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The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy

Ben Lerner

Strange to encounter a living writer in the Library of America series

(there are only two, Philip Roth and John Ashbery); the standardized dust
jacket and hard cover, the Bible paper, inset ribbon bookmark and powerful
spine—these are the material trappings of literary entombment, a canon-
ization that feels distinctly posthumous. It must be really strange to read
your own work in this form. But the anachronism of this volume seems right
in the case of Ashbery; his poetry’s complicated play with temporality, his
slippery statements, both inside and outside of his poems, regarding liter-
ary tradition, the unusually vehement arguments made about his relation
to the archive and what place his writing will take in it—all of this makes it
fitting that he’s around for his own elevation to the pantheon.
Ashbery has always refused to be pinned down, resisting any
reader who would make him identical to himself. Consider these lines from
“Measles” (The Tennis Court Oath, 1962):

Book Reviewed: John Ashbery, Collected Poems, 1956–1987, ed. Mark Ford (Library of
America, No. 187) (New York: Library of America, 2008). Hereafter, this work is cited par-
enthetically by page number only.

boundary 2 37:1 (2010) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2009-042 © 2010 by Duke University Press

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You limit me to what I say.

The sense of the words is
With a backward motion, pinning me
To the daylight mode of my declaration.
But ah, night may not tell
The source! (73)

Limiting the poem to its referents threatens to arrest the flow of language
and fix its source. Sense is a value of retrospection, a backward motion
that forces the speaker to identify with his speech. The daylight mode to
which sense would pin the poet is opposed to the discretion of the night.
Compare the daylight mode to this passage from “The Thousand Islands”
(Rivers and Mountains, 1966):

Depths of understanding preside

Shelving steeply into a kind of flow
Stumble happily as through a miracle
Opening around you
Pinned to the moment. (137)

A demand for sense pins the poet to the past, but understanding can, hap-
pily, be dissolved into the flow of language, enabling a kind of presence. It
isn’t clear who or what is being pinned—you? the depths? a miracle?—but
the emphasis is on the moment as it flows and we flow with it, not the back-
ward, daylight mode and motion. As Ashbery writes in the poem’s opening
stanza, “. . . continuance / Quickens the scrap which falls to us.”
I want to focus on Ashbery’s ability to quicken our sense of continu-
ance—to make us experience the flow of thinking and speaking in time
over the finished thought. This isn’t the only thing that makes Ashbery a
great poet, but it is, to my mind, a central feature of his accomplishment,
especially of the work gathered here. It is also the aspect of his poetry that

. The night’s enabling discretion is beautifully praised again at the end of “As One Put
Drunk into the Packet-Boat”: “The summer demands and takes away too much, / But
night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes” (428).
. Charles Altieri’s work on Ashbery is especially good at exploring the philosophical
implications of this emphasis, particularly in Self and Sensibility in Contemporary Ameri­
can Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
. I assume this volume stops just before Flow Chart to ensure there will be sufficient
materials for a similarly sized second volume. If one were attempting to divide Ashbery’s
writings into periods, however, Flow Chart might well be read as the culmination of a

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interacts most interestingly with his canonization and helps account for why
encountering his poetry in this particular volume is especially poignant.
Throughout Collected Poems, 1956–1987, Ashbery pins us to the moment
of reading and frustrates retrograde interpretive strategies that would stop
the flow of language at its source.
It’s hardly a new observation that much of Ashbery’s work is, in some
important sense, “about time,” but I’m not sure we have an account of the
specific experience of temporality it enables. Part of the bizarre power of
Ashbery’s best poetry is that it seems to narrate what it’s like to read Ash-
bery’s best poetry, and when his work manages to describe the time of its
own reading in the time of its own reading, we experience mediacy immedi-
ately. In such poems, “. . . Each moment / Of utterance is the true one;
likewise none are true,” because truth is no longer a question of referential
adequacy, of the daylight mode, but rather of the poem’s capacity to sweep
us along with its flow. The poem becomes “Those mysterious and near
regions that are / Precisely the time of its being furthered”; we experience
the extension and periodicity of thinking or referring more than particular
thoughts or referents.
I’m quoting here from “Clepsydra” (Rivers and Mountains), one of
Ashbery’s earliest major poems, and a poem whose importance is clari-
fied by this volume, where it’s easier to see how it combines some of The
Tennis Court Oath’s experiments with disjunction with Ashbery’s more con-
ventional forms of fluency. Moreover, “Clepsydra” is one of the first poems
in which Ashbery deploys sentences of such extension and volution that it

