Yes, thanks--lovely moment, as Doug says. The Ashbery quote I can't find is
also from an interview, something about politics, boredom, and poetry.
How *does* he elaborate on the weather? If it's not inconvenient to say.
Rachel
> Lovely serendipity, Jill.
>
> Thanks for the memory.
>
> Doug
> On 2011-02-18, at 12:25 AM, Jill Jones wrote:
>
> > Small serendipitous moment:
> >
> > For a number of years, I had been referring to a quote from John Ashbery
about three
> great themes of poetry - love, death and the weather. I knew I had it
slightly wrong, and also
> knew I had read it in something I had around and about me at one stage of
my life. I also
> thought it had been lost when I had maybe lent it to someone and a fire
had destroyed a lot
> of their papers. There was nary a reference to it via online or library
search,etc. I even
> started to think I'd dreamed it up.
> >
> > Well, blow me down, here I am with it before me. The result of a huge
cleanout. It's in a
> supplement to an old magazine that our 'national broadcaster', the ABC,
used to publish,
> called '24 Hours'. Any Aussies remember this wee journal? But that's why
the quote never
> turns up in an online search.
> >
> > And the quote - from an interview with JA conducted by Peter Rose at the
Melbourne
> Writers Festival in 1992 - 'Well, I am preoccupied with the great themes:
death, love, the
> weather.' And he elaborates a little further, on the weather.
> >
> > So, a small thing, but I now have it. As, among other things, I am
giving a lecture on
> Ashbery this semester, I am happy to have a source for quotes/elaborations
that's not always
> used. But happier to have this before me - so I know I slightly
misremembered it, but that it
> was not a complete figment.
> >
> > Misremembering can be a good thing. But re-membering this one is as
good.
> >
> > __________________________
> > Jill Jones
> > [log in to unmask]
> >
> > website: www.jilljones.com.au
> > blog: rubystreet.blogspot.com
> >
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
>
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.h
tml
>
> Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for
exploring the
> past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the
earth is the medium in
> which dead cities lie buried.
>
> Walter Benjamin
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