John Ashbery

John Ashbery is an American poet who was born during the roaring twenties into the Modernist Era.
Modernist had questions of impersonality and objectivity, which can be seen in his poem Poem of the New Year.

Poem at the New Year

Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs,
that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other
principles prevail in this glum haven, don't they? If that's what it is.

Then the wind fell of its own accord.
We went out and saw that it had actually happened.
The season stood motionless, alert. How still the dropp was
on the burr I know not. I come all
packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things.

I wonder about Australia. Is it anything about Canada?
Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete
the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system?
Can we trust others to indict us
who see us only in the evening rush hour,
and never stop to think? O, I was so bright about you,
my songbird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.
The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off center.
At least that's how it feels to me.

I know it as well as the streets in the map of my imagined
industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past.
There was never any fullness that was going to be;
you waited in line for things, and the stained light was
impenitent. 'Spiky' was one adjective that came to mind,

yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal.
Its time was right in winter. There was pipe smoke
in cafés, and outside the great ashen bird
streamed from lettered display windows, and waited
a little way off. Another chance. It never became a gesture. 

At first I hated this poem because of the lack of rhyme scheme thats just boring. But as I continued reading there was one line that really stuck out to me "Can we trust others to indict us who see us only in the evening rush hour, and never stop to think? O, I was so bright about you" I loved this line because everyone is guilty of a little road rage when someone cuts you off to make that turn, someone flys through  yellow, or they ride your tail. But we always assume the worst, that they are jerks and terrible drivers, but we never think of why they are in such a hurry, It could be a life and death situation if you want to go to extremes. We never think externally, all we do is care about ourselves and this line really connected to the modernist ways of writing. Also it connects to the New York School, through  it's interactions between people in the city. I also like how he quoted Gucci Mane by saying "Burr" that was pretty dope. I thought this poem was very imaginative, thunking of what other places in the world looked like, and how they compared to what his life is like.