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Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
John Ashberry won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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5,757 people want to read
About the author
John Ashbery
269Ìýbooks464ÌýfollowersFormal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975).
From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.
From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 245 reviews
February 26, 2009
Well, I mean, GOD. You know? So beautiful. But also Ashbery sizing up the same kind of moral question over and over a dozen times in the space of a poem, and with dozens of poems (including the formidable and exhausting kind of index of ideas in the title poem) it just wrung me utterly dry.
I could be completely wrong in my interpretation (Dana says: I could just be talking out of my ass) or doing the most pre-emptory surface reading. All this has happened before. (Particularly since Dana says that the first time she read this book -- at my age -- she sensed something very profound was happening but couldn't get a handle on what it was. And I'm all OH YEAH TOTALLY GOT THIS NO PROBS GUYS.)
Still, Ashbery seems to be saying something authentic about the experience of being human--looking around at all the beauty, all the time, the most pedestrian obvious kind of beauty, the relentless surge of the physical world: dragonflies and tidepools and dirigibles and Queen Anne's Lace, all the time--and feeling suffocated. There's some essence, some meaning that just can't be sussed by the sum of all the world's physical parts. You're mired in all that gorgeous flotsam and jetsam, all those overcoats and scrambled eggs, beef and calico, but you can never get past it into something permanent that says ANYTHING about ANYTHING.
"Are you sure this is what the pure day/ with its standing light intends?"
Well sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it's all too much, but it is what it is. Thanks, John Ashbery, and goodbye.
I could be completely wrong in my interpretation (Dana says: I could just be talking out of my ass) or doing the most pre-emptory surface reading. All this has happened before. (Particularly since Dana says that the first time she read this book -- at my age -- she sensed something very profound was happening but couldn't get a handle on what it was. And I'm all OH YEAH TOTALLY GOT THIS NO PROBS GUYS.)
Still, Ashbery seems to be saying something authentic about the experience of being human--looking around at all the beauty, all the time, the most pedestrian obvious kind of beauty, the relentless surge of the physical world: dragonflies and tidepools and dirigibles and Queen Anne's Lace, all the time--and feeling suffocated. There's some essence, some meaning that just can't be sussed by the sum of all the world's physical parts. You're mired in all that gorgeous flotsam and jetsam, all those overcoats and scrambled eggs, beef and calico, but you can never get past it into something permanent that says ANYTHING about ANYTHING.
"Are you sure this is what the pure day/ with its standing light intends?"
Well sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it's all too much, but it is what it is. Thanks, John Ashbery, and goodbye.
April 3, 2016
Gosh, am I actually allowed to dislike this? Will I be thrown out of some club? I feel some trepidation.
What has finally given me permission to say I don't like it is listening to the august Poetry Magazine's podcast in which they defend Ashbery, saying the work is bricolage. Well, I hate bricolage, so hooray!
Every so often there is some fantastic line or image and I try to seize it and connect it to something. But nothing is connected to anything. I, too, find incoherent juxtaposition very entertaining when I do it myself, but I don't expect to inflict the results on others.
Clearly lots of people like Ashbery: God speed to you all etc.
What has finally given me permission to say I don't like it is listening to the august Poetry Magazine's podcast in which they defend Ashbery, saying the work is bricolage. Well, I hate bricolage, so hooray!
Every so often there is some fantastic line or image and I try to seize it and connect it to something. But nothing is connected to anything. I, too, find incoherent juxtaposition very entertaining when I do it myself, but I don't expect to inflict the results on others.
Clearly lots of people like Ashbery: God speed to you all etc.
March 14, 2018
If the first or last poem doesn't touch some pink, squishy area inside of you, you may be dead. Or possibly just an asshole.
...I like the spirit of the songs, though,
The camaraderie that is the last thing to peel off,
Visible even now on the woven pattern of branches
And twilight. Why must you go? Why can't you
Spend the night, here in my bed, with my arms wrapped tightly
around you?
Surely that would solve everything by supplying
A theory of knowledge on a scale with the gigantic
Bits and pieces of knowledge we have retained:
An LP record of all your favorite friendships,
Of letters from the front? Too
Fantastic to make sense? But it made the chimes ring
If you listen you can hear them ringing still:
A mood, a Stimmung, adding up to a sense of what they really
were,
All along, through the chain of lengthening days.
...I like the spirit of the songs, though,
The camaraderie that is the last thing to peel off,
Visible even now on the woven pattern of branches
And twilight. Why must you go? Why can't you
Spend the night, here in my bed, with my arms wrapped tightly
around you?
Surely that would solve everything by supplying
A theory of knowledge on a scale with the gigantic
Bits and pieces of knowledge we have retained:
An LP record of all your favorite friendships,
Of letters from the front? Too
Fantastic to make sense? But it made the chimes ring
If you listen you can hear them ringing still:
A mood, a Stimmung, adding up to a sense of what they really
were,
All along, through the chain of lengthening days.
July 4, 2008
"You bad birds,
But God shall not punish you, you
Shall be with us in heaven, though less
Conscious of your happiness, perhaps than we."
But God shall not punish you, you
Shall be with us in heaven, though less
Conscious of your happiness, perhaps than we."
March 5, 2022
God is this boring. Super-pretentious, totally uninteresting in style, word choice, rhythm, little sublime or nuanced. Made me crave Louise Gluck. Does anyone write like this now? If one of these poems showed up in my workshop I’d be too bored to even comment. The last piece is more of an essay than a poem (as Ashbery admitted). And yet this book won every prize out there. Help? Why do I dislike these books everyone else likes?
