I love Ashbery! I am a huge fan of the NY poets as a whole. You don't really see a lot of that erudite optimism around these days.

>What do you think of some critics' accusations that his work is meaningless?

Strong chance Ashbery would have taken that as a compliment. He believed that is was the pointless things in life that imbue it with meaning.

>>23287218
Americans haven't produced a real poet since Stevens.

>>23287226
That's not true and I love Stevens

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My fav Ashbery poem:

>Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

>The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
>Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
>From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”
>Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant
>To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched
>Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach

>And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
>“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder
>Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched
>The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
>Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant
>Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”

>Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
>Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach
>When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”
>But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder
>And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment
>Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”

>Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
>Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country
>One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment
>And all that it contains, myself and spinach
>In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder
>At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

>Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
>Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched
>Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”
>She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”
>“But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”
>Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

>But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
>Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant
>Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach
>Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched
>One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country
>Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder

>Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,
>The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched
>His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

>>23287270
cartoon logic inside of a oil painting

>>23287218
I love Ashbery. I own the first of the LoA collections of his. I really like:

Some Trees
Scheherazade
Abstentions

...and many others.

>>23287226
Stevens is overrated to an extreme—just another pervert-subvert masquerading as an intelligence. Could he write? Sure. But not to any special degree.

>>23287290
>>23287218
Oh! I almost forgot my favorite one:

Chinese Whispers

>>23287218
His best friend Koch is my fav but Ashbery is a close second.
Here, have some Koch:
>https://youtu.be/E2o__mk8Se8?si=zQD1P87HWInh-ZxW

>>23287218
Damn he was a Chad

I'd only seen pictures of him as an old man

>>23287218
The critics who think his work is meaningless are literal midwits who have been filtered. That's it.

i read a lot of him on day on shrooms after a bad breakup this time last year. very special poet

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>>23287218
O'Hara was the far better poet and Ashbery would probably admit this himself.

>>23287467
I like O’Hara, but Ashbery is the significantly better poet of the two. There's really no comparison to be made.

>>23287218
my favourite Ashbery poems:
"As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat"
"Like a Sentence"
"My Erotic Double"
"Pyrography"
"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"
"Soonest Mended"
"Worsening Situation"

>>23287223
>Strong chance Ashbery would have taken that as a compliment.
I don't think so, in "Self-Portrait..." he criticizes those who hold a glib attitude towards the meaningless of post-modernity. I don't think he would view his works as meaningless at all, I think he would be insulted if somebody suggested they were.

>>23287303
How do you approach Koch? I've tried several times, but I find him totally indecipherable.

>>23287530
Doesn't he in the same piece (maybe not?) go on to differentiate between meaningful meaninglessness and meaningless meaninglessness? I just remember him and Koch having this talk about the beauty and perfection of the yo-yo
>>23287530
Honestly with Koch I would just grab his collected works and start with The Boiling Water onwards and then circle back. I also find that his readings really helped me understand how clever his ebb and flow between monotony and exuberance really is.

I really enjoy NY Poets threads because they were all best friends that had deep respect and admiration for each other and you just know that each of them would have considered his friends far better than themselves.

>>23287467
Ashbery mogs OHara

>>23287726
>Doesn't he in the same piece (maybe not?) go on to differentiate between meaningful meaninglessness and meaningless meaninglessness?
Yes, which is why I think he would be unhappy to hear his work characterized as being meaningless.

>>23287726
I will do so, thank you.

>>23288394
Agreed. O'Hara's insistence that poetry is really nothing special infuriates me.

>>23287218
absolutely fucking hated every book of his i read. i honestly don't get it

>>23288446
Sorry that you got filtered.

>>23288446
Were you patient with it? Did you read the poems multiple times? Did you engage in the scholarship surrounding his work? Did you use the internet to listen to lectures?
There's no excuse to "not get" a writer in the age of the internet.

>>23287308
>Damn he was a Chad
meaningless buzzword at this point

>>23287289
American history inside the head of anyone who's studied it. Funny, never thought of one of those maps of the U.S. wherein all the states are different colors as an (absurd) tangram before. Country and Scratch are the featured words in this one
>whole or scratched
made me laugh. The movement from Wimpy's burp to 'domestic thunder,/The color of spinach' to 'sure was pleasant...'
Thoughts, anyone?

>>23289089
>Funny, never thought of one of those maps of the U.S. wherein all the states are different colors as an (absurd) tangram before.

You get it!

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>>23289232
Well? Popeye's weirdly fortunate 'here' (Pappy 2.0) especially when one considers the back of the dollar bill-- not the color of spinach, really, but close enough
>Annuit Coeptis ; )

Bumping this

>>23287218
Is he as hard to read as Hart Crane or is he more accessible?

>>23287218
>Ashbery lived in New York City and Hudson, New York, with his husband, David Kermani.
Husband?? He was le gay?

>>23289556
Yes. How the fuck did you not know that?

>>23289549
the latter

>>23289556
lmao

>>23289564
I just learned about this guy. Am I supposed to know how many penises he sucked just by osmosis or something?

>>23289585
He's pretty well known for having been openly gay since the 60s or 70s

>Ashbery and Thom Gunn on the first page
For me, it's These Lacustrine Cities

>>23289601
>both threads posted by me
Good taste.

These Lacustrine Cities

These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,
Though this is only one example.

They emerged until a tower
Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back
Into the past for swans and tapering branches,
Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.

Then you are left with an idea of yourself
And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon
Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others
Who fly by you like beacons.

The night is a sentinel.
Much of your time has been occupied by creative games
Until now, but we have all-inclusive plans for you.
We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,

To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air
To you, pressing you back into a startled dream
As sea-breezes greet a child’s face.
But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.

The worst is not over, yet I know
You will be happy here. Because of the logic
Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.
Tender and insouciant by turns, you see

You have built a mountain of something,
Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.

Got that big 1954-87 collection. It took a lot of effort, but most of Some Trees, Rivers and Mountains, Self Portrait all really clicked with me, loved the Skaters once I got my head around it
I remain filtered by The Tennis Court Oath and Litany - halp plox

>>23289585
>How was I sposed to know that poet obsessed with poetry was gay?

I have both of the collected poems but I just know they are not as comprehensive as they could be.

>>23289743
One of my favorite volumes of his to browse through is the Notes from the Air compendium of selections from ten or so 'late volumes,' published in 2007-- now viewed as a 'middle period'
Tennis Court Oath was universally hated for its blatant 'obscurity' (even Harold Bloom hated it) but I do love some of the poems in there, particularly Thoughts of a Young Girl, The Shower, and A Last World (from which:)
>A last world moves on the figures;
>They are smaller than we last saw them caring about them.
>The sky is a giant rocking horse
>And of the other things death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
>A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
>
>Everything is being blown away;
>A little horse trots up with a letter in its mouth, which is read with eagerness
>As we gallop into the flame.

>>23290223
Bored in/mis/comprehension with Wagnerian grandeur

>>23290230
>Wagnerian g
silly, fake in this respect (merely?) but I guess this is where irony becomes so over-the-top as to become.. subtle. OTOH the crazy intimacy of the actual (storybook 'romantic') terms baffles this (my) impression 'more than a little'

Bump for Little JA

>>23287485
Agreed

>>23287308
Dude's teeth were fucked though. It's really noticeable watching him talk in old video interviews. He was a chad as long as he kept his mouth closed.

>>23289760
Nothing gay about poetry

>>23287218
Bumping this thread. Ashbery is one of those special poets that is both funny, poignant and innovative. I love his translation of Illuminations by Rimbaud as well as many of his translations of Pierre Reverdy. His work has been a portal to some very deep nights. Thanks anon for reminding me of his power as a poet. Going to crack open one of his books.

>>23294276
oh cmon!

>>23287218
Which Library of America collection is better: his earlier work or his later work?

>>23296644
Personally love his earlier stuff from Some Trees through The Double Dream of Spring to Complex Mirror, but what surprises about Ashbery is that his 'powers' never really falter. He's consistently interesting throughout his career. But perhaps the earlier's the more vital in order to be able to come to know this; get that one (first).

>>23296660
Thanks

>>23289392
Frighteningly based

>>23296669
Yeah, the few bits quoted in this thread are all from that volume. Some Trees, the first volume, contains poems that are perfectly comprehensible (as poems) too. The Tennis Court Oath, the second volume, is perhaps the most incomprehensible. Everything thereafter falls somewhere between the two so far as 'level of difficulty' is concerned.

>>23295064
If you haven't yet check out his small prose volume (150pp) 'Other Traditions' --good essays on Roussel, Wheelwright, Beddoes, John Clare, David Schubert, and...Laura Riding!

>>23287244
This. Any reader of Stevens who subsequently becomes a reader of Ashbery can't help but discover that Ashbery is 'more alive' to the way 'life's lived' in the 21st century than Stevens even could be. Reading both is a good way to come in direct contact with palpable 'spiritual' differences between the early mid-twentieth century and the 'time-period' (we're) all stuck in now, like daydreaming flies affixed to obsolete flypaper

>>23287218
Some Trees

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

>Title track of the first volume, 1956

>>23298043
love this poem, impressive that he wrote this at a relatively young age

>>23299171
Yeah, different species of rhyme, each word as if a tree (the first stanza could be read as a model for reading this poem in particular, but of course it doesn't need to be read that way) and tossed off what seems so effortlessly. I love the concluding defense of (one's) vanished days in their quiet particularity-- as if they need defense! Beautiful poem

bump

>>23287218
I don’t really understand what he’s saying but he is one of the few poets that I read a lot of over and over again, alongside Eliot and Pound. My favourite poem by him is “City Afternoon.” Any recommendations for good secondary lit on him?

>>23289564
Honestly I was surprised when I first learned he was gay

>>23288438
oshit ive been digging into ohara this semester. i love the idea of poetry being nothing special. i think more people should take that approach to poetry. holding every poem on a pedestal like its a piece of fine art or some sacred incantation makes poets seem pretentious and unapproachable. ohara wrote poems and discarded them like they were grocery lists. i find grocery lists and think of them as poems.

havent read koch or ashberry or leroi but im excited to after this semester.

haiku4u:

black plastic bag
snagged on a naked tree limb;
first leaf of spring

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>>23301279
I enjoyed Roffmann's bio of his early years; also, Helen Vendler's helpful with Ashbery, but the only book of hers that's coming to mind right now (that deals with him) is Invisible Listeners (it's short) which also concerns itself with George Herbert and Walt Whitman. She's *the* critic/appreciator to read on Wallace Stevens btw.

>>23287218
Decent. Probably would enjoy Carruth in that vein.

>>23301596
>haiku
Can't help but think that an opportunity for the fusion of political anarchy with (human) seasonal 'expectations' was missed here. That black bag should have been (somehow) rendered as a black flag, in other words. Just a thought. As it stands, a little too obviously cynical.

>>23301356
Being 'gay' isn't what he's about; poetry is

>>23301869
dude what lmao
ideologues shoo shoo from poetry

>>23301914
Kek
Litter bad, this is what (you) get as a result *isn't* ideological? Spare me
The seasons communing with garbage to wilfully displace human expectations of seasonal 'order' would be not only timely, but rather funny. Hardly 'ideological' because frankly ridiculious

>>23301940
why are you here
are you even into poetry
or are you just looking to spread agitprop

>>23301991
>why are you here
What bureau do (you) work for?
>are you even into poetry
Yes
>or are you..
Kek
Sorry to hurt your feelings, anon
Evidently your haiku meant more to you than, given your initial post, I thought possible, but whatever
I'll leave (you) alone now

>>23302026
contribute! what are your thoughts on new york poets?

>>23302090
***
>>23289089
>>23289392
>>23290223
>>23291838
>>23296660
>>23296692
>>23296765
>>23298043
>>23299754
>>23301844
My contributions in this thread that (you) may not be aware of. Yours?
I like the NY poets well enough, but this is a John Ashbery thread.

>>23289609
>>23289601

HOW THIS SADNESS CAME TO BE PERSISTENT

The traceries were often beautiful.
But rendered on the Gnostic frieze they bore
Annihilated circumambulations,
Deliberate treacheries; from which stone of shore

The face of a wall soared up; up, infinite --
Signing the thicket signature of time,
Whose finger is a fire and whose eye
Proved serpentine as arrows.
That is when
The heaps of stones collected into cities;
Why the confessors and the hangmen faltered;
How this sadness came to be persistent.

Listen. The siren-calls. The thorns, the root:
Whose pale eviscerations since the Gothic
Well overawe a flesh now turned to splinters
Devoid of heldentenors;
Asymmetries of angels;
A falsity of waters
For which no one dare answer.

And on the eve a thunder stammers slowly;
And round the tall cool marble Nike shimmers
Chryselephantine darkness;
Scar of logos.

>>23302167
What is this sadness, which, unlike anything else in this poem except the invisible wall that springs up, 'up, infinite,' is persistent?
>The traceries were often beautiful.
That is, not persistently so-- as a possible response. But this poem is loaded with inconsistencies and 'impersistencies' in an ironic, dirge-like sequence so that at its conclusion it's hard to take even one's (own) so-called 'sadness' seriously.
One can find things like 'the fall' of the Ptolemaic universe, 'the fall' in general, God, Wagner, undone hierarchies, etc., embedded in this thing, and more than a single ambiguity or 'pun'.
What interests me here, however, is the poem's conclusion, which brings the conclusion of a poem another anon quoted in full earlier in this thread
>>23287270
Domestic thunder 'there' alludes to the United States of America in particular, of course. What of the thunder here? It can barely speak. There's an ironic reference to Milton's Pandemonium, because if 'Chryselephantine darkness' isn't 'darkness visible' then I don't know what is. The setting for this 'occurs' in the Temple of Athena Victor on the Parthenon, however, where, of course, the great Chryselephantine statue referenced no longer exists. Not so much as an Ozymandaic scrap of it remains. Most scars are invisible, I guess, or made so.

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>>23302978
Forgot pic

>>23302167
Which collection is this one from?

>>23303012
nta, but it has to be late or uncollected because it's not in any of the volumes I own. Most intriguing of all would be if it were an AI rendition of a John Ashbery poem, which, perhaps perversely, I'm hoping it is.

>>23303264
Yeah I couldn't find it in the big Collected.
What if anon wrote it himself?

>>23303283
Then I would say he or she sounded or 'felt' remarkably like John Ashbery!

