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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.

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
Somebody
West
Feeling
Sun
Feelings
Moon
Ends
Step
Firsts
Toward
Hopelessness
Journey
Utter
First
Terrible
Confusion
Steps
East

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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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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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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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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.
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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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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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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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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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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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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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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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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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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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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The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
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