Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims ...
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This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims about his own poetics seriously, it challenges some familiar critical presumptions about Ashbery, prompted by a few basic questions: What are we to make of the disparity between how Ashbery sees himself and how he is seen? What is the responsibility of critics toward authorial claims of self-knowledge and intention? Is there something to be learned by listening to this poet and his poems, rather than reading through or against them? What does it mean to read Ashbery as a self-conscious inheritor of Auden's civic tradition, rather than heir to the various Romantic traditions with which he is customarily linked? In the end, the goal is less to reject prior understandings of Ashbery than to augment and complicate them, and suggest that in doing so, we discover a poet who is even richer—both more familiar and more strange, more conventional and more radical—than we may have seen.Less
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims about his own poetics seriously, it challenges some familiar critical presumptions about Ashbery, prompted by a few basic questions: What are we to make of the disparity between how Ashbery sees himself and how he is seen? What is the responsibility of critics toward authorial claims of self-knowledge and intention? Is there something to be learned by listening to this poet and his poems, rather than reading through or against them? What does it mean to read Ashbery as a self-conscious inheritor of Auden's civic tradition, rather than heir to the various Romantic traditions with which he is customarily linked? In the end, the goal is less to reject prior understandings of Ashbery than to augment and complicate them, and suggest that in doing so, we discover a poet who is even richer—both more familiar and more strange, more conventional and more radical—than we may have seen.
Jesse Zuba
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691164472
- eISBN:
- 9781400873791
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691164472.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter offers an interpretation of one of the most remarkable debut collections ever selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award—Some Trees by John Ashbery. The reputation of the book ...
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This chapter offers an interpretation of one of the most remarkable debut collections ever selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award—Some Trees by John Ashbery. The reputation of the book as an unconventional debut has dominated the critical response to it, from the early, largely negative judgments by critics such as William Arrowsmith and Donald Hall, to more recent attempts to revalue it by Marjorie Perloff, Vernon Shetley, David Lehman, and others. The chapter argues that Some Trees has been misread both by its detractors and defenders, who tend to stress the ways in which the poems resist interpretation while ignoring many of the ways in which they encourage and support it.Less
This chapter offers an interpretation of one of the most remarkable debut collections ever selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award—Some Trees by John Ashbery. The reputation of the book as an unconventional debut has dominated the critical response to it, from the early, largely negative judgments by critics such as William Arrowsmith and Donald Hall, to more recent attempts to revalue it by Marjorie Perloff, Vernon Shetley, David Lehman, and others. The chapter argues that Some Trees has been misread both by its detractors and defenders, who tend to stress the ways in which the poems resist interpretation while ignoring many of the ways in which they encourage and support it.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka are profoundly concerned with friendship as a theme and as an intellectual, poetic, and personal problem. Each poet creates a tense oscillation in his ...
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Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka are profoundly concerned with friendship as a theme and as an intellectual, poetic, and personal problem. Each poet creates a tense oscillation in his work between a complex experimental individualism—dependent on the notions of “abandonment,” aversion to conformity, and protean selfhood—and an awareness of both friendship's ineradicable importance and its limitations. This chapter examines the relationship between O'Hara and Ashbery in order to understand better how such dynamics play out in the realm of one particular—and one particularly important—poetic friendship, as well as to propose that this specific pairing could stand as a kind of synecdoche for the broader collision between friendship and radical individualism that shapes and determines innovative post-war American poetry and its writing communities.Less
Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka are profoundly concerned with friendship as a theme and as an intellectual, poetic, and personal problem. Each poet creates a tense oscillation in his work between a complex experimental individualism—dependent on the notions of “abandonment,” aversion to conformity, and protean selfhood—and an awareness of both friendship's ineradicable importance and its limitations. This chapter examines the relationship between O'Hara and Ashbery in order to understand better how such dynamics play out in the realm of one particular—and one particularly important—poetic friendship, as well as to propose that this specific pairing could stand as a kind of synecdoche for the broader collision between friendship and radical individualism that shapes and determines innovative post-war American poetry and its writing communities.
Willard Spiegelman
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195332926
- eISBN:
- 9780199851294
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332926.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Presenting John Ashbery as a landscape poet, or a descriptive one, casts light on a sizable proportion of his poetry—even if only parts rather than wholes, let alone volumes. A panorama of visual ...
