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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.

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
Example
Drape
Perfect
Togas
Drapes
Respectability
Urge
Classical
Urges
Republic

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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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The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
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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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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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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Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
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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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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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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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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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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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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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... 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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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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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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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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