Friday, April 01, 2005

Here

...is a poem by John Ashbery. A poet sent it last night. Perhaps it's time to add Ashbery to my collection.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Because I love a good Ashbery poem:

Some Trees

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.

Anonymous said...
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Brenda Schmidt said...

Sheesh, the double post looked better than the deletion!

Thanks for the poem, Tracy. I don't know why I don't own any Ashbery.

GM said...

Damn, I spent ten minutes typing that out from the book. I didn't realize it was already on line. A guy like me should know better and do a search first.

Thanks, B.

G

Brenda Schmidt said...
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Brenda Schmidt said...

Ya, you should know better! :)

Seriously though, thanks for doing the typing and sending me that poem, G. You've mentioned Ashbery before a number of times and I thought about ordering some of his books around the same time you pointed me to the work of Geoffrey Hill. Now the three Ashbery titles you recommended are on their way.

Ariel Gordon said...

Which three Ashbury books, by the by?

Brenda Schmidt said...

A, the Ashbery titles I ordered are

Where Shall I Wander, his new one.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

The Tennis Court Oath