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John Asbery (1927- )

- born in Rochester New York

- B.A.. from Harvard
Harvard → met Frank O’Hara & Kenneth Koch
↓
moved to NY City & formed the core of NY School of poetry
- graduate studies of French literature at Columbia and New York University
--1956 (Fulbright) to France - art and literary critic in France (10 years)
- since 1966 lives in NY → teaches at Bard College
- first poems: Turandot (1953)
Some Trees (1956); both of them before France
The Tennis Court Oath (1962)- after it, he abandoned a self-consciously
experimental style
- later works→ influenced by French surrealism
-poetry of the New York Poets= ← assoc. with the abstraction of New York action
painting / nonrepresentational art: creates reality rather than imitates e.g. Jackson Pollock
and Robert Matherwell (definition: work of art=representation of the creative act that
produced it)
-surrealistic elements
-high-spirited humor
-witty imagery
His poetry :
-visual arts influenced his poetry
sensivity to landscape
dream atmosphere & imagery
popular arts
verbal collage

- his poems → melodious dream-like meditations

- his poems do not order the exterior world but present in solipsistic fashion the poet’s
personal associations and sensory responses to it (“the experience of an experience”)
- his poems are opposed to – conventional logic
- realism
- the idea of a usable past (the past is irrelevant to the present)
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- his work- beautiful in fragment

- difficult poetry, obscurely conceived to alienate readers (Eliot), generally
opaque, lacking sequential development in syntax or theme.
He : “there are no themes or subjects in the usual sense, except very broad one, of an
individual cousciousness confronting or confronted by a world of external phenomena.
The work is a very complex one, but I hope clear and concrete transcript of the
impression left by these phenomena on the cousciousness ”

-A typical Asbery poem: juxtaposes radically different discourses,

shifts rapidly between registers of tone and diction
resists conventional paraphrase and explanation
refuses to present a coherent speaker or a unified lyric self
avoids traditional subject matter , preferring surreal or comic-book
narratives.
juxtaposition of classical myth and popular culture (“Daffy Duck in
Hollywood” or the Orpheus myth in “Syringa”.
1 -at once – conservative and avantgarde
- combines untraditional subject matter with highly traditional form (he revives such form
as sestina) or he treats traditional matters in a charged avant-garde manner
2 – a dilemma at the core of his poetry (in “What is poetry?”: “is poetry only beautiful
images, trying to avoid ideas? Or is it involved with ideas about reality ?”
= Reality resists summary & analysis
Poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” 1975 >title poem of a volume that took all the
prizes (Pulitzer, National Book Award etc)
- based on a painting by Francesco Parmigiannino (a 16th century Italian painter) >a self-
portrait on a convex piece of poplar wood copied from a mirror as barbers used (he saw
in Vienna).
- He plays with the distorting effect of such a mirror held up to nature. “The rapidly
changing feelings of the poet in the act of writing his poems” > See his definition of
poetry:

-His definition of poetry: “I think that any one of my poems might be considered to be a
snapshot of whatever is going on in my mind at the time – first of all the desire to write a
poem, after that wondering if I’ve left the oven on or thinking about where I must be in
the next hourl.”
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-The tenor of his work is “pure/affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything” (Self-
Portrait…)
- The world is an” otherness” in which we dip, largely without comprehension (Self-Port)
3 –The musical aspects of his verse = most important to him
Norton 1259: “What I like about music is its ability of being convincing of
carrying an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of this
argument remain unknown quantities. What remains is the structure, the architecture of
the argument, scene or story. I would like to do this in poetry”….
4 – poems based on solid structure. Start from a firm postulate that is never divulged.
Then creates a dreamlike quality
citat Norton 1259: Asbery would like “to repreduce the power of dreams have of
persuading you that a certain event has a meaning not logically connected with it, or that
there is a hidden relation among disparate objects.”

Exemple: Introduction
To be a writer and write things
You must have experiences you can write about.
Just living won’t do. I have a theory
About masterpieces, how to make them
At very little expense, and they’re every
Bit as good as the others. You can
Use the same materials of the dream, at last.

Ashberry was more interested in process than in finished product: he claimed that
his poems were less about the outside world than about the act of the “poem creating
itself.” Since “things are in a continual state of motion,” the poem should convey “the
experience of an experience.”

Poetry
The effort to create an autonomous anti-art
to obliterate the art of the past by – parody
- assertions of its - absurdity
- irrelevance
- substitution of a set of relationships for art
Images of the familiar world are juxtaposed to present a self-creation universe – not so
much a universe of discourse as a world of feeling
1975 – Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror – Pulitzer
- National Book Critics Circle
- National Book Award
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A 15 pages reverie on Francesco Parmigiannino’s portrait of himself, copied upon a

semiglobe of poplar wood from such a convex mirror as barbers use (he saw it in Vienna)
- reality is an illusion and art the illusion of an illusion whose true subject is not what that
art makes it seen, but whatever he discovers or purposes it to be.
He obliterates both the realism of art and the validity of objective experience.
All is dominated by subjective response.
Asbery’s work is an extreme instance of that dissociation of sensibility from intellect
which Eliot diagnosed as the condition of Romantic excess inherited by early 20 th century
poetry.
Central themes – he captured the tenor of the “information age”

1)mutability and the impossibility of closure – central to English Renaissance and

American transcendentalism
a) older poets → contrast between - changeable world of human and natural affairs
contrasted
to the external, fixed world of the spirit and ideas
b) W. Stevens prefers the mutable to the eternal (infl. majora asupra lui Ashbery)
c) in Ashbery → nothing is changeless → indeterminacy in all his poetry
2)the theme of the self: the nature of consciousness and the fundamental instability of the
self → is consciousness fixed and unitary or fluid and multiple?
Reality is not a hard, fixed entity but an awareness → impression, memories,
desires
3) like one who lived abroad → he is concerned with the quality of American life /
contrasts city and country life / nostalgia for a past which is not recovered

His influence : on language poets (80s and the 90s): Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe
(linguistic playfulness & resistance to being read as a single, personal voice. Instead,
voices → heteroglosia – rejected the idea of transparency of language (influenced by
poststructuralists and deconsructivists Derrida)
language poetry is placed at the intersection of language, history and ideology