John Ashbury is one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century (and twenty first, really) and he’s still kicking. He is known as the centerpiece of New York School of poetry (O’Hara etc.) in the 60s. His poems, structurally, are simple – comparable even to O’Hara in terms of formal simplicity. Line lengths stretch unpretentiously across the page, each word is there natural and pure — yet it’s still highly abstract. His form may be simple, but all the rest  is highly complex, it’s the epitome of abstract poetry. Read and enjoy, dont be so worried about not getting it.

And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name

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.

Wet Casements

The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of
Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas
Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics
The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
have been drifting; how long have I too for that matter)
Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,
Which would have its own opinions on these matters,
Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
And out of it. I want that information very much today,

Can’t have it and this makes me angry.
I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
Of Avignon, on which people dance for the feeling
Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face
Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge

I shall keep to myself.
I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.