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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
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Inspirational
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Confuse
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Improve
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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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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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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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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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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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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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Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
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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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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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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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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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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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