John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashberyis an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery has stated that he wishes his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 July 1927
CountryUnited States of America
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.
The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.
All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat....
The soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.
What I like about music is its ability to be convincing, to carry an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities.
I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …
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.
Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.
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.