Life & Wisdom Quote by John Ashbery

Ashbery’s line is a sly little manifesto disguised as a joke about carpentry. He’s talking about poems the way you talk about a wall: tap it, listen, find the weak spots. The “hammer” is the blunt instrument of scrutiny - close reading, rereading, skepticism, even ridicule. A poem worth keeping, in this view, doesn’t need velvet-rope reverence; it can take a beating. No “hollow places” means no dead language, no fudged emotions, no decorative flourishes masking an empty center.

The subtext is pointed because Ashbery is famous for writing poems that critics have accused of being willfully slippery, full of surfaces and shifts. So he’s both teasing the demand for “solid” meaning and conceding a standard: even the most elusive poem should have internal density. “Hollow” isn’t the same as “ambiguous.” Ambiguity can be structurally sound; hollowness is when the poem collapses under pressure because it was never built to hold anything.

Context matters: Ashbery comes out of mid-century American poetry, after Modernism’s rigor and alongside the New York School’s appetite for collage, spontaneity, and everyday talk. His wit is defensive and generous at once. He’s pushing back against the idea that difficulty is a scam, while also warning fellow poets that opacity alone won’t save you. The best poem, he implies, is one you can assault from any angle and still hear something real answering back.