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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.