in memory of John Ashbery, looking back at Twin Peaks: The Return

[On September 4th I learned of the death of John Ashbery and watched the final two episodes of Twin Peaks. 

Ashbery was, apparently, an enthusiast for David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE.

"They do cross over, poetry and movies. My poetry seems to be something I make up as I go along. 

Certain movies strike me that way - going in and out of one's dreams..."

Reading some of Ashbery's poems on the LRB website a few passages struck me.]

from Chronic Symbiosis

[...] For one irrational second I thought
today's subject was plagiarism, as symbolised
by that desk. But no, it's joy
in never knowing, in having once known,
and in its still not being too late to know.

[...] Quick, tell me a story

that I may repeat it with minor variations
and the job be over. Rakes and shovels lean beside
the open door this evening with a special lustre
all their own, that they can't know. And I,

I was spirited away by a handsome enchanter
to a medium-sized city not twenty miles from here
and live my life as I can hear and smell it. No grouch
am I, yet hardly an earth-mother either. [...]


from Many Are Dissatisfied

yet the wind from Seattle blows over and over,
against the facing page and against the anthill.
You would wonder at all the crumbs
that have been dropped, lest you find your way
through this tangled story of ours,
and at how the gentlemen fliers cursed us
as mere entertainers, made us put our wallets away.

[...] Or is it all declamation – the wanting
to sue nature for the tide’s infirmities,
sliding off into a lather,
mouthing the old pulchritude a house has?

from Homecoming 

Weather drips quietly through the skeins
in my diary. What surly elision is this?

Who faxed the folks news of my homecoming,
even unto the platform number? [...]

Later I’m posting this to you.
I just thought of you, you see, as indeed I do
several million times a day. I need your disapproval,
can't live without your churlish ways.