>>23287499
Well arranged. Your favorites read like a little poem.

great thread, loving these poems. always meant to check out Ashbery, and after reading this thread he's moved to the top of the pile of books I will read once I have a job and some money again.

>>23296876
>but discover that Ashbery is 'more alive' to the way 'life's lived' in the 21st century
>Reading both is a good way to come in direct contact with palpable 'spiritual' differences between the early mid-twentieth century and the 'time-period' (we're) all stuck in now, like daydreaming flies affixed to obsolete flypaper

If it's not too much trouble, would you mind expanding on this, specifically the resonance between Ashbery's poetry and the lived experience and spiritual architecture of man in the 21st century?

As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight
Filters down, a little at a time,
Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,
As the Sun yellows the green of the maple tree….

So this was all, but obscurely
I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages
Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.
New sentences were starting up. But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

A look of glass stops you
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am,
Or is it postponed again? The children
Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift
Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate
As limpid, dense twilight comes.
Only in that tooting of a horn
Down there, for a moment, I thought
The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,
Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,
Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?
They are sun motes. You have slept in the Sun
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door
But it was only her come to ask once more
If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn’t.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

bump

>>23302167
Don't be shy, anon
Where from?

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>>23305760
>>23303283
>>23303283
>>23303264
>>23302978
Interesting.
This can't be Ashbery. Ashbery has this nonchalant, conversational tone. Short words, drifting syntax. He's aware of things like rhyme or iambic pentameter, but doesn't keep to them. He's a discursive poet, not 'elevated,' often dropping in an everyday or pop reference. The poem in question is a lot more formal, serious, and condensed. Harder edged. Not from the same hand.
Also, can't be an AI. Anyone who's ever asked GPT to generate a poem 'in the style' of Keats or whoever will drop down laughing. AI can rhyme, and produce unexpected word combinations. But there's always a slip somewhere, something clumsy. Not here. This poem isn't junk.
Did an anon write it? If an anon could just casually knock out a poem capable of passing for an Ashbery, he must be one interesting anon. I don't think that's it either.
But is it the poem of some other published poet? I did a Google Search on the title. Nothing!
Weird.
Well, whatever.
In any case, compliments to >>23302978.
A very thoughtful, engaged, well-read response. That's how to engage with a poem, whoever wrote it.

>>23304087
>would you mind expanding on this, specifically the resonance between Ashbery's poetry and the lived experience and spiritual architecture of man in the 21st century?
I'd say it's the incongruity of lived experience and the lack of spiritual architecture in 21st century man that marks Ashbery's poetry. We don't know or don't believe in God or a objective metaphysical order. We're surrounded by a sort of ontological multiculturalism that asserts that any assertion is as good as any other. We read fake news, eat fake food, vote in fake elections. Even our balls and pussies are supposed to be elective. We live in a world of perceptions, but the causal glue, the hierarchial framework, is absent. Like Ashbery's poems, it's a kind of strolling collage. Except that, in the world of reality, as opposed to that of poetry, we'll eventually stroll over the edge of a cliff.

>>23306382
Ah, compared to Stevens, by my impression, is coming from an earlier modernism of subjective truth. Makes sense, thank you.

>>23304117
I remember reading this and thinking that JA, having plausibly identified himself with a group of his poems lately anthologized (Packet-Boat would be the anthology, 'drunken' speaks for itself--how many who read him think that he's just not right, 'tried new things' reminds one that 'the villanelle' will be included, which it often is, 'some...immortal and free' refers to the other poets in the anthology, most of whom are already 'actually' dead, but reported in such a way as to goof, good-naruredly, on such 'ideas' as poetic immortality..
'Elsewhere we are as...' perspectivizes either from his own group of poems in there, or, more humorously, from 'himself' among all the other poets included, select bunch! Remember, (we) are living in 'the age of mechanical reproduction' so this anthology can be, and is, in many places simultaneously. That it also happens to be in the lap of a young man under a tree, say, who is about to get into a fight with his girlfriend, all the 'anthologized poets' bear witness. It is the beginning of the school year at the conclusion of this stanza, as the maple leaves attest, and the shade of the tree is loosely quantified in terms of the strange behavior of the sunlight. The first line/title of the poem brings Rimbaud to mind, but the featured *other* poet of the poem in its entirety is actually Emily Dickinson, i.e. her idea of the fullness of that one, great, immortal day. I could go on, but I'll spare you).
Pretty fancy. There are of course worse ways to read this poem.

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>>23302978
>compliments to >>23302978.
>A very thoughtful, engaged, well-read response. That's how to engage with a poem, whoever wrote it.
What the hell, let me give it a shot myself.
In classical architecture, afrieze is the wide horizontal central section atop the columns.
So (IMHO) the poet is asserting that the element that rests on classical columns—I would argue that he means Western civilization nowadays—has grown fundamentally Gnostic, illusory, a sort of Matrix. The ‘traceries,’ ie the surface art and philosophy based on that Gnostic perspective ‘circumambulate,’ ie ‘walk around’ fundamental reality, but don’t engage with it directly, and so are ‘treacherous,’ assuming a ‘wall’ that forever blocks us from the capital-B Being of Heidegger. Which is kind of sad. But persistent, since the Kantian distinctions that lock us into our heads and bar us from the Ding-an-Sich have yet to be refuted.
“The siren calls, the thorns, the root,” describe this history (‘pale eviscerations since the Gothic’), and its negative consequences (‘a flesh now turned to splinters / Devoid of heldentenors’).
The concluding lines suggest this condition is terminal, or at least coming to an end: ‘On the eve a thunder stammers slowly.’ Ditto the ‘darkness visible’ that surrounds Nike. But the author pulls the rug out from under this depressing assessment with three simple concluding words: “scar of logos.’ The logos is of course Christ, and he is a scar because he breaks through the Gnostic matrix and mars the delusion.
But not for everyone, sadly, because some of us prefer the shadows in Plato’s cave to what the sunlight bares.
Is my interpreation bullshit? Maybe. My argument, however, is that supposedly meaningless poetry like this functions as a kind of Rohrschach blot. It doesn’t express meaning, but it evokes it. It seduces the reader into crafting a meaningful response that explains the cryptic elements. (At least to his own satisfaction.) It inspires thought, rather than communicating it. Which is rather a worthwhile thing to do.
But it isn’t really what Ashbery is doing. Carefully crafted Rohrscach-like poetry can sustain an cogent interpretation, or even multiple opposed interpretations. But it has to be crafted very carefully.
What Ashbery writes is a lot closer to free association. It says more about his state of mind, and maybe its underlying neuroses, than about the world outside Ashbery. His poetry is Gnostic, and likes it. The poem in question critiques that position.
No, not an Ashbery poem.

>>23306509
You're arguing ideologically and not accurately, anon. A 'Gnostic Frieze' is more than unlikely, and aar has nothing at all to do with 'classic architecture'. As a figure, one could imagine a kind of mental ticker tape, but on which are images of the traceries, a far larger architectural member, whatever the condition? That's silly in a silly way.
I'll stop because you're the poet, and, though (you) tried to take advantage of the good faith of the anons here, and even marginally succeeded (at least arguably) I like you anyway.

Bump

>>23287218
Gordon Lish on Ashbery:
>Having read Ashbery as closely as I will, it's difficult for me to let myself not see Wallace Stevens as a precursor of Ashbery's. I surely imagine Ashbery would welcome, in fact, and maybe has even invited, those relations, to appear between the two of them. I see Wallace Stevens, as a rather more frontal and in fact morally difficult writer than Ashbery. I think Stevens was rather more private. I think we have in Stevens a man who put before us a work of excruciating privacy, a work of excruciating inwardness and solipsism. And I don't think the case can be made for Ashbery that he has done quite as satisfactorily as Stevens has in that respect. Satisfaction in my case being, precisely that, solipsism and the extreme extent to which you are a case of one, for me, is the extent to which you are a case of absolute universalism, and most dangerous, most dangerous.

>>23307883
Basically Ashbery is mostly frivolous, lacks gravitas, gives little weight to the problem of death and hides behind ambiguities instead of offering actual inwardness.

>>23307943
Works that address the problem of death aren’t inherently more valuable than works that address other aspects of the human experience. This “critique” you've given sounds like pointless self-important drivel.

>>23306847
>A 'Gnostic Frieze' is more than unlikely
Not if the frieze is taken as a metaphor.
>>and aar has nothing at all to do with 'classic architecture'.
I do not understand this sentence.
>> As a figure, one could imagine a kind of mental ticker tape, but on which are images of the traceries, a far larger architectural member, whatever the condition?
See above.
> you're the poet
I thank you for the compliment, but it makes me wonder whether you are!
>> I like you anyway.
The feeling is reciprocated.
[Smiley Face]

>>23307943
This sounds like ad hominem criticism of Ashbery the man. More important is the question of what it is about Ashbery's technique and methodology that makes you feel that way.
I suspect it's because Ashbery's method stems from his background as an art editor and critic in the heyday of abstract expressionism. AE's believed that painting didn't have to depict anything but itself, that brushstrokes needed no reference, and as early as The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery applied that principle to words. Poetry was just a string of words; an assemblage, a collage. The words didn't have to make sense or mean anything, and so mostly they didn't.
But this is the opposite of Stevens. With Stevens, however oblique the reference, you always feel that he's referring to _something_, that it's not just word salad. He might look at a blackbird 13 different ways, but he was always looking at and trying to say something about that blackbird. For Ashbery, words were just brushstrokes. If they struck you as looking like a blackbird, it was pure accident. The brushstrokes, the words, were just hanging there, self-contained.

>>23306432
This is actually very good but next time green-text the quotations and comment in plane type below.

>>23301879
Some critics have said his extreme obfuscation of meaning in his poems was directly attributed to his state as a closeted gay man.

>>23308181
>not if...taken as a metaphor
Strange that the frieze somehow was able to survive the total destruction of the temple, but hey, whatever, minor technicality, it's just a metaphor.
But it's not a metaphor. It becomes 'as if' it were one only in your 'interpretation,' true, but this marks (you) as the author.
Consider: if 'traceries' is a
metaphor too, then you're writing about nothing at all.
And yet (you) see so much

>>23308338
>Some critics
Citations, or even a name or two

>>23287223
> He believed that is was the pointless things in life that imbue it with meaning.
based
I kinda believe this.
everything else seems so ham-fisted.

Ashbrahs! Over 100 posts in a John Ashbery thread! Is /lit/ (dare I say it) back?

>>23308471
Every once in a while the stars align and the right anons are present and keep returning to a thread about a writer that doesn’t get tons of attention on /lit/. It is more of a perfect storm. The board sucks

And *Ut Pictura Poesis* Is Her Name

You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.

>>23308405
You were farther ahead before.
>Strange that the frieze somehow was able to survive the total destruction of the temple
Where exactly does it say in the poem that the 'temple' was destroyed, or even says that there is a 'temple' at all?
>it's not a metaphor.
Because you say so? There's nothing to stop any reader from taking some element in a poem as a metaphor, or any author from intending it as such, even if the reader does not take it that way. April is not the cruelest month because April literally beats its wife and kids.
>>It becomes 'as if' it were one only in your 'interpretation,' true, but this marks (you) as the author.
If interpreting a poem makes (you) the author, then you should go interpret La Divina Commedia. Maybe you could get lucky with Beatrice.
>Consider: if 'traceries' is a
>metaphor too, then you're writing about nothing at all.
I believe the term is 'nested metaphors.' Complex, true, but then all the more fun. Besides, there's a lot to be said about nothing. Consider Buddhist emptiness!
>And yet (you) see so much
(You) give me too much credit. I was just offering a snap interpretation. I don't claim mine is better than (yours), or the only one possible, or that multiple interpretations aren't possible.
Truth is, I'm rather intrigued with poetry that's written in such a way as to sustain multiple interpretations. It challenges readers to fill in the blanks, to connect the dots, and this inspires them to a creative act of their own, rather than just receiving a poem literally and passively. Honestly, there is sometimes more depth, passion and emotional and intellectual complexity in the reader who wrestles with a poem than in the writer who wrote it. This is Ashbery's great lesson: a poem doesn't have to be meaningful to seem meaningful, or to evoke meaning from a reader who passionately, cannily interrogates it.

>>23308338
>Some critics have said his extreme obfuscation of meaning in his poems was directly attributed to his state as a closeted gay man.
Since when was Ashbery 'closeted'? He was flaming since Day One. Hell, Auden was open about his homosexuality, and that was back in the 1930's. The only 'love that dare not speak is name' nowadays is love of MAGA.

