Poem of the Day (December 23) + Vote

[Anonymous No.21422351]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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What are your thoughts on this poem, /lit/?

Strange Things Happen at Night by John Ashbery

Yesterday's poem >>21420661

[Anonymous No.21422352]

>John Lawrence Ashbery (1927 – 2017) was an American poet and art critic.
>Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age." Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephanie Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".
>Ashbery published more than 20 volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, his work still proves controversial. Ashbery said he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, not a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."

[Anonymous No.21422353]

Bump

[Anonymous No.21422431]

Feels like this was written after Self Portrait. He's just repeating himself at this point and one can tell.

[Anonymous No.21422445]

>>21422351
I love Ashbery, but this one is only okay. It's very introspectively thoughtful, and in his characteristic rhythm and easy conversational tone - which I like. It makes it seem as if it really is conversation, with us and himself. It's actually fairly funny. I enjoy how it begins almost as a guided meditation into our fantasies before quickly becoming a congested, recessive, and hyper-active mess wherein we live round-and-abouts one another, rather than among. The snarky mock-jab at the rich was funny too.

I understand the seven modes bit as metaphor - it makes perfect sense, but what seven modes or grades is the source for the metaphor?

[Anonymous No.21422448]

>>21422431
No. Entirely different subject matter; significantly different in tone. That was a commentary on existence, this is commentary on society.

[Anonymous No.21422480]

>>21422448
Aft googling, this was published in 1993, long after Self Portrait, and you can tell at this point that all his poetic abilities have evacuated from his mind. Even if the content is different the techniques are the same. You know he'll have an abstraction then throw in a non-sequitur image, and it even ends with the sort of vague questioning mixed with faux-casual he's done many times before. Something like:

I mean, my wife fucked her boss under the tents of trees
but I swayed to the spinning road signs and
bought a ticket to the next Big Broadway Musical. In ten years
we'll be twenty...

...you know, his usual sort of bullshit shitck.

[Anonymous No.21422485]

>>21422480
>you can tell blah, blah, blah
>perversions
Why is it without fail you snarky, scoffing midwits are all perverts?

All poets have a discernable style and frameworks which repeat throughout their work; that said, your analysis is weak and so was your imitation.

[Anonymous No.21422503]

>>21422485
This bullshit is the easiest thing in the world to write and to think otherwise is cope. Here's another:

Title: Commonplace Meditation with Beethoven's 4th Symphony

You know that under the clotheslines
People were speaking and stammering but I learned
The contours of it. Who's there? Death
Came in like a clown-suit and hopped
In beats of four. Did I stutter? The train
Is blowing in a calm spring breeze.

So I most certainly asked for many things,
Spun the waiters at the nearest deli around.
There was a sanctity to it.
And come hell or high water we'll serve
The last rotisserie chicken to the bear.
Parkways know no stretch. So be it.

It was the time to move. So I bent into
A square and the chiming clocks barfed
Their recalcitrant tales. Men were seething
And women were coping most extravagantly
At the site of the Disaster. Who's around anymore
To hear of my distress? The big wolves
Laughing...there's an accounting to be heard
While I'm running away from the IRS,
And the corners fly and fly and fly.

[Anonymous No.21422696]

What's (whoa!) this voting about, eh? You making a chart? Feel like you could advertise it better..
Also, >English only: lame.

[Anonymous No.21422702]

>>21422696
Yes, I'll make a chart.

[Anonymous No.21422819]

>>21422702
Cool beans

[Anonymouṡ No.21423151]

>>21422503
This. I could write five fake Ashberry pieces and post them together with five real ones and no-one could sort them out. Let's see anyone do that with Bach fugues, or Blake drawings, or something.

[Anonymous No.21423433]

>>21422351
voated

[Anonymous No.21423781]

>>21422503
kek

[Anonymous No.21424173]

>>21422503
You capture the rhythm but not the feeling

[Anonymous No.21424695]

Bump

[Anonymous No.21425473]

Bump

[Anonymous No.21425936]

>>21422503
This isn't good. This is very bad.

[Anonymous No.21426451]

>>21422351
I don't like it.

[Anonymous No.21426457]

>>21422503
Hilarious

[Anonymous No.21427195]

Bump

[Anonymous No.21427395]

>>21424173
This is the feeling of most post Self Portrait Ashbery poems. Remember when Ashbery could write poems like 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.

