Quote

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

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
Mad
Must
Featureless
Mean
General
Wail
Like
Second
Constitute
World
Bits
Pocket
Getting
Fleeting
Knowledge
Replaced
History
Pockets
Whole

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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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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
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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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Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
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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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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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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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The winter does what it can for its children.
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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
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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.
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Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It's sort of the way dreams come to us and the way that we get knowledge from them, through television, old movies, which I watch a lot of. Lines of dialogue suddenly seem to be part of a poem.
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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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Some certified nut Will try to tell you it's poetry, (It's extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense) But watch out or he'll start with some New notion or other.
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... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.
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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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Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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