>>23308646
>You were farther ahead before
I'm not aware of being in a 'race' or 'competition,' anon, so, to quote you, 'I do not understand this sentence' although the sentence (you) claimed not to understand was merely a statement that claimed, correctly, that there are no 'actual' Gnostic friezes that one can refer to in the world of, say, 'classical architecture' (and therefore the world at large). In my first post I did in fact offer to view 'Gnostic frieze' as a figure: mental ticker tape, 'mental' to accord with Gnostic, 'ticker tape' not only to accord with a process of somehow 'registered thinking' but also with the shape of a frieze, although such a frieze could only be.. worn? as a kind of internal headband, maybe?
I'm a little surprised that (you) didn't own up frankly to what (we) both know was your *actual* use of/for it, i.e. as a symbol. For what? Your own interpretive thinking, of course, because nothing in the poem *itself* justifies your interpretation of it unless.. it is your poem-- and that's what (you) *wanted* it to 'say'. ..You're actually guilty of what (you) accuse Ashbery of doing-- merely stringing together a series of images, interpret them as one will. But is this what Ashbery does? Nope. Love him or hate him, he does play fair.
>Where exactly (sic) does it say in the poem
Nowhere. I was making a more palpable similar case for the sake of emphasis.
>Because you say so?
You use it as a symbol. Don't tiresomely pretend otherwise.
>April is the cruelest month
Because it mixes memory with desire, etc. Eliot plays fair too, anon. As does Chaucer, for that matter.
>Get lucky with Beatrice
I believe Beatrice was dead long before Dante even put quill to parchment, anon. I prefer interpretations that accord with whatever facts may be at hand.
>Alot to be said about nothing
True, and to be honest I felt when posting last that this was probably the direction (you) would take. But you could've stopped at Gnosticism, or the products thereof. Again, the Gnostics were hardly known for their friezes, anon.
>(You) give me to much credit
Not really. I didn't dislike your interpretation, I just knew it was arbitrary. Nor do I dislike your closing statement, even though I don't agree with it in its entirety. I just think (you) give Ashbery too little credit; he's more clever, and far more discursive, than it seems (you) are willing to admit. I'd hate to have to reference Harold Bloom here, but...ok, I won't.
Aar it was fun to answer your post.
>aar = at any rate

>>23308638
Lovely

>>23309123
>the Gnostics were hardly known for their friezes
Sigh. It is so tiresome to pick nits.
I wrote, "In classical architecture, a frieze is the wide horizontal central section atop the columns.
So (IMHO) the poet is asserting that the element that rests on classical columns—I would argue that he means Western civilization nowadays [since the West rests on classical Greece]—has grown fundamentally Gnostic, illusory, a sort of Matrix."
I did not, of course, assert that actual Gnostics specialize in architectural construction, any more than I would claim that ancient Marcionites dominated the toga market. I did think that a casual reader of the poem (namely myself) could not unreasonably feel that the poet was trying to make a larger statement than the claim that friezes were Gnostic, since clearly stone friezes are not in a position to embrace heretical Christianity.
Did he/she/it or (you) feel that the poet meant something different, and do they or (you) have a different interpretation? OK, that's cool. As Mao said, "Let a hundred flowers bloom."
>>I'm a little surprised that (you) didn't own up frankly to what (we) both know was your *actual* use of/for it, i.e. as a symbol.
Do not try to read the poet's mind, or think to unearth his or her "actual" use of some phrase. A poem is what it is, independent of the poet's opaque psychological intentions. React to the poem, not to subjectivities you have no access to.
>>You're actually guilty of what (you) accuse Ashbery of doing-- merely stringing together a series of images, interpret them as one will.
I'm not “accusing” Ashbery of anything, nor is having an interpretation of Ashbery's methodology that differs from yours make one "guilty." It’s simply a fact that, around the time Ashbery was doing art criticism, a number of poets took the position that words in poetry could be used like abstract expressionist brushstrokes, having no necessary objective reference, no "objective correlative," as it were. When I read Ashbery's stuff, it seems to me that much of the time that’s exactly what he’s doing--stringing together a bunch of phrases. That doesn’t make the poem bad. Some of the combinations are striking, some evocative, some mysterious. I can't read minds either, so I don't know why Ashbery selects the phrases he does or why he puts them together the way he does. Obviously it isn't to secure a crystal clear meaning. But is the result interesting and worth reading anyway? Sure. In my opinion.
>>But is this what Ashbery does? Nope.
More mind-reading. Read the _poem_, dude. Poetry is about the _poem_, not a psychoanalysis of the poet.
>>Love him or hate him, he does play fair.
A true Ashbery sentence: it sounds like it means something, but when you look close, it dissolves into fog. ‘Play fair’? Poetry isn't a ball game, anon. It's an openness to verbal beauty, intellectual novelty. Sometimes that requires breaking the rules, not 'playing fair,' whatever that means.

>>23309731
>I'm not 'accusing' Ashbery of anything....A true Ashbery sentence: it sounds like it means something, but when you look close (sic), it dissolves into fog.
Well, alrighty then, let's take a closer look!
>As One Put Drunk into the Packet Boat
The title here doubles as a first line, 'As' alerts the reader that what he is dealing with here is a simile. Also, there are allusions, one of which is immediate: Rimbaud's Drunken Boat
>HOW THIS SADNESS BECAME PERSISTENT
Are (you) feeling particularly sad right now? Neither am I. Aar, this, though it appears again in the twelfth line, serves as the title of the poem, and therefore the poem's topic. Back to Ashbery:
***
Dang, something just came up. I'll have to finish this later. Will continue along these lines if the thread's still up this evening, which I assume it will be, as I charge (YOU) with the burden of making sure it is. Lates

bump

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Learn, children:
>>23309973
>>23304117
As One Tucked Sober Into A Pookah Bed

The summer demands and takes away too much,
Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point;
That time when one can no longer wander away
Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,
Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free,
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness.
I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages,
New sentences were starting up. But the summer,
Finally involved with the business of darkness,
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

So this was all, but obscurely
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower,
The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,
Only in that tooting of a horn
And even the least attentive fall silent.

A look of glass stops you
As limpid, dense twilight comes,
Filters down, a little at a time,
As the Sun yellows the green of the maple tree….

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am?
Down there, for a moment, I thought
Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
Or is it postponed again? The children,
They are sun motes. You have slept in the Sun;
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night
Still at their games; clouds that arise with a swift
Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade.
But it was only her come to ask once more
If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn’t.

The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door,
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly.

>>23311645
>butchering the poem
Fuck off, retard

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>>23311645
Kek. Thanks for the bump!
I wonder if something similar could be done with a poem in this thread entitled HOW THIS SADNESS BECAME PERSISTENT???
Would it be too presumptuous of me to entreat the Wizard to perform yet another bit of deep fake magic?
Geez, lucky for me
a. my quarry's an interpretation
b. with this bump I can go to bed, and do my thing tomorrow

>>23308689
Auden was gay, too? wtf

Bump

>>23301879
>Der homosexuelle Dichter ist nicht ein Dichter, der übrigens so homosexuell ist wie ein grünäugiger Dichter ein Dichter der übrigens grüne Augen hat. Er ist ein Homosexueller der übrigens ein Dichter ist.
Rudolf Borchardt

Anyone read a Nest of Ninnies? How’s it?

>>23312101
>Fuck off, retard
Succinctly put, with all the resources of language and wit one would expect of someone perusing /lit/.
Before you favor us with more obscenity, answer this question. Is Pookah really less comprehensible than Packet-Boat? Are the lines:

The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door,
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly.

--really less meaningful, less coherent, less Ashbery, than:

That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

If so, why or why not? Why is example #2 Pulitzer-tier classic American poetry, while example #1 is fetid butchery? And if SADNESS can be taken as uncollected Ashbery--and maybe it is, who knows?--and if you were to place examples #1 and #2 in front of readers who had never seen either, how many would take which to be the 'real,' sacrosanct Ashbery?
I said, "Learn, children," but I should have said, "Think."

>>23312186
>I wonder if something similar could be done with a poem in this thread entitled HOW THIS SADNESS
Try it yourself and see. That's the problem with critics and nitpickers. The don't have the nerve to jump into the water themselves.
>my quarry's an interpretation
Neither poetry nor an interpretation is a quarry, and you're only cheating yourself and readers by trying to shot either dead. If one wants to supercede either, then write a better poem or craft a more thoughtful and cogent interpretation.
Ah, but that's work. Better to go to bed.

>>23312828
>nitpickers
Kek. I only looked at the first two lines of the poem when I addressed (you) the second time, anon; I left 'eviscerated' thorns and roots, for instance, alone. Venture upstairs and see for yourself. I just didn't feel like hurting the poet's (your) feelings, but I knew he'd out herself. Also, as mentioned, taking advantage of the good faith of the thread, but whatever --hubris. 'You were more ahead when..' --naive, stupid (if you feel like they're aces, they probably aren't: they initially shock, but they also completely expose). --btw, *where* are you? what, when (you) engage this post, will you be doing?
>Learn, children
Kek, ok. It would be very, very easy to destroy your 'there's the poem, here's what I think about it' view of what interpretation is, because that's not what it is. A cute exercise for HS seniors and undergraduates, sure, I even encourage it, but really, one cannot think for a poem, a poem 'to be a poem' must be allowed to think for itself. Because you're not able to detect this species of thought going on in Ashbery-- which it is, in spades-- he's gibberish to (you).
My own problem is this, why should I show (you) anything? You'd just snap it up, say something insulting, then move on.
>Neither poetry nor
Kek. Then (you) shouldn't have challenged.
Am I to believe the LOA people are daft? Or maybe is it, perhaps.. hmm, no, it can't be (you).

>>23312816
>really less meaningful, less coherent, less Ashbery
Yes. The lines and sentence structures in the original have a clear relationship to one another, and although the entire poem doesn’t have a specific unifying meaning, there’s a clear series of images and ideas that are expressed as the poem progresses. Just on a sentence-by sentence-level, your butchery of it makes no sense and utterly destroys the beauty and flow of the original. You’re a cheap troll trying unsuccessfully to prove a point. Fuck off, you arrogant, self-important prick.

>>23312756
I have, it's fun in the way Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson is fun, or Evelyn Waugh in some of his shorter works like Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust. It takes place in early/mid-50's New York.

>>23312962
>>naive, stupid
>>cute exercise for HS seniors
>>hubris
>>You’re a cheap troll
>>Fuck off, you arrogant, self-important prick.
Incisive and thoughtful criticism from true connoisseurs of English. We are all much enlightened.
>>the entire poem doesn’t have a specific unifying meaning
>>your butchery of it makes no sense
The poem doesn't make sense, but my rearrangement makes no sense. Ah, but the first is Ashbery, while every line in the second is Ashbery too. Therefore A is sublime, B is worthless. OK... Well, let's compare. These--

dense twilight comes.
Only in that tooting of a horn
Down there

and

those gray flakes falling?
They are sun motes. You have slept in the Sun
Longer than the sphinx

'have a clear relationship to one another,' whereas this--

I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages,
New sentences were starting up

Makes no sense whatsoever, and there's obviously no clear progression there.
Well, to each his own, anon. If that's what you think, that's what you think.

>>I just didn't feel like hurting the poet's (your) feelings
Thank (you) for (your) gracious restraint, and for focusing on the poems and the issues they raise, rather than my unworthy self.
>>It would be very, very easy to destroy your 'there's the poem, here's what I think about it' view of what interpretation is, because that's not what it is.
It's so easy that you forebear to tell us what it is, or to destroy it. Well, you're probably very busy...
>>one cannot think for a poem, a poem 'to be a poem' must be allowed to think for itself.
Poems think for themselves? I thought reading the mind of the poet might possibly be viewed as--dare I say?--hubris, but apparently we can read the mind of the poem too. That is, provided we're not mere HS students or undergrads. Guess only full MFAs have the telepathic ability to read the minds of word salad.
>>Because you're not able to detect this species of thought going on in Ashbery-- which it is, in spades-- he's gibberish
On the contrary. As I said, I find certain turns of phrase and combinations of images quite evocative. It can get the reader (this reader, anyway) thinking, just as other combinations seem to get them shrieking and gibbering. I just don't assume that what I get out of a poem is necessarily what the poet put into it. Many critics feel that Milton made Satan the hero of Paradise Lot, and was "of the Devil's Party," as Blake put it. Was that his intention? No, he explicitly wanted to 'justify the ways of God to man.'
That doesn't mean those who feel different are shallow. The poet acts; readers react, and react differently, and even the poet changes his mind about his works over time. (See Auden's interminable revisions.)
>>btw, *where* are you? what, when (you) engage this post, will you be doing?
What's it to you?
>>Am I to believe the LOA people are daft? Or maybe is it, perhaps.. hmm, no, it can't be (you).
I'd like to say, "BWAAHAHA!" But I have no idea what you're talking about.

>>23312186
>>I wonder if something similar could be done with a poem in this thread entitled HOW THIS SADNESS BECAME PERSISTENT???
Three Question marks. Tsk tsk.
But it was a good question. Sure, why not cut-and-paste and see what happens? Funny thing is, while I expected the results to be similar, I was surprised that they were not. Consider:

Deliberate treacheries; from which stone of shore
The traceries were often beautiful.
Annihilated circumambulations,
But rendered on the Gnostic frieze they bore

Proved serpentine as arrows.
Devoid of heldentenors;
A falsity of waters
Chryselephantine darkness;

Neither really add up to me. This exercise yielded an insight that might interest you Ashbery fans out there: Ashbery’s lines cohere smoothly and easily when remixed. Amazingly so. I mean, it’s quite something to rearrange nearly 50 lines and have them come out readably, even if not always sensibly. (A given, considering the original.) Apparently there’s something about the way Ashbery uses grammar that lets his sentences flow grammatically even when cut-and-pasted to an extreme.
Not so the Sadness poet. Neither of the two selections above make sense as discursive sentences. They don’t seem to want to mix and match. Also, there’s an iambic pentameter beat to the first that’s really rather pronounced, and the second has an equally hard two-beat rhythm. Both have an marked inclination to rhyme, unlike Ashbery. No, these are not the same poet. And the mix-and-match treatment helps to bear that out. Maybe it's something to put away in the analytic toolkit.

Hey, let’s butcher the Ashbery a bit more, and see what we can learn:

But the summer was well along, not yet past the mid-point but full and dark with the promise of that fullness, that time when one can no longer wander away and even the least attentive fall silent to watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

Hm. As prose, that sounds a bit like John Updike, doesn’t it? Only broken up (in the poem version) with hard returns. But would the casual reader accept it as prose, or is something lost (or gained) in the transition?

Proved serpentine as arrows. Devoid of heldentenors; a falsity of waters Chryselephantine darkness;

--does not read like prose at all.

Curious, isn’t it, the way grammar seems to force us into assuming meaning? Take Lewis Carroll’s

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

We know the words are meaningless, but they all but coerce us into thinking that brillig is a seasonal period and that some sort of creatures are dancing in some sort of field. Why? Not because of the words themselves. They have no referents at all. But something about their placement in the sentence pulls us in that way. Interesting...

OK, guys. Knives out, back to spittle-flecked invective.

>>23313203
>LOA
Anon's referring to Library of America, the folks who published the 2-volume Ashbery up to 2010.
He's saying-- Are they retards? Because certainly you're not a retard.
To be fair, presenting a poem as Ashbery's in an Ashbery thread really is tantamount to believing that everyone else in this thread is a retard, except for you, which is pretty hubristic.
But at the same you said the poem wasn't yours, whereas the Steven King meme seems to suggest that it is. Which is it?

