“I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.”

“It’s hard to believe it wasn’t built to look that way,” Alice said, turning her back on the Forum. “Listen, Marshall, I want you to write to them about that furnace. I refuse to spend another winter like the last one.”

Scribbled on the expansive mist, the desire
of many dwindles to us
and our “activities,” wholesome

Customize the event, picking at soul scabs,
turning your face optimistically toward the window.
There must be a long biography coming out soon,

The same ideas or different ones condense,
and you don’t have to sleep again.
Garbage is necessary. That’s another issue

In these situations
I’m trying to figure out what is going on.
So is he too. Purged for oversharing,

. . . or somebody’s going to get hurt.
For my sake, however, keep pealing to a minimum.
We’ll need the firewood you can pick up on the shore

We talked about the great error
that you can live with
and really can’t afford to get.

Did he describe the blue stripe again,
unelected governor?
And from trees to hospitals, one story

He has a lazy father in Minnesota.

I hope you never have to do this in life, with its crazy little darkened
rooms. People are standing, an accurate jumble. Famille rose happy campers.

As I was saying it’s a never-ending getting
closer if you will, a class-unconsciousness searing
these ears for a lifetime, and by then it’s time

I’d had a “good night’s sleep,” meaning
thinking of waking, and waking,
shifting closer together, and then not.

This is the platform of the famous sideshow,
all of us participating, glad to be arm and arm
as spring charges down the battlefield. Let’s see,

Better homes and gardens for many
but for the rest, we are not so sure.
We need a place to turn around and be unctuous

There is a tremendous interest in dog-related items,
such as dog-paintings. once they figured out how to print on tin,
copper and silver with the horn on it,

Very little was known about anything
in the old time. It was as a vocalise
is to a sonata, children in the limelight

isn’t really a tower. It’s a square
building with towers at each
of the four corners. In the thirties

Here in the open, love lies apart,
singing to its beads. How reflective is that?
Don’t be such a goose, love said.

So we’ll go no more a-teething.
For now. When the urge
to perambulation strikes, feeling

For all I know I was meant to be one of those marchers
into a microtonal near-future whose pile has worn away—
the others, whose drab histrionics provoke unease to this day,

If it’s loveliness you want, here, take some,
hissed the black fairy. Waiting for the string quartet,
on the corner, denatured I wondered what the heck.

When they passed through a city, it was others knew it first.
The man claimed no lift in his shoe but an advertisement for the dance
left over from the last street but one.

Not that it was needed that much, this much
was clear. A little cleverness would do
as well, a lei woven of servility

as was proven 
when they entered the house 
in which the priest was, 

You are my most favorite artist. Though I know 
very little about your work. Some of your followers I know: 
Mattia Preti, who toiled so hard to so little 

In sooth, I come here sadly, 
not trembling, not against my will, 
hoping you will set the record straight.

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name solves a 
      riddle of the past. 
B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the 

Then I reached the field and I thought 
this is not a joke not a book 
but a poem about something—but what?

The gray person disputes the other’s clotheshorse stature 
       just send us some water maybe 
herding him onto the escalator for a last roll 

The madhouse statuary seemed to dispel the pre-life we gave it. 
in sleep, to become the one bauble rescued from that  hoard, whose shapes 
no one now will know. It cannot be said they existed. Yet

You said you don’t want to know any more  
than you do now, of every thing that might be  
a person. It would be cheating. That is urgent.  

My sister and I don’t seem to get along too well anymore.  
She always has to have everything new in her house. Cherished ideals  
don’t suit her teal, rust and eggshell color scheme.  

The blackboard is erased in the attic 
And the wind turns up the light of the stars, 
Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know.

This movie deals with the epidemic of the way we live now. 
What an inane card player. And the age may support it. 
Each time the rumble of the age 

The deep water in the travel poster finds me 
In the change as I was about to back away 
From the idea of the comedy around us— 

The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of a hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out, would be another, and truer, way.

clean-washed sea

The flowers were.

Silly girls your heads full of boys
There is a last sample of talk on the outer side
Your stand at last lifts to dumb evening

They are preparing to begin again:
Problems, new pennant up the flagpole
In a predicted romance.

Barely tolerated, living on the margin
In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued
On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso

The immense hope, and forbearance 
Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day 
Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled 

The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder, 
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment, 
From livid curtain’s hue, a tanagram emerges: a country.” 

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us, 
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away 
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth 

It was always November there. The farms
Were a kind of precinct; a certain control
Had been exercised. The little birds

This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive.

This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive.

This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive.

This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive.

In 1985, art historian and critic Marco Livingstone published one of the earliest monographs on American painter R. B. Kitaj. The volume appeared roughly midway through Kitaj’s career (he was born in 1932, and his very earliest works date from the…

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.