John Ashbery - again

Big Frank is taken with Ashbery. This is a poet who has a definite bifurcated audience. Some write/talk about him as though he were a poet who was not playing according to the rules that they all understood underlay poetry - it's supposed to MEAN something. You should be able to read one of his poems and then say: well this poem was about X. You can't do that with Ashbery. Other's appreciate his poetry like they appreciate their lives. That is to say that his poems are experiences, just as your life is an experience. Take a snippet out of your life and capture the thoughts, emotions, memories, bits of conversation, surroundings, plans, echoes, etc. etc. and then sum it up and say what THAT means. Big Frank is not going to include the poems in their entirety - if you want to read some of those go here, or go back to a previous post with a full poem of his. Otherwise, here are a few great passages from his latest book, appropriately entitled: "Notes from the Air".

from Riddle Me

But lovers are like hermits or cats: They

Don't know when to come in, to stop

Breaking off twigs for dinner.

In the little station I waited for you
And shall, what with all the interest

I bear toward plans of yours and the future

Or stars it makes me thirsty

Just to go down on my knees looking

In the sawdust for joy.

from Finnish Rhapsody

The one who runs little, he who barely trips along

Knows how short the day is, how few the hours of light.

Distractions can't wrench him, preoccupations forcibly remove him

From the heap of things, the pile of this and that:

Tepid dreams and mostly worthless; lukewarm fancies, the majority of them unprofitable.

Yet it is from these that the light, from the ones present here that luminosity

Sifts and breaks, subsides and falls usunder.

from Seasonal

What does the lengthening season mean,

the halo round a single note?

Blunt words projected on a screen

are what we mean, not what we wrote.