style, not a new beginning—as the dilation of “Clepsydra” on an epic scale, or as a syn-
thesis of the prose line of Three Poems and the flowing verse of, say, “A Wave.” Ash-
bery’s later work has recently sparked some compelling criticism; see, for example, John
Emil Vincent’s John Ashbery and You: His Later Books (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2007), which explores, among other things, Ashbery’s recent adventures with the
pronoun you, and Michael Clune’s brilliant (and bizarre) essay “‘Whatever Charms Is
Alien’: John Ashbery’s Everything,” Criticism 50, no. 3 (2008): 447–69. In the present
review essay, I’ll barely survey the many kinds of critical investments Ashbery’s work has
received; perhaps the reading I provide, however, can help indicate why Ashbery’s writ-
ing can beget such diverse investments in the first place. One can say of Ashbery what
Ashbery says of Raymond Roussel: “Another reason for the work’s . . . critical success
is the ease with which it can, as the French say, be served with every kind of sauce.
From Jean Cocteau to Foucault and beyond, critics who discuss Roussel tend almost
unconsciously to write about themselves” (Other Traditions [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000], 49).

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can be hard to recall their subject by the time you finish riding the waves of
predication and qualification. This is a crucial feature of much of Ashbery’s
poetry, and it’s fitting that its fullest early elaboration takes place in a poem
whose titular metaphor is a water clock. The content of the clepsydra is a
transparent medium, the content is pure form, and Ashbery’s labyrinthine
sentences derive their force less from their paraphrasable content than the
way they measure time with their flow. As Ashbery writes in the later “Say-
ing It to Keep It from Happening,” there is “something about time / That only
a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means” (509).
But in order for these elongated sentences to hold our attention, they
must keep alive the possibility of reference: they must feel like they’re inte-
grating into higher units of meaning, even if they’re not. Two of Ashbery’s
other formal signatures are required to keep sense from either cement-
ing or slipping entirely away. First, aggressive hypotaxis creates what feels
like analytical subordination and chronological development. All the but ’s,
yet ’s, whether ’s, so’s, et cetera, all the commas, semicolons, and colons,
produce the affect of logic even in logic’s absence. As James Longenbach
has written about “Clepsydra,” “if we ignore the semantic content . . . one
clause follows logically from the other, linked by a vocabulary of cause and
effect.” Second, Ashbery’s use of deictic language invites readers to defer
identifying antecedents and to await a clarification of context that rarely
arrives—we read forward with the expectation that everything will be illu-
minated. Quoting almost any passage in “Clepsydra” will show these tech-
niques deployed together:
. The most interesting genealogy of the Ashberian sentence is provided by Ashbery’s
own short critical pieces, particularly his writings on De Chirico, Roussel, and Stein (it
also owes much to late James, as he’s noted in interviews, and something to the Paster-
nak of Safe Conduct, which he quotes from in an epigraph). Ashbery’s review of Stein’s
Stanzas in Meditation, published in the July 1957 issue of Poetry, is a wonderful account
of what—long after ’57—it will be like to read Ashbery himself: “Stanzas in Meditation
gives one the feeling of time passing, of things happening, of a ‘plot,’ though it would be
difficult to say precisely what is going on . . . while at other times it becomes startlingly
clear for a moment, as though a change in the wind had suddenly enabled us to hear a
conversation that was taking place some distance away. . . . But it is usually not events
which interest Miss Stein, rather it is their ‘way of happening,’ and the story of Stanzas
in Meditation is a general, all-purpose model which each reader can adapt to fit his own
set of particulars” (Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2005], 12). It’s hard to take critics seriously who emphasize Ashbery’s anxious
relationship with Stevens to the exclusion of his loving relationship with Stein.
. James Longenbach, Modern American Poetry After Modernism (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 96.

