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Excerpt from
The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow
That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid
Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving
The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it
As we believed it...
John Ashbery Homepage at SUNY Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center
John Ashbery at Modern American Poetry
I’m sometimes kind of jealous of my work. It keeps getting all the attention and I’m not. After all, I wrote it.
John Ashbery the Academy of American Poets
Meghan O'Rourke on How to read John Ashbery
On the one hand, the poems have the dashed-off look and feel of pop culture-inflected postmodernism, inspired by the radical innovations of Dada and French Surrealism. On the other hand, at their heart is a kind of high Romantic yearning for wholeness: In a sense the poems are simply about being unable to give up that longing.
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