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Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

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
Modern
Purpose
Death
Thing
Furniture
Filled
Office
Building
Wise

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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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Silly girls your heads full of boys
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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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... 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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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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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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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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The winter does what it can for its children.
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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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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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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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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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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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