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These two guys in the front yard—
Are they here to help?

— John Ashbery April Galleons (1987)

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More quotes by John Ashbery

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down.

The summer demands and takes away too much.
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway.

The Paris Review (1983)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Ashbery (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.