God— I love John Ashbery #poetry
“ANOTHER KIND OF AFTERNOON
Remotely the unnamed keeps up with me. It must be quite a time since the last dignitaries visited with you. Yes, and I'm about out of breath
for all the quiet cells we kept company in. Must be a zillion years
Look, here comes one of them.
I know I just met the czar's brother
in a book report. Soon it was time to return home, past the midpoint, skipping-place. Fierce, how that cloud suffocates the sun, then is gracious for a while” 
I came across Ashbery only recently. Not sure how I missed him. I ran across him in Michael Clune's "Writing Against Time"
So— not everyone enjoys his poetry. But I do! It’s uncanniness speaks to me.
I like the idea that his poetry uses familiar terms, but you can't become familiar with them--it resists memorization. That's my crude interpretation of Clune's point--the quotidian / surreal.
I’m not familiar with Clune— he sounds interesting. When John passed away a few years ago— The Paris Review shared this piece on Twitter & it grabbed my attention.
“It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror.”
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/12/09/the-i-and-the-you/
