Entries tagged with John Ashbery

April 21, 2020

Document 85: Ashbery Lesson

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.

It’s a kind of game with no losers and only one
Winner—you. First, pain gets
Flashed back through the story and the story
Comes out backwards and woof-side up. This is
No one’s story! At least they think that
For a time and the story is architecture
Now, and then history of a diversified kind.
A vacant episode during which the bricks got
Repointed and browner. And it ends up
Nobody’s, there is nothing for any of us
Except that fretful vacillating around the central
Question that brings us closer,
For better or worse, for all this time.

—John Ashbery

Notes and links

Text: John Ashbery, “Introduction,” in A Wave (New York: Penguin, 1985): 34.

Image: Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1977.

Links: Entry 11: “For a Left Ashbery Critique”
Entry 14: “The Perfect Ashbery (Review)”
Entry 36: “Ashbery Alpha and Omega”

January 20, 2019

Entry 36: Ashbery Alpha and Omega

ashbery w jarrett earnest

Barrett Watten, “Ashbery Alpha and Omega: Presentism, Historicism, and Vice Versa.” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures (Changsha, China), no. 3 (2019): 87–93. For pdf, click here.

Abstract: This reading of a single poem from the last collection of verse John Ashbery published before his death in 2017 sees it as an example of a concept of “presentism” that differs from modernist or postmodern accounts of the “present” associated with abstraction or immanence. Rather, Ashbery’s presentism is historical in being based on overlapping and discontinuous linguistic and experiential frames. Ashbery’s poetic use of the content of experience is always mediated through its presentation as information, ranging from high to low values and often employing “low-mimetic,” pop cultural elements. What results is a suspension of certainty in which meaning is structured and informed by its status as information. Thus leaving open questions of knowledge, Ashbery’s poetry does not represent a fully present consciousness but relies on forms of cognition and information processing that are nonconscious, operating in the background and informed by decades of his practice as a poet. A brief comparison with the late paintings of Willem de Kooning, who experienced cognitive disability at the end of his life, points out similar nonconscious forms of cognition such as motor skill and even aesthetic judgment. The reading is thus informed by information theory, cognitive science, and neurophysiology in showing how Ashbery’s late style makes a present that is historical and structured on his entire oeuvre.

Keywords: Poetics, the New York School, information theory, cognitive science, late style

Headnote: This paper was given in a session titled “Social Readings of John Ashbery” at the Louisville Conference for Literature and Culture After 1900, University of Louisville, Feb. 2018. Thanks to Alan Golding and panelists Sandra Simonds and David Kellogg.

Image: detail from John Ashbery, Late for School, c. 1948. Collage, 12 1/2 x 8 inches. From “John Ashbery with Jarrett Earnest,” Brooklyn Rail (3 May 2016); link here.

August 6, 2011

Entry 14: The Perfect Ashbery (Review)

Planisphere, by John Ashbery. New York: HarperCollins/Ecco Press, 2009.

There is one poem in Planisphere I would love to have written. I see it as an apogee of Ashbery’s art, toward which all combinations of rhetoric and slippage, on their elliptical path, tend. This is language art at its finest. I’ll leave it at that:

STRESS RELATED

You don’t see so much of these anymore,
not see so much of this. There were others
who saw more. Innocence is cool,
he offered. Now not so much.
Innocence is the finish. Through all our
wide day it stressed. It was foolish to argue,
idle to come undone. The post arrived.
It all failed. All failed somewhere. [104]

March 12, 2010

Entry 11: For a Left Ashbery Critique

from “Ashbery’s Historicism: 
Nonsite Hypotaxis and Modernity Critique
in The Double Dream of Spring“

Presented at John Ashbery in Paris: International Conference
12 March 2010, Institut Charles V, Université Paris Diderot

What makes The Double Dream of Spring both unique and exemplary for Ash­bery’s work is its positive critique of social modernity, rather than a mere ironic reversal of modernism, at the intersection of critical theory, poststructuralism, and romanticism. In the figural space of his works, Ashbery inverts of the poetics of radical particularity—seen in terms of an aesthetic of the fragment and the condition of reification under capitalism—that relocates what Altieri terms its “aesthetic agency” in an interplay of “partial local coherence” that at once proposes and disposes of any horizon of totality. … More

February 11, 2010

Event 07: John Ashbery in Paris

“Ashbery’s Historicism: Regions of Modernity
          in The Double Dream of Spring“

Workshop Session III, 14:30–17:00
Friday, 12 March 2010

John Ashbery in Paris: International Conference
11–13 March 2010
Institut Charles V, Université Paris Diderot

For the complete program, see:
http://johnashberyinparis.blogspot.com/2010/02/conference-programme.html