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Presenting John Ashbery as a landscape poet, or a descriptive one, casts light on a sizable proportion of his poetry—even if only parts rather than wholes, let alone volumes. A panorama of visual details overwhelms Ashbery's poems and his speakers, sometimes charming them, sometimes depressing them. Time, consciousness, and landscape are his primary subjects. He is a poet nostalgic for space as well as time. This chapter examines his poem, “Haunted Landscape,” where everything changes before the readers' eyes: the poem ends with a haunted house, before which it has presented an abandoned mountain landscape and a farming scene somewhere down South. The poem extends from pastoral to georgic to domestic gestures.Less
Presenting John Ashbery as a landscape poet, or a descriptive one, casts light on a sizable proportion of his poetry—even if only parts rather than wholes, let alone volumes. A panorama of visual details overwhelms Ashbery's poems and his speakers, sometimes charming them, sometimes depressing them. Time, consciousness, and landscape are his primary subjects. He is a poet nostalgic for space as well as time. This chapter examines his poem, “Haunted Landscape,” where everything changes before the readers' eyes: the poem ends with a haunted house, before which it has presented an abandoned mountain landscape and a farming scene somewhere down South. The poem extends from pastoral to georgic to domestic gestures.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter suggests that John Ashbery's work offers a memorable response to inveterate, distinctly American questions surrounding individualism, ceaseless movement, and democratic fellowship. In ...
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This chapter suggests that John Ashbery's work offers a memorable response to inveterate, distinctly American questions surrounding individualism, ceaseless movement, and democratic fellowship. In his most famous poem, nominally a “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery acknowledges that the influence of other people is so powerful that it is impossible to locate an autonomous self apart from those with whom one interacts. Despite much commentary to the contrary, the self in Ashbery does not exist alone in the universe. The chapter also states that Ashbery is obsessed with kinetic motion and its paradoxical dance with stasis. Such half-thwarted interpersonal encounters drive Ashbery's poetry forward: the engine behind his poems runs on the dialectical movement back and forth between the insularity of the self and its interconnections with others.Less
This chapter suggests that John Ashbery's work offers a memorable response to inveterate, distinctly American questions surrounding individualism, ceaseless movement, and democratic fellowship. In his most famous poem, nominally a “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery acknowledges that the influence of other people is so powerful that it is impossible to locate an autonomous self apart from those with whom one interacts. Despite much commentary to the contrary, the self in Ashbery does not exist alone in the universe. The chapter also states that Ashbery is obsessed with kinetic motion and its paradoxical dance with stasis. Such half-thwarted interpersonal encounters drive Ashbery's poetry forward: the engine behind his poems runs on the dialectical movement back and forth between the insularity of the self and its interconnections with others.
Srikanth Reddy
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199791026
- eISBN:
- 9780199950287
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791026.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter outlines the impasse faced by a new generation of American writers who seek to extend John Ashbery’s digressive project. Ashbery’s lyric speakers commonly address the reader while ...
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This chapter outlines the impasse faced by a new generation of American writers who seek to extend John Ashbery’s digressive project. Ashbery’s lyric speakers commonly address the reader while drifting in a landscape of houseboats, hot air balloons, and countless other pleasure craft. These floating speakers provide a figure for what might called ‘the interiorization of drifting’ in this writer’s work. For Ashbery, the experience of inwardness is modelled upon the very rivers which convey his lyric speakers to their fugitive elsewheres; allegorizing William James’ notion of “the stream of consciousness,” this poet constructs a riverrine poetics in which both consciousness and the lyric itself follow the digressive contours of a river’s shifting topology. This afterword concludes with an examination of strategies employed by younger American poets writing in the wake of such digressive masterpieces as Houseboat Days and Flow Chart. Is it possible to extend the labyrinthine poetics of a writer who digresses without end? Finally, the chapter asks what lies “beyond digression” in American poetics of the next century.Less
This chapter outlines the impasse faced by a new generation of American writers who seek to extend John Ashbery’s digressive project. Ashbery’s lyric speakers commonly address the reader while drifting in a landscape of houseboats, hot air balloons, and countless other pleasure craft. These floating speakers provide a figure for what might called ‘the interiorization of drifting’ in this writer’s work. For Ashbery, the experience of inwardness is modelled upon the very rivers which convey his lyric speakers to their fugitive elsewheres; allegorizing William James’ notion of “the stream of consciousness,” this poet constructs a riverrine poetics in which both consciousness and the lyric itself follow the digressive contours of a river’s shifting topology. This afterword concludes with an examination of strategies employed by younger American poets writing in the wake of such digressive masterpieces as Houseboat Days and Flow Chart. Is it possible to extend the labyrinthine poetics of a writer who digresses without end? Finally, the chapter asks what lies “beyond digression” in American poetics of the next century.
