Explaining John Ashbery’s poetry in a three paragraph blog post is a near impossible task. Instead, anyone who might be interested should go to their local university or public library and check out David Herd’s book, John Ashbery and American Poetry (or buy it through Amazon, at $75.00), and read it along with Ashbery‘s first five books, which has been bound into a collection called The Mooring of Starting Out. That’s how I did it and I plan on quoting from that book this week to share some concepts to keep in mind when reading Ashbery, a poet who I feel is immensely rewarding if one makes the effort to grapple with his idiosyncratic mode.

For a very ruff summarization, Ashbery is the natural progression of a form of poetics started by Wallace Stevens where the poem’s subject matter should generally be the poem itself, not to derive meaning from but there for the reader to develop an experiential understanding with, a poetry of the moment, or the occasion, the ineffable presence that can be found in a poem when there is a simultaneous construction and deconstruction of the poem’s language, syntax, images, thoughts and forms. The poetry then becoming not just a comment on itself, but an expression of our relationship with the world and our selves.

Getting back to Herd’s book, here is an account of a lecture Ashbery provided to Yale in the late 1960’s which is equally applicable towards his poetics. It should be noted that Ashbery typically refrains from explaining his poetry, or deciphering if the case may be, and when standing up for the lecture, suggested that his standing before the crowd said about all that needed to be said (but, of course, he continued on from there, because that was what he was paid to do):

…Ashbery performs his sense of occasion. His opening gambit is curious, intriguing reflect on the occasion, to work out for themselves [the audience] why it is that their presence combined with the poet’s is so eloquent that no further characterization is necessary. He call on his audience to reflect on the occasion in which they too are participating, to which they too contribute, and the significance of which they too are more capable of grasping. Ashbery, in other words, sets out to pursue the occasion not as an opportunity to preach to his audience-- they do not need a poet telling them what to think-- but to draw attention to the occasion itself, and so to draw their attention to what they have in common. (103)