Quote

Therefore bivouac we On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up Over the horizon like a boy On a fishing expedition.

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
Boys
Fishing
Blond
Morning
Horizon
Highway
Unimpeded
Great
Fishes
Highways
Conundrums
Things
Boat
Grab
Impermanent
Like
Rivers
Swing
Expedition
Sea
Swings
Veiled
Sex
Lakes
Scruples
Therefore
Worn
Expeditions

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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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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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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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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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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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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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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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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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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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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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about.
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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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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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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