“It’s good to be modern if you can stand it.
It’s like being left out in the rain, and coming
to understand that you were always this way: modern,
wet, abandoned, though with that special intuition
that makes you realize you weren’t meant to be
somebody else, for whom the makers
of modernism will stand inspection
even as they wither and fade in today’s glare.”
Excerpt From
Commotion of the Birds: New Poems by John Ashbery