Srikanth Reddy
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199791026
- eISBN:
- 9780199950287
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791026.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, American, 20th Century Literature
Digression is widely considered a mark of disordered or evasive discourse. Modern legal, philosophical, and political writing largely disavows this trope, regarding it as a departure from the model ...
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Digression is widely considered a mark of disordered or evasive discourse. Modern legal, philosophical, and political writing largely disavows this trope, regarding it as a departure from the model of rational exposition institutionalized under the Enlightenment. And yet, as the rhetorical figure of digression has grown increasingly marginalized within the decorum of public discourse, it has come to occupy a central position in the private discursive world of poetry. This book outlines an anatomy of “the excursus” within twentieth-Century American poetics; moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to theories of identity, this study considers the various spheres in which American writers of the period revise prior models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in the modern poem. The opening section considers the manner in which Wallace Stevens employs digression within the ars poetica genre to deconstruct aesthetic theory under High Modernism; the second chapter examines Marianne Moore’s use of the excursus to organize archival knowledge in the Progressive poetry of instruction; the third section turns to Lyn Hejinian’s construction of a digressive narratology intended to unsettle master-narratives of the Cold War era; the fourth chapter treats digression as a strategy for fashioning the self in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara; and the book concludes with a survey of “Elliptical” strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery’s aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the 21st Century.Less
Digression is widely considered a mark of disordered or evasive discourse. Modern legal, philosophical, and political writing largely disavows this trope, regarding it as a departure from the model of rational exposition institutionalized under the Enlightenment. And yet, as the rhetorical figure of digression has grown increasingly marginalized within the decorum of public discourse, it has come to occupy a central position in the private discursive world of poetry. This book outlines an anatomy of “the excursus” within twentieth-Century American poetics; moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to theories of identity, this study considers the various spheres in which American writers of the period revise prior models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in the modern poem. The opening section considers the manner in which Wallace Stevens employs digression within the ars poetica genre to deconstruct aesthetic theory under High Modernism; the second chapter examines Marianne Moore’s use of the excursus to organize archival knowledge in the Progressive poetry of instruction; the third section turns to Lyn Hejinian’s construction of a digressive narratology intended to unsettle master-narratives of the Cold War era; the fourth chapter treats digression as a strategy for fashioning the self in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara; and the book concludes with a survey of “Elliptical” strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery’s aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the 21st Century.
Brian Glavey
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190202651
- eISBN:
- 9780190202675
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190202651.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
From the title poem of Some Trees onward, the impersonality of John Ashbery’s work has been conceptualized as primarily defensive in nature. This chapter argues that Ashbery’s use of ekphrasis ...
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From the title poem of Some Trees onward, the impersonality of John Ashbery’s work has been conceptualized as primarily defensive in nature. This chapter argues that Ashbery’s use of ekphrasis involves identifications with the visual give way to a sort of shyness that is generative rather than repressive. This bashful aesthetic is evident in Ashbery’s art criticism, particularly his writing about Joe Brainard. The latter’s work offers Ashbery a way of imaging a queer artistic subjectivity that transforms experiences of shame into a means of connection. Rather than reading the aesthetic in repressive terms, as something that hides the secret of sexuality, Ashbery offers a way of thinking about the aesthetic in more generous terms. This lesson sheds light on contemporary work in queer theory focused on the role of shame in the formation of identity.Less
From the title poem of Some Trees onward, the impersonality of John Ashbery’s work has been conceptualized as primarily defensive in nature. This chapter argues that Ashbery’s use of ekphrasis involves identifications with the visual give way to a sort of shyness that is generative rather than repressive. This bashful aesthetic is evident in Ashbery’s art criticism, particularly his writing about Joe Brainard. The latter’s work offers Ashbery a way of imaging a queer artistic subjectivity that transforms experiences of shame into a means of connection. Rather than reading the aesthetic in repressive terms, as something that hides the secret of sexuality, Ashbery offers a way of thinking about the aesthetic in more generous terms. This lesson sheds light on contemporary work in queer theory focused on the role of shame in the formation of identity.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book of postwar American poetry's obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Friendship.” Emerson drives home his ...