>>23314152
>Anon's referring to Library of America
Ah. I thought he meant the Law of Assumption schizos on /x/. Now that would be disturbing.
>He's saying-- Are they retards? Because certainly you're not a retard.
Thank you. Kind words seem rare around here.
I most certainly do not think the LOA people are retards. I own a copy of the LOA Ashbery (1956-1987) myself, and I thank them for publishing it.
>presenting a poem as Ashbery's in an Ashbery thread really is tantamount to believing that everyone else in this thread is a retard, except for you
Maybe it's a malady unique to Ashbery admirers (among whom I count myself), but it amazes me how readers here can find stuff in these posts that are just not there at all. I went back to check, and whoever posted Sadness doesn't say anywhere that it's a poem by Ashbery, or a parody or an homage to Ashbery, or has any connection to Ashbery at all. But somehow this total vacuum of information clearly indicates to some that I view all /lit/ as drooling imbeciles. On the contrary: I honestly find many of the people posting here to be quite sharp and intelligent, and many of the posts to be thoughtful and acute. (OK, one or two posters maybe need to take their meds, but only one or two.) I'm sure that if Ashbery's departed shade ever browses /lit/, this thread would warm his heart. As far as mine goes, I can assure you that dumping on anyone here was and is absolutely not my intention at all.
>you said the poem wasn't yours
Again, I never said any such thing, nor (I believe) did any other poster make that claim, though there are at least as many plausible candidates as me.
>>Which is it?
Frankly, I'd rather not say. Because (a) if say I'm not the offending poet, I'll be called a liar, and (b) if if say I AM the offending poet, I'll still be called a liar, and (c) as I've been saying all along, it's the poem that should be getting the attention, not the writer, and (d) nonetheless, speculation along these lines has made this thread a lively occasion, and sparked some genuine thought.
Is the author an uncollected Ashbery? I don't think so, but it's not impossible. Should we think so? Why? Is the poem a response to Lacrustine Cities, or a Stephen King-style rewrite, or something completely unrelated? How do we know? Is it an AI regurgitation of Ashbery? I don't think so, but what makes some here think it is, and others not?
I've tried pointing out some of what I think are persuasive differences in terms of rhyme, prosody, grammatical character between the poems. Maybe you find them compelling, maybe not. Either way, you get to know the poems better; and (e) so long as it's a mystery, you have to think about the poetry of John Ashbery (and its lugubrious doppelgänger). To my mind that that's a good thing. Which stops cold if I hold up my hand and go, "I did it."
In short? Come to your own conclusions. Ashbery didn't hand you answers all cleaned up and ready on a plate. Why should I?

>>23314447
>These Lacustrine Cities
>from Rivers and Mountains
Is "Rivers and Mountains" a reference to the Chinese shanshui (mountains and rivers) genre? Was he influenced by Chinese poetics? I'm aware many of roughly his generation were, but for some reason I didn't think he would be among them, his vibe is a little different.

>>23314465
Via Pound, every modernist and postmodernist was influenced by Chinese poetics. I'm sure Ashbery was--he's certainly 'an artist of the floating world'--but I never felt that any influence was overt enough to be really obvious. The 'rivers and mountains' catch is a smart observation, though. Maybe I'm wrong.

Märchenbilder
>Es war einmal . . . No, it's too heavy
>To be said. Besides, you aren't paying attention any more.
>How shall I put it?
>'The rain thundered on the uneven flagstones.
>
>The steadfast tin soldier gazed beyond the drops
>Remembering the hat-shaped paper boat, that soon . . .'
>That's not it either.
>Think about the long summer evenings of the past, the queen anne's lace,
>
>Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
>The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
>For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse,
>Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.
>
>Pomp of flowers, decorations
>Junked next day. Now look out of the window.
>The sky is clear and bland. The wrong kind of day
>For business and games, or betting on a sure thing.
>
>The trees weep drops
>Into the water at night. Slowly couples gather.
>She looks into his eyes. 'It would not be good
>To be left alone.'. He: 'I'll stay
>
>As long as the night allows.' This was one of those night rainbows
>In negative color. As we advance, it retreats; we see
>We are now far into a cave, must be. Yet there seem to be
>Trees all around, and a wind lifts their leaves, slightly.
>
>I want to go back, out of the bad stories,
>But there's always the possibility that the next one . . .
>No, it's another almond tree, or a ring-swallowing frog . . .
>Yet they are beautiful as we people them
>With ourselves. They are empty as cupboards.
>To spend whole days drenched in them, waiting for the next whisper,
>For the word in the next room. This is how the princes must have behaved,
>Lying down in the frugality of sleep.

Yet another poem from the Self-Portrait, but this one's clear enough until having to ponder the last sentence for a lifetime or two. Nonetheless, it ends beautifully; the poem is definitely over.. or is it just asleep?

Ashman bump
Really enjoying this thread

>>23313203
>What's it to you?
You're on /lit/, anon. The second question was intended as a kind of leading clue, alas
Glib when it comes to your own poem, yet strangely mum when it comes to any one of your master's. Here, I'll get (you) started on a fresh interpretive foray
>A 'packet boat' is in fact a mail boat and therefore 'full of letters,' which
There, by all or any means, roll on...
>inb4 fake offense taken

>>23316824
I find variant and imaginative interpretations of poetry most welcome. However, I prefer my prose straight, ie, comprehensible. Thus, when someone says to me--
>> *where* are you?"
-- I think they are asking me where I am, ie, my address; and only a fool posts his address on 4chan. Let the glowies earn their salaries!
When someone then asks--
"what, when (you) engage this post, will you be doing?"
Umm... sitting at a keyboard, tapping the keys? I don't see the question as 'a leading clue, alas" because I'm "on /lit/." /lit/ isn't an Agatha Christie mystery. Though some of the comments on it sure are head-scratchers.
>>Glib when it comes to your own poem
Ah, that crank belief yet again, based on no claim on my part and no evidence. Truly, faith is a beautiful thing.
>>yet strangely mum when it comes to any one of your master's.
And who exactly is my 'master.' Yet another mystery known only to the mystery poster, who seems to know but does not bother to say.
Comments like this don't offend me. They just don't seem to open up an useful insights into John Ashbery. For instance, one anon cited a very beautiful poem of Asbery's that concluded:

>I want to go back, out of the bad stories,
>But there's always the possibility that the next one . . .
>No, it's another almond tree, or a ring-swallowing frog . . .
>Yet they are beautiful as we people them
>With ourselves. They are empty as cupboards.
>To spend whole days drenched in them, waiting for the next whisper,
>For the word in the next room. This is how the princes must have behaved,
>Lying down in the frugality of sleep.

But did anyone notice that you can literally present the lines backwards, and get something recognizably Ashberian?

Lying down in the frugality of sleep
For the word in the next room. This is how the princes must have behaved,
To spend whole days drenched in them, waiting for the next whisper,
With ourselves. They are empty as cupboards
Yet they are beautiful as we people them.
No, it's another almond tree, or a ring-swallowing frog . . .
But there's always the possibility that the next one . . .
I want to go back, out of the bad stories.

inb4 a cry of "butchery!": I'm not saying the latter inversion is better, or as good. I am saying that it's striking that you can literally read Ashbery backwards, and still get poetry that is palpably Ashbery. Is that not weird? What does it say about Ashbery's use of language? What does it say about our own capacity to find meaning in places where it is simply was not put? The first two lines sound to me like the poet is saying that 'princes' lie down in sleep to find in dreams some 'word' (The Word of St. John?) in the 'next room' (The Unconscious? The Life after death?)
But there is no poet, only a random collision of lines.
This is worth thinking about. Where I am is not.
Ashbery's poetry most definitely benefits from a studied ambiguity. But when discussions of his poetry sink into crypsis, it benefits no one.

Once I let a guy blow me.
I kind of backed away from the experience.
Now years later, I think of it
Without emotion. There has been no desire to repeat,
No hang-ups either. Probably if the circumstances were right
It could happen again, but I don’t know,
I just have other things to think about,
More important things. Who goes to bed with what
Is unimportant. Feelings are important.
Mostly I think of feelings, they fill up my life
Like the wind, like tumbling clouds
In a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds.

>>23317882
>feel his tail waggling. He was so nice.
Genuinely awful writing here. Embarrassing.

>>23317882
why are you posting your nasty slop here? this is a thread to talk about the work of john ashbery. the poem you're attempting to critique isn't the original work of that anon, it was written by ashbery. fuck off to the poetry general thread, you utter retard

>>23317925
Thought I was in the poetry general, sorry.

The first movie I ever saw was the Walt Disney cartoon, The Three Little Pigs. My grandmother took me to it. It was back in the days when you went “downtown.” There was a second feature, with live actors, called Bring ‘Em Back Alive, a documentary about the animal tamer Frank Buck. In this film you saw a python swallow a live pig. This wasn’t scary. In fact, it seemed quite normal, the sort of thing you would see in a movie—”reality.”

A little later we went downtown again to see a movie of Alice in Wonderland, also with live actors. This wasn’t very surprising either. I think I knew something about the story; maybe it had been read to me. That wasn’t why it wasn’t surprising, though. The reason was that these famous movie actors, like W.C. Fields and Gary Cooper, were playing different roles, and even though I didn’t know who they were, they were obviously important for doing other kinds of acting, and so it didn’t seem strange that they should be acting in a special way like this, pretending to be characters that people already knew about from a book. In other words, I imagined other specialties for them just from having seen this one example. And I was right, too, though not about the film, which I liked. Years later I saw it when I was grown up and thought it was awful. How could I have been wrong the first time? I knew it wasn’t inexperience, because somehow I was experienced the first time I saw a movie. It was as though my taste had changed, though I had not, and I still can’t help feeling that I was right the first time, when I was still relatively unencumbered by my experience.

I forget what were the next movies I saw and will skip ahead to one I saw when I was grown up, The Lonedale Operator, a silent short by D.W. Griffith, made in 1911 and starring Blanche Sweet. Although I was in my twenties when I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art, it seems as remote from me in time as my first viewing of Alice in Wonderland. I can remember almost none of it, and the little I can remember may have been in another Griffith short, The Lonely Villa, which may have been on the same program. It seems that Blanche Sweet was a heroic telephone operator who managed to get through to the police and foil some gangsters who were trying to rob a railroad depot, though I also see this living room—small, though it was supposed to be in a large house— with Mary Pickford running around, and this may have been a scene in The Lonely Villa. At that moment the memories stop, and terror, or tedium, sets in. It’s hard to tell which is which in this memory, because the boredom of living in a lonely place or having a lonely job, and even of being so far in the past and having to wear those funny uncomfortable clothes and hair styles is terrifying, more so than the intentional scariness of the plot, the criminals, whoever they were.

>>23318758
Imagine that innocence (Lillian Harvey) encounters romance (Willy Fritsch) in the home of experience (Albert Basserman). From there it is only a step to terror, under the dripping boughs outside. Anything can change as fast as it wants to, and in doing so may pass through a more or less terrible phase, but the true terror is in the swiftness of changing, forward or backward, slipping always just beyond our control. The actors are like people on drugs, though they aren’t doing anything unusual—as a matter of fact, they are performing brilliantly.

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>>23315145
A favorite of mine:

At North Farm

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?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

>>23318841
This is a nice one. Different style from his other stuff that I've read.

>>23318841
Brings this one to mind, another one from Self-Portrait, however
>Mixed Feelings
>
>A pleasant smell of frying sausages
>Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible
>Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around
>An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.
>How to explain to these girls, if indeed that's what they are,
>These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas
>About the vast change that's taken place
>In the fabric of our society, altering the texture
>Of all things in it? And yet
>They somehow look as if they knew, except
>That it's so hard to see them, it's hard to figure out
>Exactly what kind of expressions they're wearing.
>What are your hobbies, girls? Aw, nerts,
>One of them might say, this guy's too much for me.
>Let's go on and out, somewhere
>Through the canyons of the garment center
>To a small cafe and have a cup of coffee.
>I am not offended that these creatures (that's the word)
>Of my imagination seem to hold me in such light esteem,
>Pay so little heed to me. It's part of a complicated
>Flirtation routine, anyhow, no doubt. But this talk of
>The garment center? Surely that's California sunlight
>Belaboring them and the old crate on which they
>Have draped themselves, fading its Donald Duck insignia
>To the extreme point of legibility.
>Maybe they were lying but more likely their
>Tiny intelligences cannot retain much information.
>Not even one fact, perhaps. That's why
>They think they're in New York. I like the way
>They look and act and feel. I wonder
>How they got that way, but am not going to
>Waste any more time thinking about them.
>I have already forgotten them
>Until some day in the not too distant future
>When we meet possibly in the lounge of a modern airport,
>They looking as astonishingly young and fresh as when this picture was made
>But full of contradictory ideas, stupid ones as well as
>Worthwhile ones, but all flooding the surface of our minds
>As we babble about the sky and the weather and the forests of change.
>
Of course the suddenly notorious Packet-Boat begins this incredible volume, for whatever that's worth.

>>23320268
>This is a nice one. Different style from his other stuff that I've read.
I agree. I think it's because it's shorter. That tends to concentrate the images and the similes.
One problem with reading Ashbery is that he writes cryptic sentences, and when it's just one or two, you're dealing with only one puzzle, which lets you focus on it. When he writes dozens upon dozens upon hundreds, as with The Skaters, the reader's comprehension short-circuits and the mind glazes over. Short Ashbery is best Ashbery.

>>23317363
>Ah, the crank belief again
'Glib' clearly refers to the interpretation of the poem, regardless of whether or not you've been maneuvered into the general position of being a liar howsoever (you) at this point 'choose' to respond --as you yourself acknowledge to another anon, here
>>23314447
What does this 'make' (you)? Shall we say it together? A luh luh luh..
What's the point of sociologically inspired 'clarity' ie a 'preference for straight prose' if THAT eludes (you) as well? Or, if (you) are going to attempt to deflect it back into 'pretend' 'mystery'. (It's not a mystery btw; but in deference to your thickness I feel I should inform you that at this point it does you more credit- not much, but a teeny bit more -to have written the poem than not).
--Hey man, if (you) want to read The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo upside-down, by odds, by evens, or even sideways, then by all means do it.
But on your own time, please.

>>23320630
A long-ish Ashbery poem that's exceptionally straightforward all the way through is the early 'Instruction Manual' (from Some Trees). Many of the poems in this thread are pretty clear too
>>23320373
>>23318841
>>23315145
>>23308638
>>23298043
The last two a little more difficult than the first three, but clear enough for a satisfactory first reading.

