Here you are.
- “I don’t know if the poet has a role, but I have my hopes for the poem…”
Ben Lerner, from “The Lichtenberg Figures”
It is always already winter.
Raccoons open each other for warmth.
The poor live under the bridge outside of time.
If we can speak of the poor. If you can call that a bridge.
At a fashionable retrospective, a woman soils her prewar dress.In order to avoid saying “I,” the author eats incessantly.
The author experiences pleasure from a great distance,
like the bombing of an embassy. In the business district,
fire is exchanged. The media butcher the suspect’s name.Every weekend, the law gets laid,
while these abstractions, hung like horses,
attend their semiformals stag. The last censuscounts several selves inhabiting this gaze,
mostly unemployed.
- “How to Read John Ashbery”
Meghan O’Rourke, in Slate:
John Ashbery wrote his first poem when he was 8. It rhymed and made sense (”The tall haystacks are great sugar mounds/ These are the fairies’ camping grounds”) and the young writer—who had that touch of laziness that sometimes goes along with precocity—came to a realization: “I couldn’t go on from this pinnacle.” He went on, instead, to write poems that mostly didn’t rhyme, and didn’t make sense, either. His aim, as he later put it, was “to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about.” It worked. Early on, a frustrated detractor called him “the Doris Day of Modernism.” Even today a critic like Helen Vendler confesses that she’s often “mistaken” about what Ashbery is up to. You can see why: It simply may not be possible to render a sophisticated explication de texte of a poem that concludes “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.”