April 9, 2019
Asbery's Self-Portrait
The American poet John Ashbery's (1927 -- 2017) book "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" received extraordinary accolades upon its publication in 1975. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Circle Award. The book, especially the lengthy concluding poem for which it is named, solidified Ashbery's reputation as a major American poet and remains his most widely-read work. The book consists of 35 poems, including the title poem. I am in the midst of reading the Library of America's collection of Ashbery's poems from 1956-1987 and wanted to pause to try to take stock through this important collection.
Ashbery's poetry and this volume resist paraphrase. Each poem includes lines and figures which are individually striking and often beautiful; but the poems cannot be read discursively. The diction shifts markedly in the poems from the solemn to the profane. There are sudden shifts in person and in tenses. Frequently, lines or sections are clear enough, but a poem as a whole will appear opaque. There is a sense in Ashbery's work of cutting through the tendency to rationalize and to focus on the joy of experience in its diversity. The concreteness and detail of the poem show a love of things in their variety and keen emotional responses. The poems frequently have the sense of an interior monologue or a discussion among friends. For all their difficulty, the poems have a certain lightness of touch. The poetry is urbane and shows great knowledge of art, music, literature, movies, and popular culture. And with reading, some sense of what Ashbery is about becomes clear.
"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was a watershed book for Ashbery because it is somewhat more accessible than his earlier avant-garde books. Yet the difficulties remain. The title poem, Ashbery's masterpiece, is, on one level accessible to read. It moves in a narrative reflection, and can be followed, up to a point. This is still a difficult poem which will bear close and repeated readings.
The title poem is based on a painting of 1524 of the same name by Parmigianino that now is in the Kunsthistoriche Museum, Vienna. The painting shows a reflection of the artist on a convex mirror. It is marked by a seemingly distorted and large right hand, and the somewhat feminine yet intense face of the artist staring at the viewer. In his poem, Ashbery addresses the artist, discusses and questions him about his painting, and quotes commentators on the painting contemporary and modern. He describes the work and his reaction to it, e.g.
"That is the tune but there are no words
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music."
The suggestion is that words are inadequate to capture reality, which must be conceived imaginatively. As the poem progresses, it discusses tradition and interpretation and perspectivism in understanding reality. The artist's vision is brought forward as Ashbery meditates on modern life and its cacophony. The poem becomes its own reflection of Ashbery's understanding of the creative endeavor.
The short poems in this volume are overshadowed by the Self-Portrait. These poems tend to be even more elliptical than this major poem of the volume. In my reading, I tried to identify the works that I could respond to while passing over, for the present, others that seemed to me obscure. This might be a good way for other readers to approach the book.
The poems I enjoyed include the first poem, "As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat, the title of which is based on a poem called "Tom May's Death" by Andrew Marvell. (1621 --1678). Ashbery begins with the words "I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free" which in the context of the poem seems to speak of the renewal of the creative endeavor. The "Poem in Three Parts" begins with a startling phrase ("Once I let a guy blow me") but proceeds to an exploration of how one responds to experience: "Who goes to bed with what/ is unimportant. Feelings are important./ Mostly I think of feelings, they fill up my life/ Like the wind, like tumbling clouds/ In a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds.""
There is a charm and a picture of adolescent sexuality in "Mixed Feelings". The poem "The One Thing that can Save America" with its sense of nostalgia as Ashbery describes the "timeless" truths of warding off danger "Now and in the future, in cool yards,/In quiet small houses in the country,/Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets." The poems "Tenth Symphony", "Fear of Death" and "City Afternoon" are among others that I enjoyed.
This book is difficult, modern poetry that may not appeal to all readers. The poems in this book are evocative and I think a sense of them can be got from sympathetic reading. This book deserves its reputation as a major work of American literature.
Robin Friedman
The American poet John Ashbery's (1927 -- 2017) book "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" received extraordinary accolades upon its publication in 1975. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Circle Award. The book, especially the lengthy concluding poem for which it is named, solidified Ashbery's reputation as a major American poet and remains his most widely-read work. The book consists of 35 poems, including the title poem. I am in the midst of reading the Library of America's collection of Ashbery's poems from 1956-1987 and wanted to pause to try to take stock through this important collection.
Ashbery's poetry and this volume resist paraphrase. Each poem includes lines and figures which are individually striking and often beautiful; but the poems cannot be read discursively. The diction shifts markedly in the poems from the solemn to the profane. There are sudden shifts in person and in tenses. Frequently, lines or sections are clear enough, but a poem as a whole will appear opaque. There is a sense in Ashbery's work of cutting through the tendency to rationalize and to focus on the joy of experience in its diversity. The concreteness and detail of the poem show a love of things in their variety and keen emotional responses. The poems frequently have the sense of an interior monologue or a discussion among friends. For all their difficulty, the poems have a certain lightness of touch. The poetry is urbane and shows great knowledge of art, music, literature, movies, and popular culture. And with reading, some sense of what Ashbery is about becomes clear.
"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was a watershed book for Ashbery because it is somewhat more accessible than his earlier avant-garde books. Yet the difficulties remain. The title poem, Ashbery's masterpiece, is, on one level accessible to read. It moves in a narrative reflection, and can be followed, up to a point. This is still a difficult poem which will bear close and repeated readings.
