John Ashbery Quotes
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How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you.
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I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
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And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.
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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.
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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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A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, we can be sure.
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I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.
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The sun fades like the spreading Of a peacock's tail, as though twilight Might be read as a warning to those desperate For easy solutions.
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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Life is beautiful. He who reads that As in the window of some distant, speeding train Knows what he wants, and what will befall.
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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.
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Will occur as time grows more open about it.
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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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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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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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One can lose a good idea by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.
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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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Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.
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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
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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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I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
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Then let yourself love all that you take delight in Accept yourself whole, accept the heritage That shaped you and is passed on from age to age Down to your entity. Remain mysterious; Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous.
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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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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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.
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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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I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.
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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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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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Wallace Stevens Poet -
Anne Waldman Poet -
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Frank O'Hara Writer -
David Lehman Poet -
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W. H. Auden Poet -
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