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And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, No words to say what it really is, that it is not Superficial but a visible core, then there is No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.

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
Experience
Problem
Really
Pathos
Way
Superficial
Visible
Core
Surface
Words

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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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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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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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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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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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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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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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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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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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