Authors
John Ashbery (b. 1927)
Bibliography
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
As one of the more controversial contemporary poets in NAAL, Ashbery has seen his work reverently unpacked and explicated by many well-known academics. However, others who write verse or who write criticism of contemporary poetry have faulted Ashbery for aesthetic excess and a too obscure, too aloof relationship to worldly experience. The poet as connoisseur is not new: Stevens played the role frequently, and Eliot, at the end of his life, wrote long stanzas in which a mildly amused or bewildered speaker toured a landscape as if on holiday. A question to entertain, as you grow comfortable with Ashbery's unique voice, is where and how that voice moves beyond its characteristic detachment.
1. If you assume that the opening stanzas of a poem, especially of a long poem, should engage us and make us want to read on, review the opening stanza of Soonest Mended (1970) and the first two quatrains of The Lament upon the Waters (1977). Summarize the content of each stanza, with special attention to the mysteries or questions that have been opened up but not answered. Describe the speaker's attitude toward questioning: Is the process an urgent one? Or only an amusement? What seems to be at stake for the speaker in the meditations that begin these two different openings?
2. Describe and speculate about the "angels" mentioned at the opening and closing of part I of Illustration (1956). Who sees them, and what do they see them as? Is the novice committing suicide? Is she a figure in a surrealist painting? Does part II of the poem provide guidance on how to read part I?
3. Read carefully and discuss the opening eight lines of the second stanza of Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Then read carefully the closing nine lines of the poem's third stanza (lines 302-10) and try an interpretation of those lines. Compare these two passages. What thematic similarities do you see? Has the thinking or the mood shifted, as you move from the opening of the second stanza to the close of the third? Reading over larger sections of Self Portrait, what further development do you see, related to those perceptions and speculations?
4. When Ashbery comments about life, love, death, dreams, or other traditionally heavy poetic subjects in these longer poems, does he comment as a bard? As a prophet? Describe the sensibility which offers these valuations to us, and comment on how we might be expected to engage with them.