Business idea: chart for post war poetry
Nothing to frighten the /lit/ horses - no Prynne or LANGUAGE, no angry ethnic minorities - stuff like Self Portrait in A Convex Mirror, Life Studies, 77 Dream Songs, The Haw Lantern, Moortown Diaries, High Windows

>>23320866
>>luh luh luh
This is a thread about the poetry of John Ashbery, not about my thickness, whether I am a liar, whether my interpretations are glib, etc etc.
To keep to Mr. Ashbery's work--
1. I rearranged the lines of one of his poems, and a few lines of another, not because I am a winsome scamp, but because I wanted to show anons interested in his poetry, as opposed to off-topic invective, that Ashbery's use of grammar and syntax is singular and unique. It's very hard to do that with most poems. Try it on lines like--

Slings and arrows
To be or not to be
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind

--and you get word salad that just doesn't add up. Ashbery's loping sentences and clauses, by contrast, snap together in easy variations as smoothly as lego. I would argue that this tells us a lot about the underlying structure of his poems, or rather the apparent lack thereof, and why his poems nonetheless seem to hang together so beautifully.
2. I have also tried to point out why many of his poems, despite their surface meaninglessness, are nonetheless moving and meaningful to many of us here. I believe this is because Ashbery is adept at constructing a sort of Rohrschach language trap--combinations of words and images that suggest meaning rather than state it, and that require a response from the reader to complete the picture. The poem is Ashbery's, but each individual reader's experience of an Ashbery poem is a co-creation. We fill in the blanks, and Ashbery's art largely (but not exclusively) consists of carving up openings in his discursive forays for us to fill. His works inclines us to philosophize, which is one reason why it is so precious.
3. As for the Sadness poem, some people say it's a stray Ashbery, some say its an AI, some say it's me, some say it's some other anon. All of them are on the wrong track. Who cares? A poem stands alone. It speaks for itself.

>>23317397
gay

>>23321437
Dreams Songs is great, I never see it discussed here

>>23323769
>never see it discussed here
It is post ww2 poetry after all. Hence why I think a chart is required. The good chaps in this thread excepted, there is a wall of ignorance on this board about this topic. You more often see a 'why is everything after Ezra Pound utterly worthless' type thread.
Perhaps a chart with the big benchmarks, but nothing too difficult, nothing the average anon won't recognise as 'proper' poetry, to post in those threads is required. Eventually, perhaps a critical mass of anons may familiarise themselves with those benchmark collections, and we can have more nice things.

>>23323962
Yeah a lot of people on /lit/ have a weird distaste for post-ww2 poetry without even having read it.

>>23306317
>>23305760
>>23303283
Ashberykiddies cannot into search engines
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47763/farm-implements-and-rutabagas-in-a-landscape

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>>23302167
>>23325640
AIslop haters 0
Ashbery 1

>>23325640
>>23325677
Poetry Foundation shows 0 results for "How This Sadness Came To Be Persistent."
Google shows several hits, but all of them either link back to this thread, or to an obscure passage in Ruskin's Modern Painters, ie:

"There the priest is on the beach alone, the sun setting. He prays to it as it descends;—flakes of its sheeted light are borne to him by the melancholy waves, and cast away with sighs upon the sand.

"How this sadness came to be persistent over Turner, and to conquer him, we shall see in a little while. It is enough for us to know at present that our most wise and Christian England, with all her appurtenances of school-porch and church-spire, had so disposed her teaching as to leave this somewhat notable child of hers without even cruel Pandora’s gift."

Which doesn't illuminate very much, does it?

>>23323962
>It is post ww2 poetry after all. Hence why I think a chart is required.
Gotta have stuff to chart before you can chart it. Wikipedia to the rescue. English poets post-1945:

Poets in British Poetry since 1945 (first edition)
A. Alvarez - Kingsley Amis - George Barker - Patricia Beer - Martin Bell - Francis Berry - John Betjeman - D. M. Black - Thomas Blackburn - Alan Bold - Alan Brownjohn - Basil Bunting - Miles Burrows - Charles Causley - Barry Cole - Tony Connor - Iain Crichton Smith - Peter Dale - Donald Davie - Lawrence Durrell - D. J. Enright - Paul Evans - Ian Hamilton Finlay - Roy Fisher - John Fuller - Roy Fuller - Robert Garioch - David Gascoyne - Karen Gershon - Henry Graham - W. S. Graham - Robert Graves - Harry Guest - Thom Gunn - Michael Hamburger - Ian Hamilton Finlay - Lee Harwood - Spike Hawkins - Seamus Heaney - John Heath-Stubbs - Adrian Henri - Geoffrey Hill - Philip Hobsbaum - Anselm Hollo - Ted Hughes - Elizabeth Jennings - Brian Jones - David Jones - Philip Larkin - Peter Levi - Christopher Logue - Edward Lucie-Smith - George MacBeth - Norman MacCaig - Hugh MacDiarmid - Roger McGough - George Mackay Brown - Louis MacNeice - Barry MacSweeney - Derek Mahon - Matthew Mead - Christopher Middleton - Adrian Mitchell - Dom Moraes - Edwin Morgan - Edwin Muir - Jeff Nuttall - Stewart Parker - Brian Patten - Sylvia Plath - Peter Porter - Tom Raworth - Peter Redgrove - Jon Silkin - Stevie Smith - Bernard Spencer - Jon Stallworthy - Nathaniel Tarn - Dylan Thomas - D. M. Thomas - Anthony Thwaite - Charles Tomlinson - Rosemary Tonks - Gael Turnbull - Vernon Watkins - David Wevill

Poets in British Poetry since 1945 (second edition)
The following poets in the first edition are not in the second edition:

Paul Evans - Spike Hawkins - Anselm Hollo - Barry MacSweeney - Stewart Parker - Rosemary Tonks

The following were added:

David Constantine - Douglas Dunn - James Fenton - Tony Harrison - Michael Longley - Medbh McGuckian - Andrew Motion - Paul Muldoon - Tom Paulin - Craig Raine - Peter Scupham - C. H. Sisson - Ken Smith - David Sweetman - George Szirtes - R. S. Thomas - Kit Wright

[What? No mention of Peter Scupham! What total bullshit!]

>>23323962
And here are the Americans post-1945, according to AI:

American poetry after 1945 has been marked by a diverse range of styles, themes, and movements. Here are some notable American poets and their contributions:

Beat poets: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso, among others, were part of the Beat Generation, known for their spontaneous, free-verse style and countercultural ideals.
Confessional poets: Poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell explored themes of personal struggle, mental health, and the human condition.
Black Mountain poets: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov, among others, were associated with the Black Mountain College and its experimental approach to poetry, which emphasized the importance of the individual’s inner life and the connection between poetry and everyday experience.
Deep image poets: Poets like Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and Michael McClure were influenced by the Black Mountain movement and emphasized the importance of the subconscious and the exploration of the human psyche.
Language poets: Poets like Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Carla Harryman, among others, were part of the Language poetry movement, which emphasized the importance of language and its relationship to meaning and reality.
Native American poets: Poets like Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, and Leslie Marmon Silko have made significant contributions to American poetry, exploring themes of identity, culture, and social justice.
Post-confessional poets: Poets like Adrienne Rich, Frank Bidart, and Mark Doty have continued the confessional tradition, exploring themes of personal and social identity, politics, and the human condition.
Some notable American poets after 1945 include:

Allen Ginsberg
Sylvia Plath
Robert Lowell
Adrienne Rich
Joy Harjo
Sherman Alexie
Mark Doty
Frank Bidart
Lyn Hejinian
Ron Silliman
Carla Harryman
Robert Creeley
Denise Levertov
Charles Olson
Robert Duncan
Robin Blaser
Michael McClure

>>23325818
Top of the Pops: Betjeman, Thom Gunn, Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, Peter Scupham (whom they did mention. I was too blinded by outrage that he wasn't included in the first edition that I missed it as I frothed. Mea culpa.) Honorable Mention: Rosemary Tonks.
Americans: well, Lowell, of course. Can't think of anyone else on the list worth reading, except, now and again, Plath. Stalling certainly has promise.

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>>23320268
>>Different style.
Just to see what it would come up with, I told ChatGPT 4 to pretend that it was John Ashbery and to write a typical Ashbery poem. Here it is:

The Latecomers

In this light, the maples seem almost underwater,
Their day poised on the brink of another genre,
Where trees are merely guests, invited to ponder
the silent maturation of the world.
A bird’s flight corrects the pleasant sky,
Each wingbeat aligning with misplaced clouds.
The trees have no opinion on this.
Their job is to obscure the landscape,
To remember the sun spots we will soon forget.

A farmhouse sits, slouching at the horizon,
Watching its own reflection in the pond’s eye,
Quietly considering its own existence,
Like a page waiting for its footnote.
They are incidental, like the parade
That winds through a forgotten town.
The day is a palm we read over and over,
Finding a different future each time,
None of which contain us.
The leaves whisper together among the corn,
And I nod as though I understand the dialogue
Between place and its wayward children,
Declaring a kind of silence
That isn’t that at all—
Scraps of laughter feathering from next door,
A tractor’s sigh as it turns the corner.
Lost in the thick hum of a Tuesday afternoon.

Inside, the wallpaper's pattern makes a case
For impermanence, escaping into the folds of worn chairs
That remember more than they can say,
As evening yawns into dusk,
Building shadows that slant against themselves,
Casting shapes that seem to argue
With the geometry we learned and soon forgot.
Each moment curates its own exhibition,
Displaying artifacts we had no hand in choosing.

A clock ticks on, indifferent to symmetry,
Crafting futures from the residue of past mornings,
Where the forecast had promised something
Sharp and decisive, yet here we remain,
Outside. In the nearby valley, the townspeople
Rehearse their solitudes, unfurling along streets
Familiar as the coat hung behind the kitchen door,
Its empty pockets full of yesterdays,
Not knowing the exact moment
To be read aloud, waiting
For someone to arrive.

>>23325843
>>23321437
I'd have Omeros, 77 Dream Songs, Life Studies, SPICM (or that early Ashbery selected), Seamus Heaney 66-87 Selected, Collected Larkin, Ariel, Howl, Ted Hughes selected, the old Geoffrey Hill collected (not the new massive one), that New York Poets anthology, The New Poetry
That's 12,

>>23326774
Fuck forgot about RS Thomas

>>23326758
First thing that I notice is that it's a Seamus Heaney title; that the poem itself is mad with anthropomorphism (a figure that Ashbery likes but uses very carefully) and that it concludes with what may be construed as a 'late arrival' whom it is safe to assume will never arrive, at least at this point, which is at every 'point' from which the poem itself will be read.
Can sense be made of the poem ON ITS OWN TERMS, ie without reading into it? Probably. But will this prove satisfactory? Probably not, but who knows?
>The trees have no opinion on this.
Of course they don't.
>Their job
Oh, so they ALSO have a taskmaster, unless this is the poet opining, as it were, 'externally' -- but if so then the use of the first plural nominative and objective in the second stanza becomes awkward, sloppy, sophomoric--
What I see initially are mistakes that Ashbery wouldn't make, in terms of both style and sense. But, as
>>23322047
remarks
>This is a thread about the poetry of John Ashbery
I'll leave it at that.

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>>23325822
>>23325843
After Ashbery, this guy

>>23326774
I might include The Voice That Is Great Within Us. It's an oldie, as modern anthologies go, but a goodie.
It would be nice to see the list expanded globally. Can't imagine modern poetry without Transtromer, for instance, or Borges or Milosz. But that might overload the chart.
Funny how many poets the AI overlooks. Not just Ashbery, but Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Timothy Steele, Richard Wilbur. As
Donald Trump might say, "It's not sending their best."

>>23328172
Add Robert Hass

>>23327118
>unless this is the poet opining, as it were, 'externally' -- but if so then the use of the first plural nominative and objective in the second stanza becomes awkward, sloppy, sophomoric--
>What I see initially are mistakes that Ashbery wouldn't make, in terms of both style and sense.
Agreed. This is clearly second-rate Ashbury. Of course 'the poet' isn't opining at all, since the poet is an AI. And yet...
AI is strange. I've played with it a bit, and I'm always surprised at how well it does, and also surprised at how it never does quite well enough. There's always something just a bit 'off.' Readers might find it useful nonetheless--it's like a shadow cast by an Ashbery poem, a dim outline that nonetheless tells us something about the form of what is casting it.
This poem isn't something Ashbery would have released, and yet he might well have found it interesting as a sketch or first draft--or as a collaborator. Maybe the next age of poetry will consist of just such collaborations--a coming age of pseudopoetry.

>>23328180
Yes, and Charles Simic!

>>23328225
Yeah, he's a wonderful poet. I also like the little autobiographical prose caprices that I believe the University of Michigan Press still publishes.

>>23327506
>>23328180
>>23328225

Second these

>>23328223
>Of course 'the poet' isn't opining at all
If not, then the simulation fails, because the poet can't be doing anything else, either. --Strategies for the assumption and the defense, the opening up and the closing down of space on a chess grid are (though variable) never ambiguous.. Note the use of the first plural in this relatively easy poem
>>23320373
The poet's looking over an old, faded photograph (breakfast is being made) while engaging with what he calls the 'creatures' of his imagination that it, the photo, prompts. So long as an imaginative 'past' contains his speculations the pronouns are strictly first, singular I, third, plural they. When his speculating enters a possible future phase six lines from the end of the poem a first, plural we suddenly appears--'we' perhaps meet in an airport lounge --nothing at all fancy about this. But this 'future' suddenly blazes forth with 'the possibility' of an 'eternal present' reading beginning with the conjunctive 'but' after the comma of the penultimate line
>but all flooding the surface of our minds/As we babble
Though the royal We (and the first, plural objective Our preceding it) is strongly *felt* in these final lines (the poem's startling effect, in fact) the suggestion is nonetheless firmly rooted in what ALSO is the imagined 'future situation' with the girls. That we FEEL suddenly included is enough, that we ARE is not so certain, at least 'literally'.
There's alot more to this poem, of course.
My own dim view of this technology's function is not 'to aid' but to shut down completely what is perceived as a competing aspect of mental functioning.

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>>23328225
Memory Piano, A Fly in the Soup, The Metaphysician in the Dark.. are some other titles.

>>23329692
>>Of course 'the poet' isn't opining at all
>If not, then the simulation fails, because the poet can't be doing anything else, either. --Strategies for the assumption and the defense, the opening up and the closing down of space on a chess grid are (though variable) never ambiguous..

Well, yes and no. The poet is an AI. It doesn’t opine. It generates sentences that look to us like opinions. So we can’t speak of the poet’s insights or intentions. There aren’t any. On the other hand, the simulation doesn’t exactly fail, either, because if we act _as if_ there were a self-aware poet behind the poem, we can respond in the usual way—being moved or not, being critical or not, etc. Moreover the sentence generated can in fact be true. If an AI generates a sentence than says, “It’s raining outside,” and it _is_ raining outside, it’s raining outside. If we respond by getting an umbrella, we won’t get wet. The lack of a sentient author does not invalidate the value of the sentence generated.

