And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name

By John Ashbery b. 1927 John Ashbery

You can’t say it that way any more.

Bothered about beauty you have to

Come out into the open, into a clearing,

And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you

Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange

Of you, you who have so many lovers,

People who look up to you and are willing

To do things for you, but you think

It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .

So much for self-analysis. Now,

About what to put in your poem-painting:

Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.

Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,

Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?

There are a lot of other things of the same quality

As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must

Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,

Dull-sounding ones. She approached me

About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was

Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.

Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head

Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something

Ought to be written about how this affects

You when you write poetry:

The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind

Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate

Something between breaths, if only for the sake

Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you

For other centers of communication, so that understanding

May begin, and in doing so be undone.

Source: Houseboat Days (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987)

Biography

John Ashbery is recognized as one of the greatest twentieth-century American poets. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Griffin International Award, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Ashbery's poetry challenges its readers to discard all presumptions about the aims, themes, . . .

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