Happy Birthday, John Ashbery!
Reading an Ashbery poem requires greater inwardness than “the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe,” as he wrote. Instead, it requires, “sort of,” letting “things be what they are.”
Read MoreReading an Ashbery poem requires greater inwardness than “the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe,” as he wrote. Instead, it requires, “sort of,” letting “things be what they are.”
Read MoreTo be sure, Ashbery’s frequently unsettling syntax doesn’t seem an exact match for such Zen Koans as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Yet his abrupt non-sequiturs do have a way of lightly shocking the mind out of conventional patterns of thought.
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