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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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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
Feels
Closed
Going
Length
Time
Poetry
Works
Head
Look
Looks
Snip
Feel
Occasionally

More quotes by John Ashbery

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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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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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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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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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 soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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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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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.
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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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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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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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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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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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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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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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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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The winter does what it can for its children.
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