Quote

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.

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
World
Remains
Sink
Accredited
Soon
Prisoner
Enchantments
Memories
Soft
Harvested
Turn
Poison
Fondest
Turns
Innocence
Demented
Experience
Season
Enchantment
Years
Aging
Prisoners
Life
Seasons
Oblivion

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Silly girls your heads full of boys
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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.
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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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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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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 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 tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
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What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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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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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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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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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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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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Life is not at all what you might think it to be A simple tale where each thing has its history It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.
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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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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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