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        . . . likewise none are true,

Only is the bounding from air to air, a serpentine
Gesture which hides the truth behind a congruent
Message, the way air hides the sky, is, in fact,
Tearing it limb from limb this very moment: but
The sky has pleaded already and this is about
As graceful a kind of non-absence as either
Has a right to expect: whether it’s the form of
Some creator who has momentarily turned away,
Marrying detachment with respect, so that the pieces
Are seen as parts of a spectrum, independent
Yet symbolic of their staggered times of arrival;
Whether on the other hand all of it is to be
Seen as no luck. (140)

As this passage bounds from margin to margin, as the serpentine ges-

ture unfolds, it seems as if sense is being made, as we allow the conjunc-
tions, qualifications, and punctuation to propel us along. But that “Only” is
confusing; one cannot upon a first reading determine if it means only the
bounding from air to air is true, or if the bounding from air to air is a new
subject that subsequent lines will describe. The successive colons divide
the already complicated sentence into a kind of linguistic Zeno’s paradox, in
which the unit of meaning threatens to break up into infinite sub-distances,
and such elaborate sentences are then further ramified by lineation. More-
over, the antecedents of “it” and “this” are ultimately undecidable; the first
“it” probably describes the air tearing the sky limb from limb, but could also
refer to the serpentine gesture tearing apart the truth behind the cover of
a congruent message; regardless, “this” could refer to the sky’s pleas, the
whole situation of tearing limbs, or the poem itself, and the second “it’s,”
which might indicate possible forms of graceful non-absence, whatever that
means, could just as easily refer back to all previous antecedents or be
read, at least initially, as introducing a new subject. The final “it” in the pas-
sage seems most readily to stand for all of this pronominal ambiguity itself,
and our perhaps doomed attempt to see the various deictic pieces as parts
of a referential whole. Deictic language in Ashbery allows us to progress
through long, hypotactic sentences as if antecedents and their context were
assumed, as if the sentence were moving towards logical resolution; when
we fail to identify those antecedents external to the poem, the poem itself

. Longenbach also reads this passage.

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becomes the most available context, and its processes invest its pronouns.
While Longenbach, then, is correct that “the temporal experience of the
poem itself” is more important than its meaning, this isn’t just because
we “ignore the semantic content” of the poem or are fooled by its causal
vocabulary; rather, form becomes content as one reads because the poem
itself fills the vacuum left by indefinite deictics. In Ashbery’s poems, mean-
ing might not be fully present, but we have a graceful kind of non-absence:
each moment feels authorized by a truth that has yet to arrive, and if it
never arrives, if there is “no luck,” we then read the poem as referring to the
evanescence of reference as it evanesces.
Because Ashbery makes us read about our reading in real time, we
often feel as if commentary has displaced the actual poem—as if we’re
reading a secondary text about an unavailable primary source.10 Our sense
that the “real” poem has somehow been supplanted by the text at hand
is furthered by Ashbery’s frequent use of one critical language or another
within his poetry, whether, say, the mock-Marxist idiom of “Definition of
Blue” (“The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism / And
the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth century,” et
cetera), art criticism in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” or the philosophi-
cal casuistries of “Three Poems,” among other examples; Ashbery assimi-

