Selected Poems Book

Okay, I'm going to mark this as read. I believe my eyes have passed over every line in the past few months, even if in some sense Ashbery remains permanently unreadable, unassimilable to the vanities of goodreads. I wonder if he and Captain Beefheart ever thought about collaborating on an opera (with help from Arvo Part?). Wouldn't that have been awesome? Too bad it never came to pass. RIP.

On that invisible terrain on the far side of pain, as it were.

*
Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day
We notice the hole they left.

Meanwhile it is possible to know just enough, and this is all we were supposed to know, toward which we have been straining all our lives. We are to read this in outward things: the spoons and greasy tables in this room, the wooden shelves, the flyspecked ceiling merging into gloom - good and happy things, nevertheless, that tell us little of themselves and more about ourselves than we had ever imagined it was possible to know.

*
The appeal of Ashbery is that he writes one continuous poem, sort of a confession, but not a personal confession. What appears on the page are just the snatches you happen to overhear. The downside of this - well, he really can be a pain in the ass.