Compare this poem to everything he put out at the later part of his career. I couldn't replicate this poem as easily as I can his other crap.

[Anonymous No.21427406]

>>21425936
Exactly. I came up with it in 10 minutes and this is exactly what Ashbery has been doing for the bulk of his poetic career. Flowchart is just this for 200 pages.

[Anonymous No.21427542]

>>21427406
No, it isn't. It isn't that there's no similarity at all, but that it's a strawman. Not only that, there's a WORLD of difference in difficulty between creating a style and imitating one, and you can't even master the imitation.

[Anonymous No.21427548]

>>21427542
>no argument

[Anonymous No.21427549]

>>21427395
Oh, I will agree with you on Some Trees. This is one of my favorite Ashbery poems, however, it is way more structurally simple than his later work. This has a very rigid form which is easy to copy, and the word play is less abstract than what he becomes able to do with grace and nonchalance in his later career.

I love that you love Some Trees, but if you think this takes more craft than his later work, you need to read more poetry.

[Anonymous No.21427556]

>>21427548
A favorite comeback of midwits. Along with, YWNBAW, any every other pasta.

[Anonymous No.21427565]

>>21427549
Wallace Stevens is abstract "grace and nonchalance" and Frank O' Hara did the quirkiness better. Ashbery never ever reached those heights, then cannibalized himself for his whole career.

[Anonymous No.21427573]

>>21427542
You mean the style that was done better by Stevens and other Modernists and all Ashbery did was infuse pop culture nonsense into it?

[Anonymous No.21427588]

>>21427565
Stevens is far easier to imitate than Ashbery. I sound like Stevens in my prose without even trying. I won't say he doesn't have any grace or nonchalance, but he is a tryhard larping at ambiguity while Ashbery actually reached it. I haven't read enough Frank O'Hara to criticize or praise him, but I like quirky, so I'll give him a closer look.

>>21427573
An absolutely nonsensical take. You can only utter the word pop-culture and Ashbery in the same sentence because he rose to fame. You're just one of many, rebelling for the sake of rebellion.

[Anonymous No.21427619]

>>21427588
I did the Ashbery imitation, now you do your Stevens imitation. And I'm talking about poetry, not prose.

In fact, here's another Ashbery imitation of mine which I call Bugs Bunny Rides The Tram:

Something strange is creeping across me.
La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars
Of "I Thought about You" or something mellow from
Amadigi di Gaula for everything--a mint-condition can
Of Rumford's Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy
Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller's fertile
Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged
Stock--to come clattering through the rainbow trellis
Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland
Fling Terrace. He promised he'd get me out of this one,
That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he's
Done to me now! I scarce dare approach me mug's attenuated
Reflection in yon hubcap, so jaundiced, so déconfit
Are its lineaments--fun, no doubt, for some quack phrenologist's
Fern-clogged waiting room, but hardly what you'd call
Companionable. But everything is getting choked to the point of
Silence. Just now a magnetic storm hung in the swatch of sky
Over the Fudds' garage, reducing it--drastically--
To the aura of a plumbago-blue log cabin on
A Gadsden Purchase commemorative cover. Suddenly all is
Loathing. I don't want to go back inside any more.

[Anonymous No.21427629]

>>21427619
'Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow

[Anonymous No.21427635]

>>21427619
I'm not invested enough in our conversation, though I thought about it - before you even asked. I'm honestly just surprised you could find something like A Hightoned Old Christian Woman to be difficult to imitate.

Again, bro, your imitations suck. Stop posting them. This one barely even has a shadow of Ashbery in it.

[Anonymous No.21427642]

>>21427635
You got got mate. This one is actually Ashbery.

[Anonymous No.21427650]

>>21427635
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/daffy-duck-hollywood

[Anonymous No.21427684]

>>21427642
>>21427650
That's what I get for pretending it wasn't a good imitation, and serves me right, but even if he wrote a few bad poems, it does not destroy a career spanning many collections of poetry. I stand by saying he wrote good work post Self-Portrait. Chinese Whispers is one of my all-time favorite John Ashbery poems, and it comes from his 2002 collection.

[Anonymous No.21428646]

>>21427642
KEK