Guadalajara

“How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!”
John Ashbery from “The Instruction Manual

This is one of the great lines of poetry. It is simple and weird, and is about the imagination and reality. A little like the jar in Tennessee. The rhythm of the line is nearly perfect, moving quckly and elegantly to an end, leaving us in Guadalajara where we are not now. The tone is wonderful, being both serious and personal and at the same time parodic of elegant hi flying rhetorical flourish. Ashbery gets to have it both ways.