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This book of postwar American poetry's obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Friendship.” Emerson drives home his belief that true friendship, at its most intense and productive, is a wonderful yet confounding contradiction. This equivocal attitude about friendship and the possibilities for communion with others has reverberated throughout the history and development of American poetry. The book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-World War II American poetry and its development. By focusing on the work and interrelations of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets—the “New York School” poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka—the book investigates the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the uneasy role of the individual within them.Less
This book of postwar American poetry's obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Friendship.” Emerson drives home his belief that true friendship, at its most intense and productive, is a wonderful yet confounding contradiction. This equivocal attitude about friendship and the possibilities for communion with others has reverberated throughout the history and development of American poetry. The book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-World War II American poetry and its development. By focusing on the work and interrelations of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets—the “New York School” poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka—the book investigates the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the uneasy role of the individual within them.
Margaret Ronda
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503603141
- eISBN:
- 9781503604896
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503603141.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter begins with a discussion of the new forms of environmental consciousness emerging in the 1960s and early 1970s around pollution and systemic toxicity. It focuses specifically on Rachel ...
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This chapter begins with a discussion of the new forms of environmental consciousness emerging in the 1960s and early 1970s around pollution and systemic toxicity. It focuses specifically on Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, discussing their approaches to ecological interconnection under the sign of crisis but also the ways in which this interconnection is difficult to perceive or understand. The chapter then turns from their reflections on the scarcely perceptible intimacies of ecological interconnection to an examination of John Ashbery’s poetry, which explores these thresholds. Exploring Ashbery’s portrayals of waste and air as phenomena undergoing change, this chapter argues that Ashbery’s work depicts various forms of environmental consciousness. His poetry unfolds an affirmative embrace of ecological uncertainty that involves neither critique nor attempt to repair damage, nor even an attempt to understand the causes of emergent crisis. Instead, he traces the way crisis can be sensed in his poetic surrounds.Less
This chapter begins with a discussion of the new forms of environmental consciousness emerging in the 1960s and early 1970s around pollution and systemic toxicity. It focuses specifically on Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, discussing their approaches to ecological interconnection under the sign of crisis but also the ways in which this interconnection is difficult to perceive or understand. The chapter then turns from their reflections on the scarcely perceptible intimacies of ecological interconnection to an examination of John Ashbery’s poetry, which explores these thresholds. Exploring Ashbery’s portrayals of waste and air as phenomena undergoing change, this chapter argues that Ashbery’s work depicts various forms of environmental consciousness. His poetry unfolds an affirmative embrace of ecological uncertainty that involves neither critique nor attempt to repair damage, nor even an attempt to understand the causes of emergent crisis. Instead, he traces the way crisis can be sensed in his poetic surrounds.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter provides a theoretical and historical background for the subsequent analysis of how dissonant companionship plays out in the work of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka. It ...
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This chapter provides a theoretical and historical background for the subsequent analysis of how dissonant companionship plays out in the work of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka. It examines the entrenched concept that the avant-garde is a communal enterprise and will draw attention to the enduring individualism that threatens to explode that notion. It then situates the post-war avant-garde within two crucial contexts to understand better this strain of nonconforming individualism, the profound ambivalence that post-war avant-garde poets feel toward the avant-garde itself, and the theory of discordant friendship that is so central to their work. The chapter looks at how the poets of the 1950s are affected by distinctive features of 1950s Cold War culture.Less
This chapter provides a theoretical and historical background for the subsequent analysis of how dissonant companionship plays out in the work of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka. It examines the entrenched concept that the avant-garde is a communal enterprise and will draw attention to the enduring individualism that threatens to explode that notion. It then situates the post-war avant-garde within two crucial contexts to understand better this strain of nonconforming individualism, the profound ambivalence that post-war avant-garde poets feel toward the avant-garde itself, and the theory of discordant friendship that is so central to their work. The chapter looks at how the poets of the 1950s are affected by distinctive features of 1950s Cold War culture.
