Time & Perspective Quote by John Ashbery

Ashbery dodges the museum-glass idea of the poem as a finished artifact and replaces it with something more like live wiring. The line is funny in its understatement: poetry isn’t a sacred tablet, it’s a spool running in the background, and the poet is just the person with scissors. That domestic image ("snip off a length") demystifies inspiration without denying it. It also quietly reframes authorship. The poet isn’t a heroic maker imposing order on chaos; he’s an editor eavesdropping on his own mental weather.

The intent is almost polemical, but delivered with Ashbery’s signature slyness. Calling poems "closed works" invokes the academic impulse to seal them up, to treat them as puzzles with correct solutions. Ashbery’s subtext is a refusal: meaning is not a locked room. His poems often read like consciousness caught mid-turn, full of detours, tonal swerves, and half-heard phrases. This quote offers the operating manual. The "going on all the time" suggests continuity - not the dramatic lightning strike of genius, but the ongoing churn of perception, memory, media noise, private anxiety. A poem is a sample, not the whole broadcast.

Context matters: Ashbery came of age against mid-century expectations of coherence and confessional sincerity, and alongside New York School artists who prized process, collage, and improvisation. He’s aligning poetry with contemporary art’s interest in the provisional. A poem, for him, isn’t closure; it’s a cut in the stream that lets you see the stream is there.