. I hope this accounts for the apparent hypocrisy of my reading Ashbery as literally about
the foolishness of reading Ashbery literally; as referents fail to stabilize, the poems begin
to describe that instability.
. Longenbach, Modern American Poetry After Modernism, 96. My emphasis on how
form becomes content in Ashbery can also be distinguished from Marjorie Perloff’s focus
on Ashbery’s “indeterminacy.” Perloff makes interesting claims for indeterminacy itself,
whereas I view indeterminacy as a moment—a temporary suspension of meaning that
allows the poem to become (determinately) about its own reading. See Marjorie Perloff,
The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1981).
. Ashbery on Roussel: “Nouvelles Impressions is . . . an anomaly: a narrative poem
without a subject, or almost. The real subject is its form” (Other Traditions, 67). For a
consideration of how Ashbery’s self-referential syntax can be understood in relation to
“contemporary philosophy of language,” see Jody Norton’s “‘Whispers out of Time’: The
Syntax of Being in the Poetry of John Ashbery,” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 3
(Autumn 1995): 281–305.
10. See Bonnie Costello’s “John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader” for a useful, early
consideration of how Ashbery’s “you” inscribes the reader within the poem in order to
avoid what she perceives as the threat of “banal solipsism.” Costello also explores how
Ashbery’s poems can mirror our reading, although with different emphases. Contempo­
rary Literature 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1982): 493–514.

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lates the vocabularies of “secondary literature” into the “primary source.”11

This sense of displacement is also furthered by the frequent descriptions
of distant origins (“The sources of these things being very distant . . .”
[“French Poems,” 199]), missed connections (“You have it but you don’t
have it. / You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other” [“Paradoxes and
Oxymorons,” 698]), or vanished meanings (“I had thought of all this years
before / But now it was making no sense” [“The Double Dream of Spring,”
202]), and so on. Instead of making a bid for lyric immediacy, the poems
refer to its displacement, as if the poem we have describes a poem for
which we’ve always arrived too late.
The most extreme instance of this general tendency is the remark-
able long poem “Litany,” which opens As We Know (1979). Originally printed
in parallel columns, the Library of America edition gives the left column the
verso and the italicized right column the recto; it is by far the longest line-
ated poem in this volume, taking up over one hundred pages. Ashbery has
said, “half-jokingly,” that his intention in “Litany” was to “direct the reader’s
attention to the white space between the columns,”12 and the poem itself
refers to “the center that is not there” (617). The typography makes it hard
not to read the columns as potentially commenting on each other, but we
also read them as commenting on an absent center. If the “real” text is
missing, then even the left column is already a secondary text, and we read
the right, italicized column as criticism of criticism, which it often explic-
itly is:

Just one minute of contemporary existence

Has so much to offer, but who
Can evaluate it, formulate
The appropriate apothegm, show us
In a few well-chosen words of wisdom
Exactly what is taking place all about us?
Not critics, certainly, though that is precisely
What they are supposed to be doing, yet how
Often have you read any criticism
Of our society and all the people and things in it

11. For a particularly interesting examination of how Ashbery co-opts the language of his
critics, see Susan M. Schultz, “‘Returning to Bloom’: John Ashbery’s Critique of Harold
Bloom,” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 24–48.
12. Interview with Peter Stitt, quoted in John Shoptaw’s On the Outside Looking Out: John
Ashbery’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 227.

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That really makes sense, to us as human beings?

I don’t mean that a lot that is clever and intelligent
Doesn’t get written, both by critics
And poets and men-of-letters in general
But exactly whom are you aware of
Who can describe the exact feel
And slant of a field in such a way as to
Make you wish you were in it, or better yet
To make you realize that you actually are in it
For better or for worse, with no
Conceivable way of getting out?
That is what
Great poets of the past have done, and a few
Great critics as well.13 (599, 601)

“Litany” doesn’t just offer “a running commentary on itself, rendering fur-

ther critical parallel phrasing superfluous”; it includes a running commen-
tary on commentary.14 While it’s hard to know how seriously to take the
claims “Litany” makes about criticism, it’s interesting to note that the test
of greatness for both poets and critics is their ability to make us experience
the present as we read: this field, this minute.15 This isn’t the cliché that
criticism is necessarily less immediate than poetry; at least “a few great
critics” have pinned us to the moment, and Ashbery’s poetry doesn’t claim
privileged access to some originary experience (“. . . night may not tell /

