Archive for the ‘John Ashbery’ Tag
Tucsonan Activists — Image by kenne
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.
— Some Trees by John Ashbery
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Aspen Loop On Mt. Lemmon (08/02/13) — Image by kenne
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.
— John Ashbery
“Written in 1948 when Ashbery was only 21 and a senior at Harvard College, this brief lyric has everything that his later, much longer, poems will advance. It is a love poem that never mentions love directly, but a feeling of being in love infuses the way the speaker sees, feels, and thinks about everything. It makes him feel both small and big, a tiny piece of a greater universe, but nonetheless connected to a world full of mystery and grandeur. A sense of the universe comes from gazing up at those huge trees from the ground while in love and remembering the immensity of that experience of feeling and thinking.” Source: Publishers Weekley
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Seed Pods — Grunge Art by kenne
“We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants /
So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.”
— John Ashbery
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Tree in Lapidary– Computer Art by kenne
Today has that special, lapidary
Todayness that the sunlight reproduces
Faithfully in casting twig-shadows on blithe
Sidewalks. No previous day would have been like this.
I used to think they were all alike,
That the present always looked the same to everybody
But this confusion drains away as one
Is always cresting into one’s present.
— from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery
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Becoming is Superior to Being 