Of course it depends on your definition of poetry, but for me poetry is often the very lack of definition, though I tend to look for at least the appearance of definition… Anyway, we’re all looking for something to read, and Ashbery here gives us something to read, and it reads like slippery pros...
SOME TREES OUT OF A HUGE FORESTUsed Poem: "Some Trees" by John AshberyThe "Mesostomatic" Poem I got using the program:Each neighBor by spEech wereArranging yoU and I in whaT performance not merelY chance means sOmethingFilled withCanvaspuzzling ligHtAnd being there and moviNg o...
I really wanted to like this book more, because Ashbery has written some of my favorite poems. Hearing him read once, in Cambridge in the late 1970s, was an unforgettably pleasurable experience. And of course I realize that emulating, amplifying, distilling, and somehow organizing the random buzz...
Thoughts About AshberyAshbery re-describes reality through the ever-changing vivacity of his ideas. His poems are chronicles of what happens when one of the most fertile imaginations of our time creates on the page landscapes of ideas. In order to understand Ashbery, we need to pay attention to...
Our Review The juxtaposition of seemingly random, even bizarre elements is what renders the poetry of John Ashbery so difficult for some readers. He collects ordinary oddities and links them together in a conversational stream of consciousness, thus disguising profundity in the everyday (or findi...
First published in 1984 and now appearing in a new edition, A Wave is widely considered one of Ashbery's finest books of poetry. The 44 pieces collected here--particularly the long title-poem--find the poet applying his uniquely lyric, meditative, and often hilarious sensibility to the mysterious...
We have trees to prune, cryptograms to decode, it was all a blind running into the light— She couldn’t say the word for “fish.” Nor are his genes undone by what oafish submarines remain. Aye, sir, Captain Nemo, sir, we’ve spotted the junk in the roads up ahead. What! That spasm I created for my o...
The hotel breakfast china Poking ahead to the last week in August, not really Very much at all, found the land where you began …” The hills smouldered up blue that day, again You walk five feet along the shore, and you duck As a common heresy sweeps over. We can botanize About this for centuries,...
Sea so dark, O harvester, is it possible they could have brought you and me together after so long, only to be separated in an instant? There must have been some purpose to this, some idea hiding in the vacuity, the regular oblongs that comprise your adverse assessment of my capabilities, like bu...
But just as children imagine a prayer Is merely silence, he expected his subject To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush, Plaster its own portrait on the canvas. So there was never any paint on his canvas Until the people who lived in the buildings Put him to work: “Try using the brush As a mea...
She saw us make eye contact. And that was that for that day. Too bad he too, when I am meaning if I came along it’d already be too late. Some of the swans are swarming. The spring has gone under—it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Now they watch him and cringe. Who are they? Who is he? We decided...
At dusk. No later. The kittens will be in by then. “What if I said I want no kittens, just a big fat you?” The Motorway City, Leeds, has more of them, more varieties. And I said I just couldn’t. Mime the dialogue any faster. They’re taking rollcall now. With all the spontaneity of a sarabande he ...