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

More quotes by John Ashbery

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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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Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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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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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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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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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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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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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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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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And we may be led, then, upward through more Powerful forms of poetry, past columns With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference. Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.
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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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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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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.
John Ashbery
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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
John Ashbery
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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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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.
John Ashbery
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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.
John Ashbery
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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
John Ashbery