The title poem is based on a painting of 1524 of the same name by Parmigianino that now is in the Kunsthistoriche Museum, Vienna. The painting shows a reflection of the artist on a convex mirror. It is marked by a seemingly distorted and large right hand, and the somewhat feminine yet intense face of the artist staring at the viewer. In his poem, Ashbery addresses the artist, discusses and questions him about his painting, and quotes commentators on the painting contemporary and modern. He describes the work and his reaction to it, e.g.
"That is the tune but there are no words
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music."
The suggestion is that words are inadequate to capture reality, which must be conceived imaginatively. As the poem progresses, it discusses tradition and interpretation and perspectivism in understanding reality. The artist's vision is brought forward as Ashbery meditates on modern life and its cacophony. The poem becomes its own reflection of Ashbery's understanding of the creative endeavor.
The short poems in this volume are overshadowed by the Self-Portrait. These poems tend to be even more elliptical than this major poem of the volume. In my reading, I tried to identify the works that I could respond to while passing over, for the present, others that seemed to me obscure. This might be a good way for other readers to approach the book.
The poems I enjoyed include the first poem, "As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat, the title of which is based on a poem called "Tom May's Death" by Andrew Marvell. (1621 --1678). Ashbery begins with the words "I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free" which in the context of the poem seems to speak of the renewal of the creative endeavor. The "Poem in Three Parts" begins with a startling phrase ("Once I let a guy blow me") but proceeds to an exploration of how one responds to experience: "Who goes to bed with what/ is unimportant. Feelings are important./ Mostly I think of feelings, they fill up my life/ Like the wind, like tumbling clouds/ In a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds.""
There is a charm and a picture of adolescent sexuality in "Mixed Feelings". The poem "The One Thing that can Save America" with its sense of nostalgia as Ashbery describes the "timeless" truths of warding off danger "Now and in the future, in cool yards,/In quiet small houses in the country,/Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets." The poems "Tenth Symphony", "Fear of Death" and "City Afternoon" are among others that I enjoyed.
This book is difficult, modern poetry that may not appeal to all readers. The poems in this book are evocative and I think a sense of them can be got from sympathetic reading. This book deserves its reputation as a major work of American literature.
Robin Friedman
June 5, 2007
I don't know if I'm poetry-deaf or what, but this just seems like a bunch of words strung together for no reason other than to befuddle.
April 30, 2020
New York / Where I am now, which is a logarithm / Of other cities
I organize a reading series called "Covers Only" where the only rule is you can't read your own work. We did a halloween edition back in October where everyone had to dress as the poet/writer they were reading as, and I dressed as John Ashbery as he looks on my copy of this book:
I went as Ashbery more out of the ability to look LIKE him as opposed to my penchant admiration of his work (though I do admire his mustachioed-Daddy aesthetic) of which I have only read spottily.
Now, to the current day—Lo and behold beneath my bedside pile I pulled out this paperback which I have had for years and which I'd lost in the wash of other books that ebb and flow from the side of my bed. Mostly in my time with this particular copy, I've read the eponymous long poem though very little else aside from a random short poem here or there. Well, I had nothing to do and certainly nowhere to go so I started to make my way through the other work in this collection and it is...not good. The fact this book won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award can only be chalked up to the strength of the last and title work, which is frankly great. So great in fact that the remainder of the book feels like it were written by a different poet altogether, and a poor one at that. But, like those critics, I will give this book a solid rating because of the strength of the self-portrait in question, which is rigorous and weird and beautiful in its own kind of limitless way (which is saying a lot given that it's only fifteen pages long). As to the rest—throw it from the steamship of modernity, for it's a bore.
I organize a reading series called "Covers Only" where the only rule is you can't read your own work. We did a halloween edition back in October where everyone had to dress as the poet/writer they were reading as, and I dressed as John Ashbery as he looks on my copy of this book:
I went as Ashbery more out of the ability to look LIKE him as opposed to my penchant admiration of his work (though I do admire his mustachioed-Daddy aesthetic) of which I have only read spottily.
Now, to the current day—Lo and behold beneath my bedside pile I pulled out this paperback which I have had for years and which I'd lost in the wash of other books that ebb and flow from the side of my bed. Mostly in my time with this particular copy, I've read the eponymous long poem though very little else aside from a random short poem here or there. Well, I had nothing to do and certainly nowhere to go so I started to make my way through the other work in this collection and it is...not good. The fact this book won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award can only be chalked up to the strength of the last and title work, which is frankly great. So great in fact that the remainder of the book feels like it were written by a different poet altogether, and a poor one at that. But, like those critics, I will give this book a solid rating because of the strength of the self-portrait in question, which is rigorous and weird and beautiful in its own kind of limitless way (which is saying a lot given that it's only fifteen pages long). As to the rest—throw it from the steamship of modernity, for it's a bore.
November 10, 2017
40% evocative imagery and 60% highbrow gibberish. In this review, I'll sort out which is which, and dare you to up the percentages.
The first six lines are fairly accessible. Most of the Ashbery's book has to do with the gap between two layers of truth- seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, present and past, life and death, etc. In this case, it's the discomfort of being labeled and the sense that labels cannot describe the internal changes of a person. Abstract, but I think I get it.
After that, we get a picnicking couple, a glass wall, and a directive to go back to the city. Why? Does the couple represent the people who are labeling the river? What does the season have to do with it? Why go back to the city? Why throw in a hawk? How does any of this connect to the first six lines?
I used this poem because I thought it was the easiest to grasp. The rest were more confusing. If anyone can explain this book to me, I'm all ears.
River
It thinks itself too good for
These generalizations and is
Moved on by them. The opposite side
Is plunged in shade, this one
In self-esteem. But the center
Keeps collapsing and re-forming.