True, there is a distinction between value and ambiguity. But the distinction is—dare I say—ambiguous. You are correct to say that, as in chess, the number of variations are fixed, not ‘ambiguous.’ But when, as with chess, the number of possible variations exceeds the number of atoms in the solar system, we have a sort of practical, de facto ambiguity. Not an ambiguity of number, but an existential ambiguity resting on the fact that the human mind can’t grasp or handle the precision of a less than infinite but near infinite number of possibllities. We know there is an underlying precision; still, we experience a smearing, a blur.

Consider. When ChatGPT 4 generated “The Latecomers,” what it most likely did was go through the thousands of Ashbery lines available online, and maybe some criticisms, and selected what, statistically, appeared to be characteristics most commonly used. “Oh, look: Ashbery mentions farms and valleys a lot. I’ll stick in a farm and a valley. He likes to say things in the form of questions. I’ll throw in a few questions.” And so on and so on.
The result is something that is not a poem by John Ashbery, but is a poem reflective of many Ashberyisms. It may be a failure as a poem, but not as a simulation.
The question is, can we derive any value from this simulation, either by gaining some insight into Ashbery’s actual poetry through exploring its statistical derivative, or by taking that derivative on its own terms?

Let’s take this to another level:

[part one of two]

>>23329692
A Variation
In this light, the maples seem almost underwater,
Their day poised on the brink of another,
Where trees are merely guests, invited to ponder
The silent maturation of the world.
A passage of birds brushes the bronze of sky
Like Vincent’s rapid oils, wingbeats aligning,
Obscuring the drifting cloudscapes,
The glare of sun which they will soon forget.

A farmhouse sits, slouching at the horizon,
Watching its own reflection in the pond’s eye,
Quietly considering its existence,
Like a page waiting for a dusty footnote,
Or a half-recalled parade that years ago
Wound through a small and half-forgotten town.
The leaves whisper together among the corn,
And I nod as though I hear the conversation
Between place and its wayward children,
Declaring a kind of silenceThat isn’t that at all—
Scraps and flutters of laughter from next door,
A tractor’s sigh as it turns the corner
Lost in the thick hum of a Tuesday afternoon,
As evening yawns into dusk.
Each moment curates its own exhibition,
Displaying artifacts we had no hand in choosing.

The day is a palm we read over and over,
Finding a different future each time,
Some of which contain us. The hours tick,
Crafting tomorrow from the residue
Of past mornings, yet here we remain
In the nearby valley, townspeople
Rehearsing their solitudes, unfurling along streets
Familiar as the coat hung behind the kitchen door,
Its empty pockets full of yesterdays.

What I did here was take my own suggestion, and used “The Latecomers” as a draft. I snipped out things I thought were weak or that I didn’t like, and added a few turns of my own. Now the poem has an author, or at least a co-author: me. One can find (or claim to find) the poet’s intentions, purposes, attempts at meaning, etc.
I’m not saying the poem is an improvement on the AI Ashbery simulation, and I am certainly not saying it’s better than any original Ashbery. Does it suck? Let the reader decide.

But what the hell _is_ it? It’s not an Ashbery. It’s not me—too much of the original AI remains—but it’s not entirely not me either. Is it a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of an Ashbery, the image degrading with each iteration? It’s certainly no longer a purely AI non-poem. It’s something novel: a strange new kind of pseudopoetry.

>> My own dim view of this technology's function is not 'to aid' but to shut down completely what is perceived as a competing aspect of mental functioning.

I largely agree. The more we lean on AI, the less mental functioning we do ourselves. McLuhan once said that every new technology ‘extends but amputates’ a human function. The car replaces legs, dispensing with the need for walking, the gun replaces the fist, and so on.
AI amputates mind, but replaces it with a crutch—itself. Will we be any the stronger for it? I don’t know.

>>23330438
Interesting series that I will respond to-- atm, however, certain matters of my pretend 'adulthood' beckon, I guess some would refer to them as 'respondibilities,' aar I must attend to them or blow my cover.. yet again.
>as if...as it were
These situations are themselves imaginary, and rely on functions like 'suspensions of disbelief' or even flat out belief on the part of the reader. But in this novel situation who's reading who? In a way, ie in light of this technology, have not what were once readers NOW become 'the poems,' are not the AI poems *really* interpretations of these 'poems,' the engineers behind the technology not poets but anti-poets, and therefore anti-human, doing what they can to interpret the poems that we've suddenly become so as to.. what? move on? In this stacked configuration 'the poet' has 'always already' been eliminated, and that's half the anti-poets' battle, achieved simply in the way the technology presents itself. The 'as if' situation, in other words, asks 'us' to pretend 'as if' nothing has changed, ie that all the old relations hold. Do they? Really? I don't believe they do, primarily because they don't. For me the pressing question has become, What do about this situation?
Aar, just a thought, hopefully not too scattered as to resist coherence, before I venture out into yet another realm where I often find myself 'going through the motions'
Actually, it's not so bad.

Bump

>>23330602
>>In a way, ie in light of this technology, have not what were once readers NOW become 'the poems,' are not the AI poems *really* interpretations of these 'poems,' the engineers behind the technology not poets but anti-poets, and therefore anti-human, doing what they can to interpret the poems that we've suddenly become so as to.. what? move on?
Beautifully put, and with rhetorical phrases to admire (like ‘anti-poets’. A good critical coinage can be poetry in itself.)
But I feel that the metaphors are a bit stretched. When I look into the bathroom mirror in the morning, I don’t see a poem. (Well, maybe a Bukowski.) I suppose it can be said that the reader is the actual poem in the sense that the reader has the internal experience of the poem, whereas the poem itself, being words on paper, has no experience of anything. But that’s always been the case, and always will be. There’s a gulf between sentience and non-sentience—the ‘hard problem of consciousness.’ And no one’s resolved it yet.
That said, ‘AI poems’ are not really interpretations of poems, much less of us. What they are, are regurgitations of existing poetic material—collages of lines, phrases, verbal images, arranged in ways that mimic human productions and the statistical averages of those productions.
But since they’re not human, they inevitably slip up in nonquantifiable matters of judgement and taste. Think of AI poetry as being like AI cooking recipes. AI can create a recipe based on a sampling of a hundred thousand human recipes, and by keeping to those parameters it may not make many glaring mistakes. But it has no taste buds. So it will make mistakes, and bad ones. What should humans do? Cook the dish. See if it’s good. If so save the recipe. If it’s bad, spit it out.

>>In this stacked configuration 'the poet' has 'always already' been eliminated, and that's half the anti-poets' battle, achieved simply in the way the technology presents itself.
Yes, but after all, that’s PR, designed to inflate stock prices. Meanwhile, as with Google’s woke Gemini fiasco, the stock price plunges $90 billion. AI can create something that looks like an Ashbery. But not if you look close. ‘

>>The 'as if' situation, in other words, asks 'us' to pretend 'as if' nothing has changed, ie that all the old relations hold. Do they? Really? I don't believe they do, primarily because they don't.
You are absolutely correct.

>>For me the pressing question has become, What do about this situation?

Short-term, use AI for things like grammatical analysis, proofreading, spellchecking, and (not least) experimentation. Middle-term, we may find AI supplying rough but solid first draft material for nearly all written communications, though always with the need for human oversight and adjustment, and for putting the finishing touches on those communications. Long-term, the final answers may lie with Theodore Kaczinski, if not the Butlerian Jihad.

>>23332299
>When I look into the bathroom mirror in the morning, I don't see a poem.
Correct, but what does a poem see when it looks into a bathroom mirror? Or, less tongue in cheek (though I stand by the observation) how would it become possible for you to understand that YOU are being read WHEN reading an authorless poem 'in the traditional sense' of 'what reading is'? Consider,
What validates a poet? His poetry, or, 'in the eyes of the world' (to quote Robert Hunter) his poems. What ultimately (if anything) validates an AI 'poem' in particular, but also AI in general (as an immoderately lucrative enterprise, among other things)? You do. How so? By being agreeable, the new/old standard (Belief), as opposed to being amazing, or beautiful, or to whatever it was at which an actual poet once aimed via poems in the old sense: influence, power..
The weird thing about 'poetic power' is that it is almost exclusively benign, however, even helpful, to its readers. It sharpens observation, teaches patience, lends incredible value to what perhaps the less poetic among us would deem mundane, or even boring. It makes us not only ridiculously content with what the world deems 'less,' but even happy. Fullness of life is even more possible as a relatively consistent 'feeling' for readers of a poetic turn, than it is even for poets themselves
>And glad not to have invented
>Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
>A silence already filled with noises,
>A canvas on which emerges
>
>A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
This is Ashbery in the 1950s, and, amazingly, he never really departs far from this sentiment over the entire course of his career. It's an attitude he shares with no other poet, including Whitman.
..I didn't intend to all of a sudden become 'on topic' when I began this thing, but lo, it does appear I have.
I still have a little more to report, but I'll do that tomorrow.
Good posts btw.

>>23332299
B (is for bump)--
So, whereas formerly a reader read a poet's poem in search of a rollicking good time, or, if of a more serious turn, 'to plumb its depths' -- the success or failure of these and like endeavours the criteria of a poet's future 'greatness' via his poetry (one's own opinion of the matter having very little to do with a poet's over-all success or failure in such matters, however, given that in matters of this and like ilks, including what follows, MAJORITY RULES) so
In the new model it is the anti-poet who, via tech, 'delivers' (makes possible the delivery of) a simulated model based on metrics and whatever else as applied to an army of English dictionaries, if the poetry being sampled for the sake of a 'new' production happens to be in English, etc. The depths being plumbed are the readers', however; what's 'sought' is agreement not in the way (or approximate form) of 'how wonderful' but one more like 'yeah, that's Ashbery' --any subsequent 'amazement' 'allocated' is to the technology itself, formerly by rights the poet's, but he no longer exists. That's a clear price. But there are less obvious costs as well, a few of which I believe have been mentioned already

Soonest Mended

Barely tolerated, living on the margin
In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued
On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso
Before it was time to start all over again.
There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils,
And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering
The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting
The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.
And then there always came a time when
Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile
Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K.,
Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused
About how to receive this latest piece of information.
Was it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out
For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind
With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem),
Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid?
To reduce all this to a small variant,
To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau—
This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.
Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.
Now there is no question even of that, but only
Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,
With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across
The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away
And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash
Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:
This is what you wanted to hear, so why
Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers
It is true, but underneath the talk lies
The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose
Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.
(1/2)

>>23333659
These then were some hazards of the course,
Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else
It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,
The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.
They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game
Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes
And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.
Night after night this message returns, repeated
In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,
Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,
The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,
Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes
To be without, alone and desperate.
But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting
Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,
Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,
But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression
Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day
When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering
Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning
Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that
Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,
That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint
None of us ever graduates from college,
For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up
Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.
And you see, both of us were right, though nothing
Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars
Of our conforming to the rules and living
Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,
Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept
The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

>>23333665
Lovely

>Thoughts of a Young Girl
>
>'It is such a beautiful day I had to write you a letter
>From the tower, and to show I'm not mad:
>I only slipped on the cake of soap of the air
>And drowned in the bathtub of the world.
>You were too good to cry much over me.
>And now I let you go. Signed, The Dwarf.'
>
>I passed by late in the afternoon
>And the smile still played about her lips
>As it has for centuries. She always knows
>How to be utterly delightful. Oh my daughter,
>My sweetheart, daughter of my late employer, princess,
>May you not be long on the way!
>
f. Tennis Court Oath, poem 3

>>23294276
Lmao

>>23330457
>One can find (or claim to find) the poet's intentions, purposes, attempts at meaning, etc.
Yes, but first and foremost one must attempt to understand what it is the language says, where it directs us grammatically or otherwise, the justness of the physical analogies used, etc., --in order to begin to guess a poet's intention(s).
Legit question --what is the poetic intention of one who co-authors an AI generated poem? In other words, poetic 'intention' is among the initial throwaways (it no longer exists); but what is the intention of the AI surrogate? It cannot be said to have one at this stage. The engineers? Your acknowledging that the system 'works' (at the cost of poetic value..), etc.
>A Variation
>>>23330438
(I had to refer up in order to see the poem as I'm not at home)
>In this light, the maples seem underwater,
They're not, but due to a trick of light they seem so to someone (the poet?)
>Their day poised on the brink of another,
The speaker asserts (note) that a species of day unlike that of the poet himself affixes itself to the trees in this seeming situation-- this poem is already not an Ashbery btw. 'brink' is interesting because it is a verge, a margin-- it's also a cliche-- 'brink of a brand new day' --if not re-purposed, which is something Ashbery loves to do in some of his later phases
>Where trees are merely guests, invited to ponder
What were they a line ago? Hosts? Guests of whom? Invited (by whom) NOT to be guests but.. to ponder? Perhaps we'll gain some idea
>The silent maturation of the world.
In essence, nothing. Suddenly I'm thinking of the Jefferson Airplane song Eskimo Blue Day, perhaps because I was born in San Francisco? I'm drifting..
>2
>A farmhouse sits, slouching at the horizon,
>Watching its own reflection in the pond's eye
The sitting, slouching farmhouse watching its own reflection in a pond's eye should probably be slouching over the pond itself, not 'the horizon' --awkward
>Quietly considering its existence
>Like a page waiting for a dusty footnote,
These two lines are simply bad; very bad
>3
>The day is a palm we read over and over,
>Finding a different future each time,
>Some of which contain us
Though this accords with no one's experience, I personally think that it's sweet you replaced the AI's 'none' with your own 'some' --and though this has absolutely nothing to do with a reading of this thing, it makes me think that you are a person with both hope and heart, and I therefore like you sight unseen.
Ok, good stopping place. I realize I ignored the painting analogies, etc., but considering them would not have helped this poem.

>>23327506
Love Ammons, pity no one reads him here. There used to be an Ammons fag who made infrequent appearances here pre-Covid, but he hasn't posted on years

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>graphic design is my passion
Work in progress. Suggested title: Post War Poetry: A Guide for the Perplexed

>>23336799
I’m so hyped for this.

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>>23336799
Looks good, anon!

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>>23333659
(Least Said) Soonest Mended
The painting referred to near the beginning of this wonderful poem.

