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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.

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
Train
Window
Wants
Inspirational
Beautiful
Befall
Life
Speeding
Reads
Distant

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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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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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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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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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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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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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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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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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Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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I listen to music a great deal. In a way, it's trying to express things that can't be expressed in words. That's something that interests me, too. Even though I use words to express myself, I am trying to, it seems to me, get beyond that.
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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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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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Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
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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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... 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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