After a week in Manhattan and two days of the New York Poetry festival, I can't help but consider the New York School, namely John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.

Poetry Magazine features four poems, published in their 1955 issue.

Important points from Poetry Foundation on the author explore a stream of consciousness sort of writing that Ashbery may have made popular but found early examples in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, according to Google.  Quotes from Poetry Foundation include: 

"Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees (1956) won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. The competition was judged by W.H. Auden, who famously confessed later that he hadn’t understood a word of the winning manuscript."

"Ashbery’s poetry—and its influence on younger poets—remains controversial because of just this split in critical opinion: some critics laud Ashbery’s “ability to undermine our certainties, to articulate so fully the ambiguous zones of our consciousness,” while others deplore his obscurantism and insist that his poems, made up of anything and everything, can mean anything and everything. Reflecting upon the critical response to his poem, "Litany," Ashbery once told Contemporary Authors, "I'm quite puzzled by my work too, along with a lot of other people. I was always intrigued by it, but at the same time a little apprehensive and sort of embarrassed about annoying the same critics who are always annoyed by my work. I'm kind of sorry that I cause so much grief."

"Ashbery attempts to mirror the stream of perceptions of which human consciousness is composed. His poetry is open-ended and multi-various because life itself is, he told Bryan Appleyard in the London Times: "I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life." 

"In more recent Ashbery works, such as Girls on the Run (1999), Chinese Whispers(2002), Where Shall I Wander? (2005), A Worldly Country (2007), Quick Question (2012), and Breezeway (2015), critics have noted an infusion of elegy as the poet contemplates aging and death."

So the poet has a long arc through the 20th century and continues to publish a book every few years.

In the December 1955 edition of Poetry Magazine, Ashbery published four poems. .

The first entry "And  You Know" traces the life of a school teacher and the fleeting students who come and go.  The lines are long and open with a quick image of "girls" in a "schoolhouse" but immediately zooms out into the heavens with comets, stars, and planets, which to my reading illustrates the contrast between just one moment in time and the countless moments of time itself which reaches beyond any memory.

The poem then shifts into a rhyming monologue of the teacher, declaring "I was a child under the star spangled sun once. / Now I do what must be done."  This line does smart work at contrasting the celestial hopes of childhood with the reality of making ends meet.  The schoolmaster and children become symbols for the conscious of children vs. adults.  And I love how the sudden switch to rhyme seems to satirize the seriousness of adulthood.

As the children grow older and the leave the school to experience the world they've only learned about in books, the teacher is left behind to cry, although he seems to have picked up a girlfriend (a former student in black and yellow "flouces") as a consolation to his work.

Ultimately, the children are cast out into the real world.  "They never cared for school anyway / And they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board / And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.

Interminable afternoons and endless nights open and close this poem, further stating contrast between the length of time vs. the length of a life, as day and night surround reader.

One challenge of the poem is the use of pronouns, set off first by the 'you' in the title.  "As You Know" seems to first speak to the reader, as one knows how life begins and ends. Then the girls are introduced in third person, followed by the schoolmaster speaking about himself in first person.  No trouble here, but then the schoolmaster is treated in third person, followed by an unclear 3rd person plural, "we" which I infer is to be the speaker, reader, and all of humanity, as "We ought to imitate him in our lives / For as a man lives he dies."

The 'we' continues, as 'we are pointing out . . . (places) we will visit" presumably on a map, speaking to the longing to grow up and experience the world for ourselves. But the 3rd person shifts in the final stanza as "they have left us feeling cross and tired."  So as the poem moves, we leave the teacher, then we are left by the students.

This captures an seemingly endless succession of leading our elders behind, as they were left behind, as we will be left behind by our own children, as you know.