How to read John Ashbery

One seldom finds really helpful articles on poetry. Meghan O'Rourke explains how to read Ashbery: "First, bear in mind that Ashbery's subjects are big ones—time, memory, nostalgia—so don't get frustrated by what may seem vague. Second, trust yourself. If you're bored, skip the poem, or skim. But make sure to stay receptive to the farcical comedy in the poems, which often arrives out of nowhere—like a deadpan subway announcer in a good mood. Third, Ashbery's most famous rhetorical ambiguities—the odd, nonsensical language, the ever-shifting array of pronouns, the abrupt shifts in diction—are not totally without a center. He considers his poems to be, like Jasper Johns' paintings, a kind of "organized chaos." Imagine the poems as a series of different self-revising, self-interrupting voices—the different voices we use to talk to ourselves in our own minds (incantatory, exhortatory, scolding, disgusted, delighted, genial, nonsensical) that belong to the different characters we carry around in our own heads. Notice, too, that Ashbery frequently substitutes an unexpected word for a familiar one—"the bee's hymn," say, rather than "the bee's hum." Ashbery, who cut his teeth on the surrealists and the Dadaist poets—Tristan Tzara, Guillaume Apollinaire—as well as Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, is trying to renovate a language that to him seems exhausted and cliché-riddled." Megan, please do this for more poets.