>>23333635
>>whereas formerly a reader read a poet's poem in search of a rollicking good time, or, if of a more serious turn, 'to plumb its depths' -- the success or failure of these and like endeavours the criteria of a poet's future 'greatness' via his poetry
I think it is true—and not despicable—that some people like poetry simply because they like poems, and are not particularly concerned with the poet’s ‘future greatness’ or even with the poet’s opinions. (Many consider Ezra Pound a great poet, and an even greater nut.)
I remember reading a poem that Stevie Smith wrote about her dog, Belvoir. She dreamed that Belvoir had saved a child’s life by pushing the baby out under a brewer’s dray, but died in its place. So when she woke up, she wrote the following:

The stricken Belvoir raised his paw and said,
“I die a perfect gentle quadraped.”

Now to me that poem is delightful and just about perfect. But it tells me nothing about the poet’s concept or purposes in writing the poem, must less her greatness or relative standing in The Pantheon. I’m not sure she even had any concepts of purposes at all in writing it. Maybe the lines just popped into her head, as many poets confess that they do.
So what? Isn’t it enough to just like the wit, the adroit pentameter, the irony, the unexpected rhyme, and let it go at that?
Stevie Smith was a rather conflicted Christian, I suppose it’s possible that, emerging from the Jungian depths of her psyche, Belvoir was a symbolic transfiguration of the crucified Christ calling her to agonized repentance. If you want to think that, help yourself. All I’m saying is that it isn’t necessary to wring capital-M Meaning out of a poem or insist on capital-P Precision in its delivery every single time. As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
>>MAJORITY RULES
If so, Jewel would Poet Laureate.
>> The depths being plumbed are the readers'
True enough, but it’s the readers who are doing the plumbing. The poem just sits there. Although mousetraps and landmines just sit there too.
>>what's 'sought' is agreement not in the way (or approximate form) of 'how wonderful' but one more like 'yeah, that's Ashbery' –
I don’t agree. Reading that AI poem, neither you nor I said, “'Yeah, that's Ashbery.' In fact, we agreed the original AI was a very poor imitation of Ashbery, with several weaknesses. I have yet to read a really good poem by an AI. AI poetry may produce a surprisingly good word combination or image, but a kaleidoscope can produce some striking patterns too.
That’s not the issue. The issue is, what do we make of this pseudopoetry? You seem to think some apocalyptic literary Rubicon is at hand, and I think we can take this second-rate poetry and use it to jack ourselves up to something better. It's a new situation, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Such things come bearing dangers but also opportunities. We don't do enough creative thinking about the latter.

>>23333635
>>any subsequent 'amazement' 'allocated' is to the technology itself, formerly by rights the poet's, but he no longer exists.
Flesh-and-blood poets continue to exist, and all that’s happening is that now there is another poetry-producer in town, and have no choice but to coexist with it as well. I believe it’s possible to coexist amiably, with AI productions (in an interesting role reversal) supplying human poets with ‘prompts’ and critical input (of sorts) that may help the human poet better crystallize his concerns and efforts.
I also believe that a worst-case outcome is possible in which the (human) poet has AI so influence his stuff, or even literally generate so much of his own stuff, that the end result is not a collaboration, but just a ‘fake literature’ that corresponds to ‘fake news.’ Readers will respond to these non-living authors with equally lifeless responses.
Which way, Western poet? As always, both ways. Some will use AI intelligently, and some will be used and misused. Capitalist survival of the fittest will determine which gains greater market share.

>>The weird thing about 'poetic power' is that it is almost exclusively benign, however, even helpful, to its readers. It sharpens observation, teaches patience, lends incredible value to what perhaps the less poetic among us would deem mundane, or even boring. It makes us not only ridiculously content with what the world deems 'less,' but even happy. Fullness of life is even more possible as a relatively consistent 'feeling' for readers of a poetic turn, than it is even for poets themselves.
Beautifully expressed.

Also, bump. Who'd have thought an Ashbery post may yet crack 200? Apparently /lit/ and poetry is not quite dead yet.

>>23337981
>and not despicable
I'm not a monster, anon. At the same time I do recognize the existence of a major poetic tradition that was amped up by a myriad of decibels upon the appearance -in print- of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson in this country that some poets-- to name a few not yet mentioned in this thread-- Mark Strand, John Hollander, Louise Glück --CHOOSE to engage. The impetus behind my own 'choosing' to engage in this TOPIC at all was the supposition that there was nothing cognitive, ie TRADITIONALLY IMAGINATIVE, in some of the more difficult poetry of John Ashbery --thus, AI could be admitted as an adequate 'substitute' --by another- perhaps not you (although 'crypsis' was mentioned by her earlier..) in this thread. --How do I know I was dealing with a her? Because a dude would have answered the 'where are you?' question like this-- in the kitchen, walking my dog, forking your mother.. something along these lines; and would almost CERTAINLY not have proffered a too lengthy explanation anent this blah blah blah
>Jewell
I have some of her by heart (I think)
>Wind blows cold when you reach the top
>It feels like someone's face is stuck to the bottom of my shoe
>I gotta plastic Jesus and a cordless phone in every corner of my room
>Everybody but you tellin' me what to do
I would imagine she's perfectly happy where she is. The position of which you speak, recently if not wilfully abandoned by Kanye, is now occupied by Taylor Swift, however.
>I don't agree
I don't disagree with your not agreeing; I was however speaking in terms of quasi-logical conclusions, ie as I perceive them from where I'm looking now.
>The poem just sits there
Right, 'regardless,' but the poet who 'uses' AI is obviously more concerned with looking like a poet than in actually being one. Is this not obvious? Intention cannot exist in any other way in this situation short of the reader being asked to do the imagining FOR the'poem' --but we've already been through this. All 'imaginative content' is left to the reader, formerly the property of the poem itself.
>another poetry producer in town
If you say so, but I completely disagree; the object is to kill poetry by modes of rehash. Again, is this not obvious?
>Capitalist survival of the fittest..
This has been the case in this country since the ACW, but there are many markets, anon. So it appears that actual poetry still stands a chance..

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>>23336799
Suggested add

>>23338351
>>I'm not a monster, anon.
Never said you were, old buddy.
>>At the same time I do recognize the existence of a major poetic tradition that was amped up by a myriad of decibels
In poetry as in chicklit there are always cliques, and they’re always pretty tawdry. I think of the Interminably Garrulous Bore tradition that goes from Whitman to Ginsberg to arguably Kerouac. A few good lines in the relentless gush, but I like my poetry like I like my whiskey—clean, brisk and sharp. (Man, talk about Old School metaphor! That's how you spot AI. The branding iron of Woke on its prosaic hide.)
I was much taken with the observation of Borges that we create our ancestors, not the reverse. Once a writer shows any individuality, critics immediately descend to tell us how derivative he/she is.
>> was the supposition that there was nothing cognitive, ie TRADITIONALLY IMAGINATIVE
AI is not ‘imaginative’—it mimics imagination, like a chameleon imitates a leaf. The question is, can we learn something by watching the impersonation, just like we can spot a person’s characteristic quirks by seeing an impersonator exaggerate them. I think we can.
>> a dude would have answered the 'where are you?' question like this
More reading of interpretations into things that are not there. Sorry, anon, I’m not only a dude, but straight and sufficiently laden with testosterone to be bored to tears by feminist poets and themes.
>>quasi-logical conclusions, ie as I perceive them from where I'm looking now.
What always trips AI and what may well kill it eventually is that it always frames things logically, which is to say, falsely, whereas the human is the domain of the quasi-logical. We use logic too, of course, but also gambles, hunches, intuitions, etc etc. We don’t assume that reality can be explained, only that it must be acknowledged, however inexplicable.

>>23338351

> the poet who 'uses' AI is obviously more concerned with looking like a poet than in actually being one. Is this not obvious?
Not to me. I play with AI because I find AI fun to play with, but I have no wish to look like a poet or be one. Poetry is simply an interesting form of writing and an interesting way to write. As a behavior, it’s fascinating. But most poets and their ‘circles’ nowadays strike me as complete idiots. I miss the sound good sense of Pope or Samuel Johnson or many of the Romans. Most poetry I see today is just embarrassing preening about how oppressed oppressive wankers are. Who wants to be associated with that?
>>All 'imaginative content' is left to the reader, formerly the property of the poem itself.
A false antithesis, and overblown. A poem can be an imaginative statement, and a reader can make imaginative statements about a poem. That hasn’t changed, and won’t.
>>the object is to kill poetry by modes of rehash. Again, is this not obvious?
Again, no. The buffoons infesting Silicon Valley couldn’t give two shits about poetry. They just want to make a fast buck and currently they’re over-inflating the value and power of AI to sucker investors and the public to open their wallets. If, inadvertently, AI puts an end to humanity, well… Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence and Corporate Stupidity are so far on an even par. They're more likely to stumble into self-destruction than universal destruction
>>actual poetry still stands a chance..
Yes. A fit conclusion to this thread, though I suspect it has a few posts left to go regardless.

>>23339429
>Never said you were
A little strange that your defense of the poetic tastes of 'ordinary people' (hm, Robert Redford.. but the Pulp song's Common People, more of what I'm after.. but.. would replacing ordinary with common instaur a political edge to the sentence I'm neither prepared for nor want?) turns immediately around to mis-characterize a tradition that does in fact get underway with Whitman but also runs through Ashbery and beyond. If (you) don't like the latter, fine: I can turn off my brain, and just be agreeable. Although.. I cannot help but suspect.. that this is what AI would have me do as well.. in the end.. if only in a manner of speaking....
Of Pound: a kinder but far less illustrious fate would have kept him in the States, teaching HS English in a private, all-boys Military Academy. The ABC of Reading would be a good book for such a purpose. To be fair, he was a good editor (but no oracle).
>that we create our ancestors, not the reverse
Picasso (and Freud and Brian Wilson and.. ) was taken with Wordsworth's dictum that the child is/was the father of the man, which looks odd until one discerns that in any individual's life the child phase precedes the father phase, just as the father precedes the son in chronological time; similarly: Dylan's 'the sky ain't yellow it's chicken' depends on the hearer's understanding WHICH HE DOES POSSESS (but recall must be quick) that yellow and chicken are 'metaphorical' synonyms, ..so much for what's 'surreal'. ..Aar, such puzzle-boxing, or the use and need for discernment of figures (of speech) upon figures upon figures is part of what modern poetry in 'the garrulous tradition' is about, hate it if you need or want to. It's also (returning to Borges) how one is able to discern the ancestry poets choose for themselves: in their concerns, their manner of writing, the figures their figures 'answer,' etc. To conclude: some persons enjoy figuring out crossword puzzles (the quickest do so logically, not 'semantically') whereas others not so much, and that's fine. But is modern poetry in its higher manifestations merely an agglomeration of puzzle-boxes? No. Poetic grammar consists of things-- things in the world like fox tails, boxwood, a sun and a moon. With these things a poet attempts 'to think' (ie to imagine) while at the same time realizing that the things he uses (directly or indirectly, it doesn't matter) MUST conform to their natural reality, behavior, function, human or animal use, etc. Not to understand this incredible state of affairs is not to understand that the 'garrulous tradition' consists of poems of the very highest art, or.. why a poet like Hart Crane would hurl himself off a boat in the middle of the ocean. It isn't easy, this species of poetry, but it really is 'there' --love it or not. Nonetheless I still find room enough in my heart for both Jewel and Kurt Vonnegut:
>The lover's a liar
>To himself he lies
>The truthful are loveless..

>>23339790
>Like oysters their eyes!

>>23339429
>AI is not 'imaginative'--it mimics imagination..
So.. AI is not imaginative and yet it can 'mimic'? Hmm. One aspect of both the 'How this Sadness..' poem and the 2nd interpretation thereof 'relate' is the mutual author's almost unconscious reliance upon (the too heavy employment of) the figure of personification.
>More reading of interpretations into things that are not there.
Actually, 'there' they most certainly are. ..Is this an admission, ie of having written a certain text out of line with this particular series? I hope you understand that either way I hardly care. But please understand as well that in 2024 having a p*nis can no longer guarantee one one's 'masculinity'. Nor can it detract at all from one's 'feminity'. That such a predicament rages in our time as a socio-political 'issue' consequently displays what I meant when I wrote MAJORITY RULES, --even the slightest of majorities. The plethora of law suits sure to arrive may shut this species of thinking/being down 'radically,' however, in the not too distant future. I guess we'll just have to wait to see.
>..like a chameleon imitates a leaf.
Kek, no. {forgot to add supra}
>I think we can.
If you have time for such learning, go for it.
>Most poetry
Wouldn't that be the poetry of ordinary ilk? The species you defended? That most people who fancy themselves poets don't even know what poetry is hardly surprising in an age where everyone's a diagnostician --psychological, political, poetical..
>A false antithesis
Would the burden of being imaginative or IMAGINATION be on the trans-woman or on the straight male who's expected to accept her as a woman? As a more palpable species of simulation, perhaps this analogy makes my meaning clearer?
>A poem can be...and a reader can make
Either is certainly free to think so. But reading a difficult poem NEVER begins as 'a marriage of true minds,' anon. That's not how reading poetry works. Reading poetry (or a great poem) is more like looking into a mirror: what you see is what you are. Over time this can change far more radically than your face does through aging.
>couldn't give two shits
I'm sure at least a few like poetry. In fact, I know of at least one who does for sure.

>>23337837
"Roger Freeing Angelica" (1819) by the great French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Inspired by Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.

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>>23339757
Further Nominations:

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>>23339757

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>>23339757
Of course.

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>>23339757
Wilbur is mandatory.

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>>23341161
Good essayist too

>>23341189
And how. He wrote a book on Auden that's priceless. Can you believe this immaculate formalist went to school with Jack Kerouac?

>>23287218
***Sound of champagne cork popping.***
Ashbery thread breaks 200!

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>>23339757
Peter Scupham. Super obscure, but one of the 20th/21st century's master poets. Passed away in 2022, sadly.

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>>23339757
Chelsey Minnis. Little known, but taking some interesting new directions.

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>>23339757
Even less known, but a particular favorite.

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>>23339757
Louise Gluck, to be sure. Not merely brilliant, but hot.

>>23341252
Will check out; read Dyer's Hand about a year ago; really appreciated the crisp, clear writing. Other than pic rel above have also read the Obbligati essays. Really enjoy Hecht's poetry.
Kerouac (read: On the Road) doesn't bother me so much, but my feel for him was as more of a travel writer (despite the hooplah). Haven't read his poetry.

