Quote

The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.

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
Future
Flexing
Life
Aimless
Stretching
Account
Accounts
Return
Present
Invisibly
Point
Reappear

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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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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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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.
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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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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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Silly girls your heads full of boys
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Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse. Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.
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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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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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Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
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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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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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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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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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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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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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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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