Contemporary American Literature

Course 5_4
Spring Semester 2012
Prof.dr. Rodica Mihaila
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. Ja
ckson Pollock and Robert Matherwell (definition: work of art=representation of t
he 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 t
he 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 t
he present)
- his work- beautiful in fragment
- difficult poetry, obscurely conceived to alienate readers (Eli
ot), generally opaque, lacking sequential development in syntax or theme.
He : there are no themes or subjects in the usual sense, except very broad one, o
f an individual cousciousness confronting or confronted by a world of external p
henomena. The work is a very complex one, but I hope clear and concrete transcri
pt 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 comicbook narratives.
juxtaposition of classical myth and popular culture ( Daffy Duck i
n 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 t
he 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 bar
bers used (he saw in Vienna).
- He plays with the distorting effect of such a mirror held up to nature. The rap
idly changing feelings of the poet in the act of writing his poems > See his defi
nition of poetry:
-His definition of poetry: I think that any one of my poems might be considered t
o 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 hour.
-The tenor of his work is pure/affirmation that doesn t affirm anything (Self-Portr
ait )
- The world is an otherness in which we dip, largely without comprehension (Self-P
ortrait)
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 carryi
ng an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of this argu
ment 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 divu
lged. Then creates a dreamlike quality
citat Norton 1259: Asbery would like to repreduce the power of dreams have of per
suading 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 tha
t his poems were less about the outside world than about the act of the poem crea
ting itself. Since things are in a continual state of motion, the poem should conve
y 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

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 inte
llect which Eliot diagnosed as the condition of Romantic excess inherited by ear
ly 20th 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 natura
l affairs contrasted
to the external, fixed world
of the spirit and ideas
b) W. Stevens prefers the mutable to the eternal (infl. majora asupra lu
i 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 instabi
lity of the self ? is consciousness fixed and unitary or fluid and multiple?
Reality is not a hard, fixed entity but an awareness ? impression, memo
ries, 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 Ho
we (linguistic playfulness & resistance to being read as a single, personal voic
e. 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 i
deology