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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
View
Poetry
Views
Inspirational
Think
Confuse
Thinking
Improve
Life
Salvation
People
Army

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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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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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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 gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
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We are prisoners of the world's demented sink. The soft enchantments of our years of innocence Are harvested by accredited experience Our fondest memories soon turn to poison And only oblivion remains in season.
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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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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Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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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 summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
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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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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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... 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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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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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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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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