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The sun fades like the spreading Of a peacock's tail, as though twilight Might be read as a warning to those desperate For easy solutions.
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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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The soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.
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I'm heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.
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I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
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