13. David Herd also reads this passage in his John Ashbery and American Poetry (New
York: Palgrave, 2000). Herd’s general argument—that Ashbery can be understood as an
authentically “occasional” poet, as opposed to a “thematic” poet like Robert Lowell, who
writes primarily with future readers in mind—is compelling, especially when it focuses on
Ashbery’s capacity to heighten the reader’s attention to her own circumstance. But Herd’s
book is largely devoted to clarifying the actual contexts out of which Ashbery’s work
emerges, and how those contexts are described in the poems, as opposed to delineating
the techniques that enable readers to glimpse themselves in Ashbery’s poetry.
14. Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, 234. Shoptaw’s book remains indispensable
not only for his interesting arguments about how Ashbery’s “misrepresentations” and
“crypt words” constitute a “homotextual” practice but also for its fund of biographical,
anecdotal, and archival information. I wonder if future readers of the Library of America
edition, however, will continue to experience Ashbery’s homosexuality as so heavily
encrypted: “I’m hoping that homosexuals not yet born get to inquire about it, inspect the
whole random collection as though it were a sphere” (765).
15. The intermingling of critical and poetic practice is also represented in “Litany” by the
sudden irruptions of italicized text in the predominantly Roman versos (see 584).

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The source!”). If Ashbery is impatient with criticism, especially the criticism

he’s received, it’s because his poetry is already a kind of secondary text,
however strange. His poems are glosses on poems we can’t access; it’s as
if the “real” poem were written on the other side of a mirrored surface: when
we read, we see only the reflection of our reading. But by reflecting our
reading, Ashbery’s poems allow us to attend to our attention,16 to “experi-
ence our experience”;17 they offer what we might call lyric mediacy.18

Therefore a new school of criticism must be developed.

First of all, the new
Criticism should take into account that it is we
Who made it, and therefore
Not be too eager to criticize us; we
Could do that for ourselves, and have done so.

Reader and writer are joined in this “we” because, instead of being a reposi-
tory for the writer’s experience, the poem enables the reader to experience
her own experience. “Criticism should take into account that it is we / Who
made it” sounds like an assertion of the intentional fallacy, but in fact the
“it” that author and reader have made can just as easily be interpreted as

16. Andrew DuBois’s Ashbery’s Forms of Attention (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama

Press, 2006) is an interesting examination of how attention (and distraction) play out
thematically and formally in Ashbery’s work. DuBois reads “Litany” as a contribution to
stream of consciousness techniques.
17. A. Poulin Jr., “The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery,”
Michigan Quarterly Review 20, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 242–55.
18. The capacity of the poem to return our attention and pin us to the moment can be
related to Ashbery’s few statements regarding poetry and politics, usefully compiled by
Longenbach. For Ashbery, the intensification of the experience of the present is the true
political function of poetry, however indeterminate and/or minor that function might be. As
Ashbery wrote about Frank O’Hara’s poems in 1966, “[U]nlike the ‘message’ of committed
poetry [which we might describe as poetry of the daylight mode] it incites one to all the
programs of commitment as well as to every other form of self-realization: interpersonal,
Dionysian, occult, or abstract” (Selected Prose, 82). When Louis Simpson took issue
with these remarks, Ashbery responded with unusual directness: “All poetry is against
war and in favor of life, or else it isn’t poetry, and it stops being poetry when it is forced
into the mold of a particular program. Poetry is poetry. Protest is protest. I believe in both
forms of action” (The Nation, May 29, 1967, quoted in Longenbach, Modern American
Poetry After Modernism, 104). For a compelling discussion of how Ashbery’s “posture of
minority” regarding aesthetics and politics relates to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s,
see Chris Nealon’s talk, “John Ashbery’s Optional Apocalypse,” available at http://vectors
.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/172.php.

