Planisphere: New Poems

Breathlike

Just as the day could use another hour, I need another idea. Not a conceptor a slogan. Something more like a rutmade thousands of years ago by one of the firstwheels as it rolled along. It never came backto see what it had done, and the rutjust stayed there, not thinking of itselfor calling attention to itself in any way.Sun baked it. Water stood, or rather satin it. Wind covered it with dust, then blew itaway. Always it was available to itselfwhen it wished to be, which wasn't often.

Then there was a cup and ball theoryI told you about. A lot of people had left the coast.Squirt conditions obtained. I forgot I overwhelmed youonce upon a time, between everybody's sound sleepand waking afterward, trying to piece togetherwhat had happened. The rut glimmeredthrough centuries of snow and after.I suppose it was trying to make some pointbut we never found out about that, having come to know each other years laterwhen our interest in zoning had revived again.

Publisher: Ecco

Published: United States, 1 December 2010

Format: Paperback / softback, 143 pages

Age Range: 0+

Dimensions: 22.5 x 17 x 1.1 centimeters (0.22 kg)

Writer: John Ashbery

About the AuthorJohn Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.

Reviews" [Ashbery's] productivity has done nothing to diminish his legendary inscrutability, not sap his notorious zest for playing havoc with nearly every convention and fixed idea about poetry under the sun."--Boston Globe