The couple at a picnic table (but
It's too early in the season for picnics)
Are traipsed across by the river's
Unknowing knowledge of its workings
To avoid possible boredom and the stain
Of too much intuition the whole scene
Is walled behind glass. "Too early,"
She says, "In the season." A hawk drifts by.
"Send everybody back to the city."
The first six lines are fairly accessible. Most of the Ashbery's book has to do with the gap between two layers of truth- seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, present and past, life and death, etc. In this case, it's the discomfort of being labeled and the sense that labels cannot describe the internal changes of a person. Abstract, but I think I get it.
After that, we get a picnicking couple, a glass wall, and a directive to go back to the city. Why? Does the couple represent the people who are labeling the river? What does the season have to do with it? Why go back to the city? Why throw in a hawk? How does any of this connect to the first six lines?
I used this poem because I thought it was the easiest to grasp. The rest were more confusing. If anyone can explain this book to me, I'm all ears.
Read
January 1, 2024every time i'm back it's a good time
______
my reread summer!! is HITTING !!! love for u john and your glimmering newrosies
______
Anyway here is This American in retracing my steps a little. Bloom rates him among the real American pantheon though we do have our concerns about HB. Self-Portrait! fascinating and one I'll return to soon I think. He's crystalline and slippery so I want to decipher the elliptical happenings I spy these influences elsewhere.
Of course the title poem, the last of the collection (and by far the longest) is a stand-out. All over the place JA peels back the layers of Burnt Norton and tessellates ever and ever. Lovely stuff
______
my reread summer!! is HITTING !!! love for u john and your glimmering newrosies
______
Anyway here is This American in retracing my steps a little. Bloom rates him among the real American pantheon though we do have our concerns about HB. Self-Portrait! fascinating and one I'll return to soon I think. He's crystalline and slippery so I want to decipher the elliptical happenings I spy these influences elsewhere.
Of course the title poem, the last of the collection (and by far the longest) is a stand-out. All over the place JA peels back the layers of Burnt Norton and tessellates ever and ever. Lovely stuff
January 19, 2024
normally i try to see what bits of a poetry collection i can strip for spare parts but this one outdid me to such an extent it's like those macbooks where you can't replace the battery without removing all the other components, or when people are abducted by ufos and they describe the doors sealing up behind them without leaving a seam
December 23, 2012
Ugh, wonderful! Wonderful wonderful wonderful! I haven't responded to poetry in this way in so long! I don't remember much of anything, and I understand probably even less, but I want to read this book and these poems again and again and again!
I found a podcast of Ashbery reading from the title poem for about 20 minutes, and this seemed a really productive inroad for me. The difficulty in recall with his work, for me, lies in the fact that Ashbery sequences images and thoughts in ways that follow mind-patterns rather than narrative ones. Ideas are capped early or run too long; one sight will associatively melt into another. Listening to him read, though, allows everything to settle around a single source, the voice, which - I think - may in fact be the "one solid the spaces lean on" (in Plath's phrase) in his poetry. His marker.
The title poem makes me want to weep, it's so fucking beautiful, so indelible. I'd start citing, but I'd probably transcribe the poem's entirety. Maybe just one, and probably an overquoted line, but deservedly so:
"The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention."
Doesn't this remind you that poetry isn't dead; that it has a purpose and we have an urgent need for it? How sentimental I become during the holidays!
I found a podcast of Ashbery reading from the title poem for about 20 minutes, and this seemed a really productive inroad for me. The difficulty in recall with his work, for me, lies in the fact that Ashbery sequences images and thoughts in ways that follow mind-patterns rather than narrative ones. Ideas are capped early or run too long; one sight will associatively melt into another. Listening to him read, though, allows everything to settle around a single source, the voice, which - I think - may in fact be the "one solid the spaces lean on" (in Plath's phrase) in his poetry. His marker.
The title poem makes me want to weep, it's so fucking beautiful, so indelible. I'd start citing, but I'd probably transcribe the poem's entirety. Maybe just one, and probably an overquoted line, but deservedly so:
"The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention."
Doesn't this remind you that poetry isn't dead; that it has a purpose and we have an urgent need for it? How sentimental I become during the holidays!
April 13, 2010
After all, he is the head of the epistemological revolution in American poetry (says T. Hoagland) and after all he is a so & so whatever fellow with an apartment on rails to prove it and didn't he live in Paris for a while like a good little J.A. He's laughing at us for loving him. I just know he's holding these flowers and he gets it. He gets us this big piece of the cake and we nibble it on the fat couch.
April 30, 2023
A lot of great poems in here. The title poem is like a deranged art criticism/poetry mash up.
Top three poems in the collection:
1. Grand Gallop
2. Self-portrait
3. Forties Flick
Top three poems in the collection:
1. Grand Gallop
2. Self-portrait
3. Forties Flick
March 29, 2025
Reading Ashbery feels like taking a small dose of some mildly hallucinatory drug—the effect of which is less the flighty, experiential, and centrifugally-distracted kind, and more the “this means something!� kind, a la Close Encounters Dreyfuss staring at a pile of mashed potatoes.
If pressed, I could write a solid essay on a poem or two, but most are slippery’r than noodlin� a catfish. But even when Ashbery takes me beyond my limits of interpretative power, I am ambushed by gobsmackery in some small moment or shining facet of his, some surprising metaphor or cackle-fetching image or phrase.
I have a feeling this is just the beginning for my relationship with Ashbery, and likely even with just this book, but already “Grand Galop� stands as a strong contender for a favorite poem 1970-forward.