Marta Figlerowicz
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714221
- eISBN:
- 9781501714245
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714221.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines a number of poems by John Ashbery. Ashbery’s poetry explores doubts about lyric expression’s dependence on its audience that are analogous to those voiced by Plath and Stevens. ...
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This chapter examines a number of poems by John Ashbery. Ashbery’s poetry explores doubts about lyric expression’s dependence on its audience that are analogous to those voiced by Plath and Stevens. But like the novels discussed in earlier chapters, Ashbery’s lyrics also implicitly accept their speakers’ dependence, for their self-awareness, on audiences whose presence and attentiveness they cannot control. The mirror serves these speakers as a model for the intense, careful outward scrutiny that they constantly dream of but cannot consistently secure. As Ashbery’s speakers mistake for such mirrors paintings, daydreams, and natural landscapes, they reflect on the imperfect self-knowledge they can attain in a world from which such forms of outward support are not forthcoming—as well as on the way this desire for self-knowledge clouds their capacity to relate to their surrounding world. This notion of affect is further explored by juxtaposition against the views of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.Less
This chapter examines a number of poems by John Ashbery. Ashbery’s poetry explores doubts about lyric expression’s dependence on its audience that are analogous to those voiced by Plath and Stevens. But like the novels discussed in earlier chapters, Ashbery’s lyrics also implicitly accept their speakers’ dependence, for their self-awareness, on audiences whose presence and attentiveness they cannot control. The mirror serves these speakers as a model for the intense, careful outward scrutiny that they constantly dream of but cannot consistently secure. As Ashbery’s speakers mistake for such mirrors paintings, daydreams, and natural landscapes, they reflect on the imperfect self-knowledge they can attain in a world from which such forms of outward support are not forthcoming—as well as on the way this desire for self-knowledge clouds their capacity to relate to their surrounding world. This notion of affect is further explored by juxtaposition against the views of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Willard Spiegelman
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195368130
- eISBN:
- 9780199852192
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368130.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter discusses Americans poets A. R. Ammons' Bosh and Flapdoodle and John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander. It suggests that both works are filled with black humor, nostalgia, regret, ...
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This chapter discusses Americans poets A. R. Ammons' Bosh and Flapdoodle and John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander. It suggests that both works are filled with black humor, nostalgia, regret, anticipation, and wonder. It argues that both poets have mastered the American dialect, especially its slang, and neither shies away from plain goofiness, nor does Ammons shy away from bad puns.Less
This chapter discusses Americans poets A. R. Ammons' Bosh and Flapdoodle and John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander. It suggests that both works are filled with black humor, nostalgia, regret, anticipation, and wonder. It argues that both poets have mastered the American dialect, especially its slang, and neither shies away from plain goofiness, nor does Ammons shy away from bad puns.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book has examined a vision of poetry that icontinually turns away from and returns to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri ...
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This book has examined a vision of poetry that icontinually turns away from and returns to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka and their contemporaries. The postwar avant-garde New American Poetry and the various tributaries that flow from it, among them Language poetry, establish poetry as a unique forum in which to negotiate the paradoxes of affiliation, assimilation, friendship, and personal autonomy. By continuously confronting in memorable words and metaphors its philosophical, psychological, social, and poetic quandaries, post-war American poetry demonstrates that friendship is surely one of the most curious of human phenomena, one that Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly calls a “paradox in nature.” From the 19th century to the present moment, some of the most vibrant, most enduring American writing has attempted to shed light on this infinitely rich relation, this knotty oxymoron so central to cultural narratives, literature, and people's lives.Less
This book has examined a vision of poetry that icontinually turns away from and returns to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka and their contemporaries. The postwar avant-garde New American Poetry and the various tributaries that flow from it, among them Language poetry, establish poetry as a unique forum in which to negotiate the paradoxes of affiliation, assimilation, friendship, and personal autonomy. By continuously confronting in memorable words and metaphors its philosophical, psychological, social, and poetic quandaries, post-war American poetry demonstrates that friendship is surely one of the most curious of human phenomena, one that Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly calls a “paradox in nature.” From the 19th century to the present moment, some of the most vibrant, most enduring American writing has attempted to shed light on this infinitely rich relation, this knotty oxymoron so central to cultural narratives, literature, and people's lives.
