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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

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
Poetry
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Inspirational
Think
Confuse
Thinking
Improve
Life
Salvation
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More quotes by John Ashbery

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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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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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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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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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Life is not at all what you might think it to be A simple tale where each thing has its history It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.
John Ashbery
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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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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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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
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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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Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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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 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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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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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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.
John Ashbery
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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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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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Silly girls your heads full of boys
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