Word: ashberyã
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Reading a poem by John Ashbery ’49 for the first time feels like walking into the room of a stranger. The space is mysterious; the language, unfamiliar. There is some sort of order, but it is known only to the owner. Slowly, though, orienting details emerge. Ashbery??s words take on a reassuring rhythm, thrumming steadily, visually, against the walls of the mind. Gradually one gets one’s bearings, locating oneself within the discursive beauty. “How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time, / The delicious...
...Ashbery??s experimental tendencies once marked him as a figure of the avant-garde, but his enigmatic, intensely introspective brand of poetry has been receiving much popular acclaim of late. A bound Library of America edition anthologized his collected works in 2008, an honor accorded to the likes of Emerson and Whitman, and a course setting his work alongside Philip Larkin’s was offered at Harvard this spring. To top it off, yesterday President Faust presented Ashbery, now 81 years old, with the 2009 Harvard Arts Medal for “excellence in the arts...
Based on the Farnum Lectures she delivered at Princeton in 2003, “Invisible Listeners” is built around three essays on three very different poets—George Herbert, Walt Whitman, and John Ashbery??who, Vendler argues, share a common desire to find companionship or hold colloquy with some fundamentally inaccessible “other...
Then, she moves on to how Whitman is able to fantasize a radically democratic future in which new forms of social and erotic relations, including male-male, will be possible, and to Ashbery??s discovery of a kindred aesthetic sensibility in a long-dead Renaissance painter...
...coming back” and how the two are intertwined. But this inevitable cycle is not so much an exercise in futility as it is a constant return to a place of self-searching and inspiration. In “The Painter,” we again see Ashbery??s paradigmatic enterprise. The painter returns again and again to the sea for inspiration, emphasizing the changeableness of the sea as a metaphor for his art: “My soul, when I paint this next portrait / Let it be you who wrecks the canvas...