A review by casparb
Three Poems by John Ashbery
Incredible ! I love it but also o my word Ashbery’s Three Poems stretch to 118 pages, prose, and they’re mercilessly brilliant but I’m never going to be able to do this properly on one reading. They’re something like theses on poetic practice which develop into the practice of Living with the Problem of Meaning. I love John as ever and he really drops some of his sweetest lines here
In you I fall apart, and outwardly am a single fragment, a puzzle to itself. But we must learn to live in others, no matter how abortive or unfriendly their cold, piecemeal renderings of us: they create us.
The wisdom here is enormous and as I have said too much to digest in a single reading. I leave with near the beginning of The New Spirit:
You are my calm world. This is my happiness. To stand, to go forward into it. The cost is enormous. Too much for one life.
In you I fall apart, and outwardly am a single fragment, a puzzle to itself. But we must learn to live in others, no matter how abortive or unfriendly their cold, piecemeal renderings of us: they create us.
The wisdom here is enormous and as I have said too much to digest in a single reading. I leave with near the beginning of The New Spirit:
You are my calm world. This is my happiness. To stand, to go forward into it. The cost is enormous. Too much for one life.