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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.

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
Blank
Finish
Pleasure
Reading
Space
Ends
Also
Come

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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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What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
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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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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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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 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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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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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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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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Silly girls your heads full of boys
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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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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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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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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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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 tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
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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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Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
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