Jasper Bernes
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780804796415
- eISBN:
- 9781503602601
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804796415.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The early poems of John Ashbery must be read as a meditation on the plight of labor, particularly white-collar labor, in the postwar United States. Beginning with an early poem, “The Instruction ...
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The early poems of John Ashbery must be read as a meditation on the plight of labor, particularly white-collar labor, in the postwar United States. Beginning with an early poem, “The Instruction Manual” (1956), and its exploration of the ambiguous class position of white-collar workers, this chapter tracks themes of both labor and management in Ashbery’s experimental second book, The Tennis Court Oath. In this book the standpoint of the earlier poem gives way to an explosion of shifting voices as Ashbery’s distinctive use of free indirect discourse and other techniques of point of view registers the contemporary breakdown in labor relations and the crisis for established modes of management. In Ashbery’s mature style of the 1970s, this chaotic play of voices yields to a comparatively measured technology of point of view, which reflects the new modes of management that followed the crises of the 1960s and 1970s.Less
The early poems of John Ashbery must be read as a meditation on the plight of labor, particularly white-collar labor, in the postwar United States. Beginning with an early poem, “The Instruction Manual” (1956), and its exploration of the ambiguous class position of white-collar workers, this chapter tracks themes of both labor and management in Ashbery’s experimental second book, The Tennis Court Oath. In this book the standpoint of the earlier poem gives way to an explosion of shifting voices as Ashbery’s distinctive use of free indirect discourse and other techniques of point of view registers the contemporary breakdown in labor relations and the crisis for established modes of management. In Ashbery’s mature style of the 1970s, this chaotic play of voices yields to a comparatively measured technology of point of view, which reflects the new modes of management that followed the crises of the 1960s and 1970s.
Jesse Zuba
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691164472
- eISBN:
- 9781400873791
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691164472.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but ...
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“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.Less
“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.
Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the ...
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W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the United States became, in the famous words of his first American poem, a new “way of happening.” But his redefinition of his work had a significance that was felt far beyond the pages of his own books. This book shows how Auden's signal role in the work and lives of an entire younger generation of American poets challenges conventional literary histories that place Auden outside the American poetic tradition. The book pays special attention to three of Auden's most distinguished American inheritors, presenting major new readings of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. The result is a persuasive and compelling demonstration of a novel claim: In order to understand modern American poetry, we need to understand Auden's central place within it.Less
W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the United States became, in the famous words of his first American poem, a new “way of happening.” But his redefinition of his work had a significance that was felt far beyond the pages of his own books. This book shows how Auden's signal role in the work and lives of an entire younger generation of American poets challenges conventional literary histories that place Auden outside the American poetic tradition. The book pays special attention to three of Auden's most distinguished American inheritors, presenting major new readings of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. The result is a persuasive and compelling demonstration of a novel claim: In order to understand modern American poetry, we need to understand Auden's central place within it.
Stephen Ross
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198708568
- eISBN:
- 9780191779527
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198708568.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
Throughout his career, and increasingly in the later work, John Ashbery has maintained a vibrant dialogue with the English nonsense tradition. Edward Lear in particular has accompanied Ashbery from ...