>>23341157
Hard, creepy, beautiful. Must be included, but man

>>23341286
Gluck is already there.
I wanted to keep the choices short to avoid that /lit/ tic where someone asks how to get into William Blake and gets told to buy the 1200 page collected writings edition. A chart is to help a layman surely
Otherwise I would have gone Collecteds all the way baby (both volumes of Ashbery, both Ammons, the big Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Lowell and Gunn and Gluck collected - a solid 12000 pages of poetry right there!)

>>23341846
Good policy, actually. Plus, certain individual volumes do make for more pleasant viewing, their often slightly uncommon titles for a more pleasant quick scan. (Mark Strand's Dark Harbor, for instance; good volume, but one I'm a little hesitant to recommend officially as, relatively speaking, I'm not as fond of him as a poet as I am with many of the others already placed).
For Blake? Why, the cheap little Dover Illustrated copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, of course! If that doesn't get anon 'into Blake' nothing will!

>>23341316
>Kerouac -- Haven't read his poetry.
You haven't missed much. To tell you the truth, the best thing about the Beats was a non-poet, William Burroughs. I suspect his "cut-ups" had more influence on Ashbery (and AI large language design) than is commonly thought.
>read Dyer's Hand about a year ago; really appreciated the crisp, clear writing.
IMHO, Auden is The Man: the greatest English poet of the 20th century. He did masterful versions of every poetic form known, even a neglected proto-Ashbery number called The Orators. As poets go, he was even sane.
Having written genuinely lucid poetry and prose, he's gotten a lot less critical attention of late (much like Hecht). But he's really, really worth reading.

>>23341846
>Otherwise I would have gone Collecteds all the way baby
It's a hard call. Personally I think the early, British Thom Gunn is some of the best modern British poetry ever. Late, American Gunn, like Night Sweats--ekh. I pass. It's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, though, especially with Collecteds.

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>>23341348
>Must be included, but man
Pic related. I'm not really a fan of GInsburg, but Howl is Howl. The classics are like Pokemon: Gotta Have 'Em All.

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>>23341951
Kek. I guess. Pic rel does perhaps have one of the more engaging 'official songs' ... but Ginsburg's official song? Geez

>>23341948
Yeah, don't disagree - but another criteria I had was 'must be easily available for a casual buyer'. Those early Gunn collections can be hard to find (because you'd just buy the collected). Night Sweats is available new on Amazon

>>23339790
>>23339429 (You)
>>your defense of the poetic tastes of 'ordinary people'
I’m not defending bourgeois standards. I’m defending the right to ordinary pleasures, not ordinary people. I think you ought to be able to just like and enjoy a poem or a poet, without having to go through all the Sturm Und Drang of full-blown literary/philosophical analysis each time Shakespeare scribbles “Hark hark the Lark.” Full-blown anal-retentive microanalysis is fine too, if that’s your thing, but the two should respectfully coexist. Not everything has a hidden, subtle, arcane meaning, or reveals something astonishing about the psyche of the poet. Sometimes a poet just farts around. And that can be fun to read too.
>>I can turn off my brain, and just be agreeable. Although.. I cannot help but suspect.. that this is what AI would have me do as well.. in the end..
AI doesn’t want to have you do anything. I doesn’t care because it can’t. What you need to fear is not artificial intelligence but natural stupidity, ie the Woke social engineers determined to use AI to make the Founding Fathers black women, or, in the case of poetry, to privilege Amanda Gorman over Chaucer and Dante. Coercive political stupidity is a much, much greater danger than AI. At the moment.
>> is modern poetry in its higher manifestations merely an agglomeration of puzzle-boxes? No. Poetic grammar consists of things-- things in the world like fox tails, boxwood, a sun and a moon. With these things a poet attempts 'to think' (ie to imagine) while at the same time realizing that the things he uses (directly or indirectly, it doesn't matter) MUST conform to their natural reality, behavior, function, human or animal use, etc.
Anon, Pooh Bear, like Milton’s Satan, don’t conform to natural reality. That doesn’t mean they don’t have valuable poetic usages. It depends on context and the poet’s (unknowable) intention. Can a house slouch at the horizon? Yes. Can it slouch over the horizon? No. But I wouldn’t automatically praise the one and deplore the other. In the case of Ashbery, some of his stuff is relatively coherent, and some (parts of The Tennis Court Oath) are not. Neither is per se inferior. I personally find the latter—a descent into incoherent word salad—a dead end. But not always uninteresting.

>>23340291
>>One aspect of both the 'How this Sadness..' poem and the 2nd interpretation thereof 'relate' is the mutual author's
Groan.
>>almost unconscious reliance upon (the too heavy employment of) the figure of personification.
Having scrolled up to reread “How This Sadness,” I note that there isn’t a single person in it, aside from the stature of Nike. And what does ‘almost unconscious’ mean?
>More reading of interpretations into things that are not there.
>>in 2024 having a p*nis can no longer guarantee one one's 'masculinity'. Nor can it detract at all from one's 'feminity'.
I think having a penis detracts very much from one’s feminity. Call me Old School.
>>Would the burden of being imaginative or IMAGINATION be on the trans-woman or on the straight male who's expected to accept her as a woman?
If you consider willful delusion and self-deception to be imaginative, you may have a point. But not much of one. If I say “I am and aardvark” when I am not an aardvark, I am not being so much imaginative as idiotic. If I use social pressure and legal coercion to force you into affirming that I am an aardvark, then I am a totalitarian and deserve contempt.
As a more palpable species of simulation, perhaps this analogy makes my meaning clearer?
>> reading a difficult poem NEVER begins as 'a marriage of true minds,' anon. That's not how reading poetry works.
It never ends as 'a marriage of true minds,' either, anon. Your picture of what is going on in the poet’s head is merely your picture. Only the words on the paper are objective.
>>Reading poetry (or a great poem) is more like looking into a mirror: what you see is what you are.
We agree. But do you like what you see?

>>23341161
How is this guy supposed to be any different from the endless deluge of unoriginal and mediocre but well-connected jews that coastal american cities have been spewing out every year like clockwork for the last century and half?

"...I became very weepy for what had seemed
like the pleasant early years. As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years."

That last part killed me, I feel like the last third of your life is just that, I think I'm old enough to understand that feeling

>>23341274
Now this is one hell of a deep pull, can find zero info on it/the poet. How'd you find it?

>>23341992
>of ordinary pleasures
Kek. Clearly you see what you want to see and ignore the rest. You're not defending anything I've 'attacked' but take what I defend as an affront, ie as an 'attack,' --which is completely bogus. Your need to characterize 'me' in a hackneyed way in order to justify your tastes WHICH I DON'T ATTACK AT ALL is unfortunately way too typical here as well as elsewhere
>philosophical
'philosophy' is not my bag, anon. At all. Language and rhetoric (as they figure in poetry) merely.
>Woke engineers
Don't become your enemy, anon. Best policy: ignore that shit completely. Don't be the guy whom stupidity makes stupid.
>Tennis Court Oath
Actually, most of it is completely incoherent by design (as are a few of the poems in Some Trees) but it's an early volume (the second) and Ashbery quickly moved away from that type of writing
>Poor Bear, Satan
Both are anthropomorphisms, ie legit figures. Personification is the ascription of human characteristics to abstract concepts, inanimate matter, goldfish, whatever's not human. It's a legit figure as well, but like any can be overused. Now, look again..
>Groan
Kek
>Having scrolled up
I won't recommend you do this again because I take no pleasure in being completely right.
>detracts
That was intended to be tongue in cheek but I guess I failed. Good news, though: I take great pleasure in falling flat on my face.
>It never ends as a marriage...either
I agree, but some poems one outgrows, if not most. So far as what's going on in anyone's head (even one's own) that's rather dark. Luckily, one has to deal only with language, albeit by another human being.
>Delusion, deception
A poet's stock and trade in pejorative terms, anon. I guess the more benign-sounding terms for these are Analogy and Invention, or vice versa. Point was, the burden of imagination would fall almost exclusively on the consumer, not the producer, which, either way, is completely perverse. For the most part I think we're in agreement with the WHAT, at odds only in HOW to deal with it.
>What do you see?
Poem to poem: transit, until, for the most part, full stop. A few I feel I could look at forever:
>only some [are] immortal and free

>>23342003
>How is this guy supposed to be any different from the endless deluge of unoriginal and mediocre but well-connected jews that coastal american cities have been spewing out every year like clockwork for the last century and half?
Because he's (a) original, and (b) far from mediocre. Which is more than I can say for the regurgitated antisemitism poured over every thread in 4chan nowadays.
inb4 "kike!" Sorry, I am as goyish as they come, and I know that stereotypes come into existence for a reason. But I also know that some individuals escape the stereotype. Ginsburg doesn't, but Hecht does. In spades, if you'll excuse the expression.

>>23342626
I am yet to encounter a jewish writer who did not exist in the shadow of gentile writers who did what he did but sooner, better, subtler, and without the added jewishness on top. Jewishness is just cultural inceldom, really.

>>23342095
>>You're not defending anything I've 'attacked' but take what I defend as an affront, ie as an 'attack'
No I don’t. I’m not affronted at all, and in fact I’ve found your contributions to be among the best in this thread. You over-personalize, anon. I think this, you think that—what’s the big deal? People have differing opinions. There’s no reason to feel put upon.
>>Woke engineers
>>Best policy: ignore that shit completely. Don't be the guy whom stupidity makes stupid.
It’s when society as a whole is rendered stupid by a thundering phalanx of woke engineers that we suffer. You can’t ignore a deluge if you’re drowning in it.
>>Tennis Court Oath
>>Actually, most of it is completely incoherent by design
Completely incoherent by design is still completely incoherent.
>> Ashbery quickly moved away from that type of writing
Ah, there we disagree. IMHO, Ashbery never quite got away from that type of writing. It’s marked his work from beginning to end. The key to Ashbery lies in marking just what the percentages of coherence to incoherence are in his poems. Mostly they’re coherent enough for the incoherence to give them mystery, implication, nuance—a semi-coherence we complete with our suspicions as to its meaning. But when the percentage of fog is too much, it’s a bit like too much hot sauce. Digestion suffers.
>> anthropomorphisms, ie legit figures. Personification… a legit figure as well
So they’re both OK. Good to know.
>>I take no pleasure in being completely right.
The agony you exhibit is heart-rending.
>>Point was, the burden of imagination would fall almost exclusively on the consumer, not the producer, which, either way, is completely perverse.
True, but I take exception to the term ‘burden’ in ‘burden of imagination.’ It’s a privilege. A privilege that the writer can exercise, and that the reader and critic can exercise also. Sometimes the consumer can supply more. Infinitely more, in the case of AI, which has no imagination at all. In the case of AI, it only supplies occasions for the use of human imagination, should humans choose to exercise it. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And it doesn’t take humans out of the equation.
Granted, there are dangers. Not small ones. Humans have a tendency towards sloth, including intellectual sloth. AI may yet leave MFA grads drooling as they wait for Hal to supply an apropos rhyme or a Levertovian feminism.
>>For the most part I think we're in agreement with the WHAT, at odds only in HOW to deal with it.
Coexistence is our only option, unless we decide to pull the plug. And society as a whole certainly won’t do that. So, my recommendation is that we accept that fact and use our vaunted ingenuity to find ways to make use of it without becoming morons. Those of us who aren’t morons already, that is.
>> A few I feel I could look at forever
I share in that feeling, anon. Ah, how right you are.

>>23342093
>Now this is one hell of a deep pull, can find zero info on it/the poet. How'd you find it?
Incredibly, I saw it in a fifty-cent book pile at a Barnes & Noble used book section in New York. Have to have read it a dozen times since. The poet must be ex-CIA because he's left zero footprint, a fucking miracle in this day and age.
My fingers are crossed that a second edition or even another collection will appear on Amazon one of these days, or on Libgen or Anna's Archive. I keep checking.

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Ashbery is the greatest poet of 20th century writing in English. He is better than Stevens and Pound. I’m a scholar of Turkish poetry and I can assure you that Ashbery’s images are comparable in quality to some of the best poets of Ottoman renaissance. I read some of his Turkish translations to my friends who were shocked by the intensity of emotion and the degree of perceptiveness in his writing. Despite being much more opaque than Stevens, O’Hara or Pound, he still reads amazing in translation which shows how his genius is not constrained by rhythm and syntax. Open a random poem from Ashbeey and you will find passages that take your breath away.

>>23342655
>I am yet to encounter a jewish writer who did not exist in the shadow of gentile writers
I am yet to encounter a gentile writer who did not exist in the shadow of gentile writers. I don't avoid reading gentile writers on that basis.

>>23342725
Hmm. Occasionally something interesting emerges, and I'll share this because though completely unconscious at first, it came as a result of this dialogue. It's not earth-shattering, but could prompt a line of inquiry either way. When I read
>--but I take exception to the term 'burden' in 'burden of imagination'
I thought, well, something along the lines of 'creation' is what I really meant-- 'burden of creation' ... --to make what could be a very lengthy post short, this has extraordinarily perverse theological implications folded all through it. For instance, the 'trans movement,' generally billed (and generally perceived) as a move towards 'acceptance,' is actually (from the 'burden of creation' perspective) one FOR COMPLETION-- get it? I personally don't give a rat's ass about anyone's sexuality, but this new form (of movement) remains incomplete so long as I, you, any straight male refuses to take on the role of False God (as it were) with the proclamation 'Let you be woman'! -- and really meaning it (which would require truly burdensome imaginary work) -- hanging in the balance.
Yet it must remain a movement until its 'completion' actually occurs, which means that it completely relies on its perceived 'enemies' assuming roles of even more amazing arrogance than they (us) are already accused of maintaining-- in the first place. --Strange way to consider it aar. This movement truly is radically different from historical others in the sense that it relies completely on what it hates to complete its (non-)essential being.
That many governments have already made as if to assume this role (of God) is a little unsettling, but the movement continues as strong as ever. 'Why so?' That very question's an upside, at least for us.

>>23289609
>You have built a mountain of something,
>Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,
>Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
>Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears
Bros...

>>23289762
What's missing?

>>23343795
If anon is referring to the LOA editions, they published an Ashbery 1956-1987, and an Ashbery from 1991-2001. That means the years 1988-1990 are skipped, plus the whole last 16 years of his life. A lot to miss...
Also, bump.

>>23287270
Why do people always greentext poems? It's so unpleasant to read

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>>23339757
Here's one