“Mother, I’m a poet!”

A detail from Douglas Crase’s remembrance of John Ashbery, friend and fellow poet:

It was October, bright and chilly, and his mother, then seventy-nine, was raking leaves in the front yard. She was not making much progress. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and her nose was dripping. As John came out of the house she said to him — and she had a voice that could rise in a nasal whine to match his own — “John, if you were any kind of a son at all you’d help your mother with these leaves.”

John, his hand already on the car door, turned briefly back and replied in exasperation, as though she should have known better, “Mother, I’m a poet!”

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