Quote

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.

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
Littles
Forms
Peeling
May
Soon
Swell
Little
Poet
Meanwhile
Country
Poetry
Nonetheless
Real
Powerful
Posters
People
Art
Upward
Form
Columns
Unhappily
Past
Indifference
Blooms

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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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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
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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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The winter does what it can for its children.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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 summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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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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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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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Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
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