If pressed, I could write a solid essay on a poem or two, but most are slippery’r than noodlin� a catfish. But even when Ashbery takes me beyond my limits of interpretative power, I am ambushed by gobsmackery in some small moment or shining facet of his, some surprising metaphor or cackle-fetching image or phrase.
I have a feeling this is just the beginning for my relationship with Ashbery, and likely even with just this book, but already “Grand Galop� stands as a strong contender for a favorite poem 1970-forward.
December 4, 2021
Like falling asleep in the sunlight on a long train ride.
April 25, 2021
John Ashbury’s work needs little introduction. This collection won him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1976 but he was already famous by this point.
This work - like Ashbury’s other poetry - is opaque and internalized. I found myself reading his poems and then sifting through dozens of threads from my own past - just while processing one of his poems. So there you have it, I prefer to read Ashbury’s work for the imagery that he evokes in my past.
Ashbury said it was his goal to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about. I think he has done that here.
4.5 stars. This is one of poetry’s classic collections from the last fifty years.
This work - like Ashbury’s other poetry - is opaque and internalized. I found myself reading his poems and then sifting through dozens of threads from my own past - just while processing one of his poems. So there you have it, I prefer to read Ashbury’s work for the imagery that he evokes in my past.
Ashbury said it was his goal to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about. I think he has done that here.
4.5 stars. This is one of poetry’s classic collections from the last fifty years.
January 7, 2021
Lecture très difficile, j’ai mis presque 1 mois et demi. Les mêmes thèmes reviennent très souvent, assez redondant du coup. Je pense que c’est le genre de recueil que l’on doit étudier avant de juger sur une première lecture où l’on est seul et sans aide. Pour l’instant c’est 2 étoiles, à voir plus tard.
UPDATE: deuxième lecture bien moins difficile que la première. J'ai même réussi à me connecter à l'œuvre. Ashbery veut tout et ne rien dire, c'était plutôt intéressant. Coup de cœur sur 'Voyage in the Blue'.
UPDATE: deuxième lecture bien moins difficile que la première. J'ai même réussi à me connecter à l'œuvre. Ashbery veut tout et ne rien dire, c'était plutôt intéressant. Coup de cœur sur 'Voyage in the Blue'.
March 14, 2023
Que decirte que no sepas ya John Ashbery. Te amo con locura mi nena.
February 15, 2021
In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just immediate enjoyment but our judgement also, since we subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another. The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction.
—G. F. W. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (trans. Bosanquet)
Here are poems for the end of history; here is the philosophy of art. Luckily, we don't even have to read Hegel to know how we arrived at this terminus. John Ashbery was an art critic: we can just line the paintings up from David to Delacroix to Monet to Picasso to Pollock to see what happened. Once perspective, which secured an objective viewpoint to hold phenomena together, was removed, we were left with subjectivity, what things looked like to the artist; but if only the artist's subjectivity remains to organize the painting, then there is no need for things at all. The painting's sole content therefore is—and, in retrospect, perhaps always was—an allegory of its own procedure as mental processes' formal corollary. Which is what Hegel said, more or less: history, in this case art history, is the progressive realization of self-consciousness. Ashbery knows it. In "Ode to Bill," his speaker walks out into nature, has a quasi-Romantic "vision" of a horse, and then ejects it with the Hegelian assurance, "Him too we can sacrifice / To the end progress, for we must, we must be moving on." Or this, from "On Autumn Lake":
What is appealing about Ashbery, though, is that he is not altogether Gertrude Stein, that first of the postmoderns (if Parmigianino wasn't the first—more of that later). He has his moments—for example, "These khaki undershorts hung out on lines, / The wind billowing among them, are we never to make a statement?" or, "Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him"—but his texts do not exactly dissolve into into the free play of signifiers. At the macro level of form, the sonorities of the poem remain: the shell of lyric personality, of emotion recollected in tranquility, of the oracular utterance. As in Pollock, if you squint you might see an outline of composition. Or more—genuine, indelible truth.
You could get this collection's very first line tattooed up your arm or chiseled on your headstone or inscribed on some portico: "I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free." "I did too!" one cries inwardly, happy to have found someone who understands. Then one reads the next lines: "Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight / Filters down�" Where? And what do you mean "as"?—are you or aren't you? The collection mostly works this way. While the cycle of poems traverses the whole seasonal round—as points out—overall it's like walking in winter on intermittently cleared sidewalks. We slide over surfaces of inscrutable private reference and put a foot through a fluffy mass of willful folly (scholars much of this, but we have the right to read poetry without asking their help or permission)—and then suddenly the solid ground of wisdom.
Could the wisdom be a postmodern trick—have we been coaxed by the hoaxer into actually, naïvely believing something? I doubt it. Other readers took this landmark 1975 collection, often cited as its author's masterpiece, seriously enough: it won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award that year. Ashbery contends, in less mawkish words than I'm about to use, that whatever feels real in art, be it ever so much a discourse or simulacra or representation, is real:
One poem I think I understand in its entirety—they are few and far between—is "Scheherazade," a title that, like many in the collection, refer not only to its referent but to a musical composition, reference always being mediated and the condition of music moreover being that of having no limit to reference. This poem is about stories, and about what is left of our experience, both of literature and of life, when faith in narrative withdraws:
I am ungenerously reminded of Anatole Broyard's remark about another iconically elliptical '70s book, Renata Adler's , that you can't make a meal of condiments; but then Ashbery is not a flashy nihilist (and neither is Adler). He derides
One question, then, remains for this distinguished and often very brilliant poet: if our problems aren't so different from those our precursors confronted, is it really decent or dignified of us to make so much less sense than they do?