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Throughout his career, and increasingly in the later work, John Ashbery has maintained a vibrant dialogue with the English nonsense tradition. Edward Lear in particular has accompanied Ashbery from the start as a crucial interlocutor. This essay surveys some of the highlights of that conversation, focusing on Ashbery’s early, macabre rewriting of ‘How Pleasant To Know Mr. Lear!’ and later, lighter engagement with poems such as ‘The Four Little Children Who Went Around the World’ and ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. What continuously draws Ashbery to Lear is his genius for the ‘pleasant surprise’, which Ashbery has called ‘the one essential ingredient for great art’. Long read after the modernist lights of figures such as Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden, Ashbery enjoys an equally strong affinity to Lear and his ‘ludicrously whirligig’ art of sudden shifts.Less
Throughout his career, and increasingly in the later work, John Ashbery has maintained a vibrant dialogue with the English nonsense tradition. Edward Lear in particular has accompanied Ashbery from the start as a crucial interlocutor. This essay surveys some of the highlights of that conversation, focusing on Ashbery’s early, macabre rewriting of ‘How Pleasant To Know Mr. Lear!’ and later, lighter engagement with poems such as ‘The Four Little Children Who Went Around the World’ and ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. What continuously draws Ashbery to Lear is his genius for the ‘pleasant surprise’, which Ashbery has called ‘the one essential ingredient for great art’. Long read after the modernist lights of figures such as Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden, Ashbery enjoys an equally strong affinity to Lear and his ‘ludicrously whirligig’ art of sudden shifts.
Michael Golston
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231164306
- eISBN:
- 9780231538633
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231164306.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 2 is a study of formal allegory in the poetry of Clark Coolidge. It describes Coolidge’s and John Ashbery’s interests in surrealism, then argues that the former’s works from the 1970’s should ...
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Chapter 2 is a study of formal allegory in the poetry of Clark Coolidge. It describes Coolidge’s and John Ashbery’s interests in surrealism, then argues that the former’s works from the 1970’s should be read as an on-going allegory for film and photography. It also shows how Coolidge derived constructivist principles from writers like William Carlos Williams and painters like Yves Tanguy. The chapter goes on to argue that Coolidge allegorically transcodes the discourses of poetry and film in a series of seven books written over a ten year period, discussing how he appropriates texts from Robert Smithson and bases his early poetry on Smithson’s discussions of minimalist sculpture and art.Less
Chapter 2 is a study of formal allegory in the poetry of Clark Coolidge. It describes Coolidge’s and John Ashbery’s interests in surrealism, then argues that the former’s works from the 1970’s should be read as an on-going allegory for film and photography. It also shows how Coolidge derived constructivist principles from writers like William Carlos Williams and painters like Yves Tanguy. The chapter goes on to argue that Coolidge allegorically transcodes the discourses of poetry and film in a series of seven books written over a ten year period, discussing how he appropriates texts from Robert Smithson and bases his early poetry on Smithson’s discussions of minimalist sculpture and art.
Daniel Katz
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625260
- eISBN:
- 9780748652006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625260.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter explores first Jack Spicer's unfinished detective novel, which stages the ‘return’ to San Francisco of aspiring poet J. J. Ralston, who, after several years of academic work on the east ...
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This chapter explores first Jack Spicer's unfinished detective novel, which stages the ‘return’ to San Francisco of aspiring poet J. J. Ralston, who, after several years of academic work on the east coast, comes home precisely to find an origin become unrecognisable. The second is John Ashbery's and James Schuyler's co-authored A Nest of Ninnies. The emphasis on possession and self-identity are somewhat at odds with the poetics of ‘dictation’, the ‘outside’, ‘correspondences’ and haunting, which say nothing of Spicer's pronouncement. A Nest of Ninnies ends on no such note of ‘hereness’ and geographical and cultural continuity, as one might well imagine. In Spicer, Ashbery and Schuyler, one sees where American transatlantic cosmopolitan modernism also invariably, dialectically tended, while the museum fades into its other, which, since Henry James, has at least also been its double: the shopping mall, which Europe's ghosts ask no better than to haunt.Less
This chapter explores first Jack Spicer's unfinished detective novel, which stages the ‘return’ to San Francisco of aspiring poet J. J. Ralston, who, after several years of academic work on the east coast, comes home precisely to find an origin become unrecognisable. The second is John Ashbery's and James Schuyler's co-authored A Nest of Ninnies. The emphasis on possession and self-identity are somewhat at odds with the poetics of ‘dictation’, the ‘outside’, ‘correspondences’ and haunting, which say nothing of Spicer's pronouncement. A Nest of Ninnies ends on no such note of ‘hereness’ and geographical and cultural continuity, as one might well imagine. In Spicer, Ashbery and Schuyler, one sees where American transatlantic cosmopolitan modernism also invariably, dialectically tended, while the museum fades into its other, which, since Henry James, has at least also been its double: the shopping mall, which Europe's ghosts ask no better than to haunt.
