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The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
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
Much
Demands
Summer
Demand
Gives
Takes
Away
Night
Reticent
Giving
Reserved
More quotes by John Ashbery
Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail
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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven't fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
John Ashbery
Extreme patience and persistence are required, Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.
John Ashbery
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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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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I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
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Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about.
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And we may be led, then, upward through more Powerful forms of poetry, past columns With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference. Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.
John Ashbery
Therefore bivouac we On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up Over the horizon like a boy On a fishing expedition.
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Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, No words to say what it really is, that it is not Superficial but a visible core, then there is No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
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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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The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don't see until It's all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated.
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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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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Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.
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