—G. F. W. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (trans. Bosanquet)
Here are poems for the end of history; here is the philosophy of art. Luckily, we don't even have to read Hegel to know how we arrived at this terminus. John Ashbery was an art critic: we can just line the paintings up from David to Delacroix to Monet to Picasso to Pollock to see what happened. Once perspective, which secured an objective viewpoint to hold phenomena together, was removed, we were left with subjectivity, what things looked like to the artist; but if only the artist's subjectivity remains to organize the painting, then there is no need for things at all. The painting's sole content therefore is—and, in retrospect, perhaps always was—an allegory of its own procedure as mental processes' formal corollary. Which is what Hegel said, more or less: history, in this case art history, is the progressive realization of self-consciousness. Ashbery knows it. In "Ode to Bill," his speaker walks out into nature, has a quasi-Romantic "vision" of a horse, and then ejects it with the Hegelian assurance, "Him too we can sacrifice / To the end progress, for we must, we must be moving on." Or this, from "On Autumn Lake":
Turns out you didn't need all that trainingThis happened in poetry, too, even bypassing the French avant-garde in favor of the Anglo-Americans, from Pope to Keats to Whitman to Stevens and then, in culmination, to Ashbery. First form leaches away—Pope's couplets and Keats's stanzas giving way to Whitman's yawp—and then even the fiction of a fiction, from Pope's narratives to Whitman's catalogues to Stevens's philosophical meditations to Ashbery's inability even quite to sustain a meditation without interrupting himself, per Hamlet, with "words, words, words."
To do art—that it was even better not to have it. Look at
The Impressionists—some of 'em had it, too, but preferred to forget it
In vast composed canvases by turns riotous
And indigent in color, from which only the notion of space is lacking.
What is appealing about Ashbery, though, is that he is not altogether Gertrude Stein, that first of the postmoderns (if Parmigianino wasn't the first—more of that later). He has his moments—for example, "These khaki undershorts hung out on lines, / The wind billowing among them, are we never to make a statement?" or, "Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him"—but his texts do not exactly dissolve into into the free play of signifiers. At the macro level of form, the sonorities of the poem remain: the shell of lyric personality, of emotion recollected in tranquility, of the oracular utterance. As in Pollock, if you squint you might see an outline of composition. Or more—genuine, indelible truth.
You could get this collection's very first line tattooed up your arm or chiseled on your headstone or inscribed on some portico: "I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free." "I did too!" one cries inwardly, happy to have found someone who understands. Then one reads the next lines: "Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight / Filters down�" Where? And what do you mean "as"?—are you or aren't you? The collection mostly works this way. While the cycle of poems traverses the whole seasonal round—as points out—overall it's like walking in winter on intermittently cleared sidewalks. We slide over surfaces of inscrutable private reference and put a foot through a fluffy mass of willful folly (scholars much of this, but we have the right to read poetry without asking their help or permission)—and then suddenly the solid ground of wisdom.
Could the wisdom be a postmodern trick—have we been coaxed by the hoaxer into actually, naïvely believing something? I doubt it. Other readers took this landmark 1975 collection, often cited as its author's masterpiece, seriously enough: it won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award that year. Ashbery contends, in less mawkish words than I'm about to use, that whatever feels real in art, be it ever so much a discourse or simulacra or representation, is real:
…the "it was all a dream"Still, we will be scolded by sophisticates if we try to island-hop through the collection from poignant truth to poignant truth. The other material is there to remind us that truth is constructed, discursive, and usually elsewhere: this is "postmodern poetry," or so it says in the anthologies and on syllabi. Some lines from this book seem written to appear as illustrations of postmodern theory:
Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely
Enough how it wasn't. Its existence
Was real, though troubled�
All things seem mention of themselvesAnd if postmodernism is an especially academic concern, one passage even seems to me, in its referential branching-out, to be an unequalled description of being in graduate school:
And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents.
Is anything central?
[A] book on Sweden contains only the pages of that book.
The canons are falling
One by one�
I not only have my own history to worry aboutAnthologies and syllabi are necessary in their oversimplifications—we have to put everything somewhere or else we'll be in squalor—but all the same this is Romantic poetry, too, or why else could Hegel see to the end of time from Romanticism's vantage? And it is Renaissance poetry, because there, with the death of God and the liberation/representation of the subject, the whole problem of truth begins, or else how could Hegel have found the Romantic "self-sufficiency of character" in Shakespeare? And what was the Renaissance renascent of again if not an earlier pluralist age?—this might even be ancient Greek poetry, like Archilochus, who threw away his shield to write about himself. And so, as Ashbery would say—he always very amusingly provides logical transitions where there is no clear logic but rather a rapid change of subject—more of this later.
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.
One poem I think I understand in its entirety—they are few and far between—is "Scheherazade," a title that, like many in the collection, refer not only to its referent but to a musical composition, reference always being mediated and the condition of music moreover being that of having no limit to reference. This poem is about stories, and about what is left of our experience, both of literature and of life, when faith in narrative withdraws:
Some stories survived the dynasty of the buildersIn other words—not that we can honestly "in other words" something this oblique—with the grand narrators gone and the grand narratives done, with the canons fallen one by one, we are left as muddling and supporting players who moreover know that whatever order we find in our chaotic world we have placed there ourselves. The rest of the poem leading up to these climactic lines is more mysterious, like a set of random lines lifted from a long novel. "It is all invitation," is one of these lines, and so is Ashbery's poetry. In another poem, he writes of "the teasing outline / Of where we would be if we were here," an outline his verse sketches; but he also frets that his poetry might only "[a]dd to the already all-but-illegible scrub forest of graffiti on the shithouse wall."
