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
So that the old joy, modest as cake, as wine and friendship Will stay with us at the last, backed by the night Whose ruse gave it our final meaning
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
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.
The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …
The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.
It never seems to occur to anyone that each reader is different, and that even those who might be said to resemble each other will each bring an individual set of experiences and references to their reading, and interpret and misinterpret it according to these.
Just when I thought there wasn't room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
In the evening Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.
I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.