/lit/ - Literature

Thoughts on Ashbery? Any favorite poems or collections by him that you want to recommend or discuss? What do you think of some critics' accusations that his work is meaningless?

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 hangups 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.


-John Ashbery, Registered Homosexual

Flow Chart is an interesting long poem. 224 pgs long. Writing in the 90's, you get glints of today's cultural schizophrenia wrt postmodernist rot still budding on the bough. Great vocabulary, and reading it out loud helped with my enunciation.

https://youtu.be/xhYs0twJnIA

>>18089705
John Ashbery and TS Eliot

Contemporary poets? Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, and Mark Strand, I already know of

Where do I start with John Ashberry? Also is Ben Marcus any good?

>>16795181

Thoughts on John Ashbery?

Thoughts on John Ashbery?

If you want nearish modern poets I'd also recommend John Ashbery.

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 the 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.