#john ashberry

[mournfulroses]

John Ashberry, from A Worldly Country: New Poems; "Mottled Tuesday,"

[uselessmuseum]

John Ashberry, Some Trees, 1956

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashbery

[dirtyfilthy]

“The Short Answer”- John Ashbery

I am forced to sleepwalk much of the time. We hold on to these old ways, are troubled sometimes and then the geyser goes away, time gutted. In and of itself there is no great roar, force pitted against force that makes up in time what it loses in speed. The waterfalls, the canyon, a royal I-told-you-so comes back to greet us at the beginning. How was your trip? Oh I didn’t last you see, folded over like the margin of a dream of the thing-in-itself. Well, and what have we come to? A paper-thin past, just so, and ‘tis pity. We regurgitate old anthems and what has come to pass, and why dwell on these. Why make things more difficult than they already are? Because if it’s boring in a different way, that’ll be interesting too. That’s what I say. That rascal, he jumped over the fence. I’m wiping my pince-nez now. Did you ever hear from the one who said he’d be back once it was over, who eluded me even in my sleep? That was a particularly promising time, we thought. Now the sun’s out and it’s raining again. Just like a day from the compendium. I’ll vouch for you, and we can go on scrolling as though nothing had risen, the horizon forest looks back at us. The preacher shook his head, the evangelist balanced two spools at the end of his little makeshift rope. We’d gone too far. We’d have to come back in a day or so.

- - - 

I have posted this before but it is one of my favourites of his, and I keep coming back to it

[42ndand5th]

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?

At North Farm by John Ashberry

[dk-thrive]

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you

"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?" ~ John Ashbery, from “At North Farm,“ A Wave (Open Road Media, 2014; first published 1984)

[mythologyofblue]

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

-John Ashberry, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”

[man-and-structure]

A WORDLY COUNTRY by John Ashbery Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square, the scent of manure in the municipal parterre, not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird, not the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occurred in real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel that was OK too. From palace and hovel the great parade flooded avenue and byway and turnip fields became just another highway. Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens and geese, who squawked like the very dickens. There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet or the banks, where no one came to make a deposit. In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon. By evening all was calm again. A crescent moon hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch. Departing guests smiled and called, "See you in church!" For night, as usual, knew what it was doing, providing sleep to offset the great ungluing that tomorrow again would surely bring. As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing puzzled me: What had happened, and why? One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness, and the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness. So often it happens that the time we turn around in soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in. And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.

[hyenabutter]

This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat

Charley used to do this. I would go hang out at his house on the weekends, because he was sick and couldn’t leave his house, or rarely could, and I would wind up making these awful trips to the grocery store for him--it was always just junk food and garbage, but mostly it would be drinks: he would want like, at least two gallons of milk, but then he would want fucking Powerade; he’d make a list, like an actual shopping list like normal people make, but it would be like, two each of nine different flavors of Powerade, and it would absolutely infuriate me that he wouldn’t just write “red” or “cherry” or whatever; he’d put “Blastin Berry Mix” or “Radical Glacier Blast” or whatever idiotic names they make up for that shit. Apart from how annoying it was to have to lug that much shit from the car into the house, I would be made furious that he was so hung up on the brand names. While I despise how we’re all slaves to this kind of corporate barbarism, I do admit that I’m as much of a slave as anybody else. I do, on the other hand, at least have the self-respect to hate it, and hate having to participate by actually naming the trash I’m pouring down my gullet by its proper name, and I’ll fight it every step of the way. Radical Glacier Blast may be delicious, but I’m gonna call it “that white kind” every time.