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the “new criticism” itself, not its object. Since the old New Critics worked
hard to dismantle the centrality of authorial intention, we can read this as a
joke at their expense: New Criticism is rendered irrelevant by a new (York?)
school of criticism that is Ashbery’s poetry—poetry that describes the exact
feel and slant of our reading as it happens. Most old schools of criticism
are either reductive, pinning the author to what he says, arresting the flow
of the poem and its capacity to measure time, or redundant, reflecting on a
poem that is already the reflection of our reading.19
All this talk of mirrors leads us to “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mir-
ror,” Ashbery’s most famous poem.20 While I also consider it magnificent,
rereading it in the context of the Library of America volume, its difference
from Ashbery’s other major long poems—“Clepsydra,” “The Skaters,”
“Litany,” “A Wave,” et cetera—is clearer than ever before; it is less a perfect
example of Ashbery’s greatness than a kind of melancholic retreat from his
method. This isn’t an example of what I’ve called Ashbery’s lyric mediacy,
but rather a meditation on its limits, a hard distinction to draw in poems that
are already, in a sense, a form of criticism; the difference between “Self-
Portrait” and Ashbery’s other great poems is that the former doesn’t make
us read about our reading in the time of its unfolding, it doesn’t catalyze the
strange experience of presence I’ve been describing but rather represents
a more conventional and personal retrospective mode.
To begin with, the “I” in “Self-Portrait” is Ashbery, not you or me: “I
saw it with Pierre [Martory] in the summer of 1959; New York / Where I am
now . . .” (480); this is not an “I” the reader can assume as her own; this is
Ashbery’s experience, not the experience of experience. “Self-Portrait” is
a brilliant poem about seeing one’s reflection in an artwork of the past, or
more specifically about an artist seeing his practice in a past artist’s prac-
tice, but is not itself a reflective surface in and of the present. It describes

19. Close reading would risk disabling the experience Ashbery so values in Stein and
Roussel—“the feeling of time passing, of things happening, of a ‘plot,’ though it would be
difficult to say precisely what is going on,” et cetera. An Ashbery poem doesn’t contain
some kind of stable literary knowledge, but rather allows us to feel knowledge form-
ing without ever being fully formed. The temporality and collectivity of knowing is what’s
emphasized in the title “As We Know,” not what we know.
20. “Litany” can be understood as occasioned by the critical attention Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror received. Houseboat Days, published in 1977, did not have time to respond
to the outpouring of praise from Bloom, Perloff, Vendler, and others that took place in
1976, the year Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the three major American literary
prizes. “Litany” was written between October of 1977 and April of 1978 (On the Outside
Looking Out, 225).

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Ashbery’s encounter with the first “mirror portrait,” but the power of such
mirror work to absorb the beholder is in doubt:

What is novel is the extreme care in rendering

The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface
(It is the first mirror portrait),
So that you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realize the reflection
Isn’t yours. (479–80)

Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait” doesn’t try to fool us, not even for a moment.21
Rather, it’s Ashbery’s other poetry that attempts to fool us (and, I believe,
succeeds); this poem is his uniquely direct meditation on the value of his
technique, one master of mirroring addressing another across centuries,
repeatedly distrusting the power of such an art to retain its capacity to
reflect the present over time:

I think it is trying to say it is today

And we must get out of it even as the public
Is pushing through the museum now so as to
Be out by closing time. You can’t live there.
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how:
Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime
To learn and are reduced to the status of
Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates
Are rare. That is, all time
Reduces to no special time. (484)

The artwork attempts to affirm the present—“today”—and in order for it

to do so, the authors, Ashbery and Parmigianino, must get out of it, must
make way for a viewing public. Ashbery has to vacate the “I” so that we,
along with future readers, can inhabit it. Compare the “we” above to the
“we” of “Litany”; in “Litany,” “we” are reader and writer joined against the
critics whom “we” have supplanted, but here a narrower “we” of artists is
opposed to a rude (“pushing”) public hurrying through the museum. The
artist or author sacrifices himself to make room for a public that barely
notices (itself in) the work, and neither the few great artists nor the mass of
viewers can live in a museum, an archive, with its restricted hours. Not only
the museum, but the artwork closes: its capacity to reflect time is reduced

21. It’s been suggested that Parmigianino physically resembles the young Ashbery. If
Ashbery is fooled momentarily by the portrait, perhaps that’s why.