But their echo was itself locked in, became
Anticipation that was only memory after all,
For the possibilities are limited. It is seen
At the end that the kind and good are rewarded,
That the unjust one is doomed to burn forever
Around his error, sadder and wiser anyway.
Between these extremes the others muddle through
Like us, uncertain but wearing artlessly
Their function of minor characters who must
Be kept in mind. It is we who make this
Jungle and call it space, naming each root,
Each serpent, for the sound of the name
As it clinks dully against our pleasure,
Indifference that is pleasure.
I am ungenerously reminded of Anatole Broyard's remark about another iconically elliptical '70s book, Renata Adler's , that you can't make a meal of condiments; but then Ashbery is not a flashy nihilist (and neither is Adler). He derides
those assholesand earnestly wonders when and where we contracted the postmodern condition. One poem, "Forties Flick," suggests a decade and a medium, but I like "Mixed Feelings," which names the same decade, even better; the most straightforward poem in the collection, it finds the speaker looking over breakfast at
Who would confuse everything with their mirror games
Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or
At least confuse issues by means of an investing
Aura that would corrode the architecture
Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery
an old, mostly invisibleHe concedes they are "creatures…[o]f [his] imagination," but notes their imagination too:
Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around
An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.
How to explain to these girls, if indeed that’s what they are,So modern warfare (the bomber), modern media (photography), and the emancipation of previously suppressed groups (women) brought us to the point of the canon's fall. Given that this is a mixed bag of developments, no wonder the poet has mixed feelings. The politics of the change aren't clear either, as he suggests in another poem:
These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas
About the vast change that’s taken place
In the fabric of our society, altering the texture
Of all things in it? And yet
They somehow look as if they knew�
The new conservatism isThe old hermetic conservatism was modernism, with its seemingly chaotic surfaces held together by a hidden mythic substructure; Ashbery's "new conservatism" is the chaos without the order, but with the hints of the order left in all the same, the maddening sensation that underlying significance might still be found somewhere, which "invitation" is why it's conservative, since a radical would just enjoy the egalitarian shambles:
Sitting down beside you.
°Ú…]
How about a new kind of hermetic conservatism
And suffering withdrawal symptoms of same?
But the real story, the oneThe collection's final and title piece, one of the most celebrated of American long poems, troubles any easy historical narrative, any attempt to blame the 20th century for the fact that we can't write poems or paint pictures anymore, not really. It takes its title from a 1524 self-portrait by the Mannerist painter Parmigianino, and is a long "Grecian Urn"-like meditation on the significance of this art object. "It is the first mirror portrait," we are told parenthetically, suggesting that the mirror preceded photography in making us too aware of ourselves as represented to represent anything any longer with any confidence (hence the creation of "a society specifically / Organized as a demonstration of itself"); and I'm not an art historian, but isn't Mannerism the decadence, or the "postmodernism," of the Renaissance, just as Nietzsche might have claimed that everything after Socrates and Euripides was the "postmodernism" of Greece? Ashbery, like Keats, allows the object to tease him out of thought:
They tell us we should probably never know
Drifts back in bits and pieces
The soul has to stay where it is,We artists, and then everybody along with us, locked ourselves in the mirror of representation. Now our souls can't escape and were perhaps made for this prison-house anyway. Since words are mirrors and moreover predate both mirrors and photography, "postmodernism" so-called turns out to have been always already the human condition. Ashbery offers pity as one palliative. The other is the continued attempt to "find the meaning of the music," however it may recede, deeper and deeper into a history that turns out less to have ended than not even to have begun.
Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move
As little as possible. This is what the portrait says.
But there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
That is the tune but there are no words.
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.
One question, then, remains for this distinguished and often very brilliant poet: if our problems aren't so different from those our precursors confronted, is it really decent or dignified of us to make so much less sense than they do?
October 1, 2022
Ashbery's poetry is strange, something you can't quite pin down or describe, something all its own. Sell Portrait is the collection that won him awards and an audience, it's not hard to see why. The title poem is stunning. Highlights ~ "As One Out Drunk into the Packet Boat" "Forties Flick" "A Man of Words" "Scheherazade" "Grand Galop" "Voyage in the Blue" "Hop o' My Thumb" "Mixed Feelings" "Fear of Death" "No Way of Knowing" and " Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror".
April 15, 2025
Leà sólo el original de esta edición, traducida y prologada por Verónica Volkow. Una bella reflexión en torno a la percepción del yo en la obra de arte y del paso del tiempo tanto en el lienzo como a través de las palabras.
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August 6, 2022A fraction here, a lisp where it didn’t matter.
August 10, 2020
there is so much emotion and inspiration and just genuine beauty in this book, I really can't put it into words. I haven't had an experience with writing like this before � a very visceral, real reaction that made me rethink a lot of writing and poetry in general. truthfully, I read this in the three days that my power was out this past week and I don't know if it was a specific time-and-place scenario that made Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror have such an effect on me, but I have not been able to stop thinking about Lithuanian Dance Band, On Autumn Lake, and Worsening Situation since I finished this book. a truly defining and life-changing text for me.
I want to re-read this every few years and am excited to do so.
I want to re-read this every few years and am excited to do so.
