John Ashbery
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.Collection: Poetry
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.Collection: Sad
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.Collection: Poetry
I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.Collection: Beautiful
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.Collection: Life
And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.Collection: Thinking
until only infinity remained of beautyCollection: Infinity
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takesCollection: Summer
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?Collection: Past
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.Collection: Thinking
Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.Collection: Reading
The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?Collection: Life
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.Collection: Dream
I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.Collection: Healing
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?Collection: Night
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecisionCollection: Moments
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.Collection: Dark
Poetry is mostly hunches.Collection: Hunches
The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through.Collection: Years
One listens to a piece of great music, say, and feels deeply moved by it, and wants to put this feeling into words, but it can't be put into words. That's what - the music has already supplied the meaning, and words will just be superfluous after that. But it's that kind of verbal meaning that can't be verbalized that I try to get at in poetry.Collection: Feelings
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.Collection: Writing
My feeling is that most political poetry is preaching to the choir, and that the people who are going to make the political changes in our lives are not the people who read poetry, unfortunately. Poetry not specifically aimed at political revolution, though, is beneficial in moving people toward that kind of action, as well as other kinds of action. A good poem makes me want to be active on as many fronts as possible.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Music
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!Collection: Art
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...Collection: Inspirational
The winter does what it can for its children.Collection: Children
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.Collection: Inspirational
Will occur as time grows more open about it.Collection: Life
I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.Collection: Dysfunction
If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one's actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.Collection: Numbers
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.Collection: Grateful
The evening light was like honey in the trees When you left me and walked to the end of the street Where the sunset abruptly ended. The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself To the fragile forget-me-not flower. You climbed aboard. Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones, Dreams I had, including suicide, Puff out the hot-air balloon now. It is bursting, it is about to burstCollection: Suicide
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.Collection: Spiritual
I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring anotherCollection: Speech
Therefore bivouac we On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up Over the horizon like a boy On a fishing expedition.Collection: Morning
I'm heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.Collection: Travel