John Ashbery has influenced more poets than almost any other author since 1950. Dean Young, Jane Miller, David Shapiro, and many younger poets take up the pen from within his tradition of shifting tone, quirky imagery, and timeless narratives. His innovations...
[more]John Ashbery has influenced more poets than almost any other author since 1950. Dean Young, Jane Miller, David Shapiro, and many younger poets take up the pen from within his tradition of shifting tone, quirky imagery, and timeless narratives. His innovations seem to have arrived simultaneously with Postmodernism, his methods questioning basic assumptions about unity and coherence in language and life. Like all great poets, Ashbery has devised an aesthetics that capture the character of his moment in time.
Ashbery's poetry uses conventional forms in unconventional ways. His traditional, free-verse stanzas contain surreal imagery and deliberately frustrated metaphors laced through chaotic quasi-narratives. The conversational tone of his speakers implies that their words will make sense -- but they don't. Images and metaphors dissolve, leaving the tone itself as the only stabilizing element. Readers attempt to bring coherence to an incoherent flow of ideas, usually with little success.
Ashbery teaches us that ideas are mercurial. One can't articulate them directly because they always slip from under the words that try to hold them. The predicament, as Ashbery views it, is that "When one goes at ideas directly, with hammer and tongs as it were, ideas tend to elude one in a poem. I think they only come back in when one pretends not to be paying any attention to them, like a cat that will rub against your leg."
For Ashbery, nothing in life makes sense; there's no overarching meaning to the constant stream of messages and data from the physical world. His narrators are as concerned about people yelling in the street as they are about the nature of love or the weather. Ashbery tells us that since reality is fragmented, the best art form is fragmentation. Out of the tangle of mismatched information, slippery moments of clarity may be born.
Ashbery is a prolific poet with 19 books to his name, including "Girls on the Run: A Poem," "Can You Hear, Bird," "Hotel Lautremont," and "Flow Chart." And it seems he has received every major poetry prize except the Nobel. W.H. Auden selected his first book, "Some Trees," for the Yale Younger Poet Series. "A Wave" won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Are you listening, Stockholm?
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