September 12, 2021
For many years, I wanted to read the only book that received in the same year a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The poems are like Impressionistic paintings and you may only get as far as to guess what you are looking at. I find, foremost and rather negatively, that there is too much “it� in the poems. You don’t know the “it� in most of them and thus are left holding the bag.
June 14, 2021
Une deuxième lecture qui m'a permis de mieux apprécier ces poèmes.
May 31, 2024
La poesia senza limite
La mia idea di poesia è collegata alla forma: estetica della frase e musicalità delle parole sono gli elementi fondamentali, che si ottengano con figure retoriche o attraverso una tensione e rottura della sintassi convenzionale. Il contenuto, per me, viene dopo.
E quindi un poeta come Ashbery sarebbe poco apprezzabile da me: frasi asciutte e sempre corrette per sintassi e grammatica, quasi totale assenza di accordi sonori e di figure retoriche - una poesia che sembra sconfinare nella prosa.
Eppure queste pagine mi hanno lasciato molto, come se avessi assistito al tentativo di esplorare l'ineffabile, di dare forma al non dicibile, di prendere le parole e costruire una nuova dimensione: la poesia di ashbery crea un senso di spaesamento, unendo strane frasi eterogenee e scollegate, costruendo enigmi densi di senso oltre-razionale tramite visioni particolari e complesse.
He sees the pictures on the walls.
A sample of the truth only.
But one never has enough.
The truth doesn't satisfy
Le immagini sono forti ed espressive, costruite su concetti più che sui suoni. Una sorta di ermetismo (perchè la poesia di Ashbery è difficile e a tratti davvero ostica) ottenuto con parole semplici: la rappresentazione complessa ed innovativa di un indicibile quasi inconcepibile. Niente destrutturazioni, nessun sperimentalismo linguistico: eppure una dimensione ineffabile e straniante di grande potenza viene ottenuta con frasi piane ma (quasi) incomprensibili.
Splendida il lungo pezzo che dà il titolo al libro dedicato al dipinto del Parmigianino che divinta il centro intorno a cui ruota una riflessione forte ed evocativa dell'autore: si tratta anche della poesia forse più abbordabile e comprensibile.
Una delle qualità di questo poetare è che con la traduzione si conserva gran parte della qualità letteraria e dell'originalità espressiva (specie in questa ottima traduzione in italiano che si accompagna al testo inglese)
La mia idea di poesia è collegata alla forma: estetica della frase e musicalità delle parole sono gli elementi fondamentali, che si ottengano con figure retoriche o attraverso una tensione e rottura della sintassi convenzionale. Il contenuto, per me, viene dopo.
E quindi un poeta come Ashbery sarebbe poco apprezzabile da me: frasi asciutte e sempre corrette per sintassi e grammatica, quasi totale assenza di accordi sonori e di figure retoriche - una poesia che sembra sconfinare nella prosa.
Eppure queste pagine mi hanno lasciato molto, come se avessi assistito al tentativo di esplorare l'ineffabile, di dare forma al non dicibile, di prendere le parole e costruire una nuova dimensione: la poesia di ashbery crea un senso di spaesamento, unendo strane frasi eterogenee e scollegate, costruendo enigmi densi di senso oltre-razionale tramite visioni particolari e complesse.
He sees the pictures on the walls.
A sample of the truth only.
But one never has enough.
The truth doesn't satisfy
Le immagini sono forti ed espressive, costruite su concetti più che sui suoni. Una sorta di ermetismo (perchè la poesia di Ashbery è difficile e a tratti davvero ostica) ottenuto con parole semplici: la rappresentazione complessa ed innovativa di un indicibile quasi inconcepibile. Niente destrutturazioni, nessun sperimentalismo linguistico: eppure una dimensione ineffabile e straniante di grande potenza viene ottenuta con frasi piane ma (quasi) incomprensibili.
Splendida il lungo pezzo che dà il titolo al libro dedicato al dipinto del Parmigianino che divinta il centro intorno a cui ruota una riflessione forte ed evocativa dell'autore: si tratta anche della poesia forse più abbordabile e comprensibile.
Una delle qualità di questo poetare è che con la traduzione si conserva gran parte della qualità letteraria e dell'originalità espressiva (specie in questa ottima traduzione in italiano che si accompagna al testo inglese)
August 7, 2024
For things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision. / I cannot decide in which direction to walk / But this doesn’t matter to me, and I might as well / Decide to climb a mountain (it looks almost flat)
/ As decide to go home / Or to a bar or restaurant or to the home / Of some friend as charming and ineffectual as I am / Because these pauses are supposed to be life / And they sink steel needles deep into the pores / There is no use trying to escape / And it is all here anyway.
/ As decide to go home / Or to a bar or restaurant or to the home / Of some friend as charming and ineffectual as I am / Because these pauses are supposed to be life / And they sink steel needles deep into the pores / There is no use trying to escape / And it is all here anyway.
March 4, 2023
TendrÃa que ser una lectura en las facultades de filosofÃa. Qué genial explorar, a partir del autorretrato distorsionado de otro, de ese mirar en el espejo y no verse una, hablar de todo lo demás -de toda la realidad: la memoria, los sueños, la identidad, la interpretación del cuadro y de esa realidad- a través de un haz de ideas y percepciones...no sé cómo describirlo mejor.
October 17, 2022
intense and mind-boggling. i would have rated this five stars if (1) i understood it a little more [LOL] and (2) it didn't wring me down to the bones with every poem!! i felt like i was kind of taking drugs with this bc idt it is natural to actually consume this entire collection in one sitting and not feel like your brain is being fried like an egg
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