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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.

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
Would
Wind
Riding
Everybody
Phrases
Lovelorn
Moment
Perfectly
Sonatas
White
Mood
Arrival
Moments
Instruments
Arrivals
Past
Musical
Solemn
Music
Musician
Wondered
Sometimes
Horse
Phrase

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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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I listen to music a great deal. In a way, it's trying to express things that can't be expressed in words. That's something that interests me, too. Even though I use words to express myself, I am trying to, it seems to me, get beyond that.
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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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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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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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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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We are prisoners of the world's demented sink. The soft enchantments of our years of innocence Are harvested by accredited experience Our fondest memories soon turn to poison And only oblivion remains in season.
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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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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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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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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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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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