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by time from a live and vivid practice to a paler version of itself, a dead work
of merely historical interest. This “movement / out of the dream into its
codification” (479) is the melancholy subject of the “Self-Portrait,” the most
readerly text in the Ashbery canon.
It is also the poem on which the most prizes and praise have been
showered; this must be bittersweet for Ashbery, since it’s a poem that
doubts his poetry, and expresses those doubts in a relatively conventional
manner.22 I admit to being suspicious of poets and critics who consider
it to be his masterpiece, not because I dispute its accomplishment, but
because the elevation of “Self-Portrait” often seems to be part of an effort
to neutralize his other work. As Marjorie Perloff has written in “Normalizing
Ashbery”:

. . . Ashbery attained almost no recognition prior to the publication

of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, published in 1976 when the poet
was fifty. It was only after the relatively accessible title poem of this
volume became well-known, that the Establishment started to come
around. And even then, it had to do so by erasing such troubling
volumes as The Tennis Court Oath (1962), and, in [James] Longen-
bach’s case . . . , As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), and that
loose baggy monster Flow Chart (1991). Indeed, the “acceptable”
poems, both for Longenbach and [Vernon] Shetley almost always
come from The Double Dream of Spring (1970), which contains the
lyrics like “Soonest Mended,” most readily assimilable to a Modern-
ist poetic.23

One also has to erase The Vermont Notebook, with drawings by Joe Brai-
nard, which is thankfully included in the Library of America volume. “Self-

22. “I’ve never really cared for ‘Self-Portrait’ very much, and I must say I didn’t like it any
more when I reread it. But I obviously had to put it in [Selected Poems] because people
would expect it to be there.” See John Tranter’s interview with John Ashbery in Jacket 2
(January 1998), available at http://jacketmagazine.com/02/jaiv1985.html.
23. Marjorie Perloff, “Normalizing John Ashbery,” Jacket 2 (January 1998), available at
jacketmagazine.com/02/perloff02.html. Longenbach concludes his interesting chapter
on Ashbery by singling out “Decoy,” “Syringa,” and “Self-Portrait” for special praise, view-
ing them as examples of “Ashbery’s strongest mode”—a mode inaugurated by “Clep-
sydra”—in which “Ashbery both embodies and describes his moments as they pass”
(Modern American Poetry After Modernism, 98). But “Self-Portrait” can only be consid-
ered in the “mode” of “Clepsydra” if one ignores, among other things, the poems’ very
different uses of pronouns. For Longenbach, they are always his—Ashbery’s—moments,
not ours.

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Lerner / Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy 213

Portrait” is easily assimilated to Harold Bloom’s Oedipal drama or Helen

Vendler’s desire to link Ashbery “conclusively to the Western lyric tradi-
tion,” but it is distinctly misrepresentative of his work as a whole.24 Unlike
Parmigianino, who occupies the center of his greatest work, Ashbery has,
despite his exceptional “Self-Portrait,” successfully got out of—or at least
made room for us in—his pronouns. These critics have of course produced
elaborate readings of other Ashbery poems, but the “Self-Portrait” is cen-
tral to their attempt to wrest Ashbery from his association with his more
experimental or postmodern contemporaries and appoint him heir to the
Romantics.
Ashbery is impossible to pin down when read in Collected Poems
because his radical formal variety is on display and his stranger books can-
not be ignored. I’ve tried to describe a few of Ashbery’s own “secrets of
wash and finish” that enable his poems to return our attention as we read,
to avoid the backward motion of the daylight mode. This immediate experi-
ence of mediacy, of the temporality of reading, is only intensified when
“printed on lightweight, acid-free paper that will not turn yellow or brittle
with age”; the poems will be refreshed by the future present of every read-
ing and so, like the volume itself, will “last for generations and withstand the
wear of frequent use.”25

24. Harold Bloom, ed., John Ashbery, Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1985), 185. See Bloom’s reading of “Self-Portrait” in “The Breaking of Form,”
reprinted here. For Helen Vendler’s reading of “Self-Portrait” as exemplary of “lyric inti-
macy,” see Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
25. This is part of the text that appears on the back flap of all Library of America
editions.

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