40 contemporary poetry
to distil a voice from a cacophony of different voices available to
a poet. He states his aim is to ‘reproduce from the polyphony that
goes on inside me, which I don’t think is radically different from
that of other people’.^26 Readers may initially fi nd Ashbery’s poetry
bewildering, not least because of the expansive linkages between
different subjects his work constructs. The clauses and sub-clauses
of Ashbery’s poetic line are often periphrastic – that is, refuting
direct statement through digressive techniques. His poetry dis-
plays a self-awareness of its own creation; the reader is encouraged
to consider the poem as action in process. Ashbery comments ‘as
far as my own poetry goes, while there’s a lot of my unconscious
mind in it, there’s a lot of the conscious mind too, which is only
normal, since we do sometimes think consciously – not very often,
but sometimes.’^27 Occasionally this extreme self-awareness asserts
itself as a criticism of the poem being written. In ‘The One Thing
That Can Save America’ the speaker comments self-critically ‘I
know that I braid too much of my own / Snapped-off perceptions
of things as they come to me’.^28 In later poems such as ‘Novelty
Love Trot’ the poet is unusually disarming but tongue-in-cheek
when he states ‘I enjoy biographies and bibliographies / and cul-
tural studies’.^29
A brief reference to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception ( 1945 ) helps us to understand
the self-refl exive impulse in Ashbery’s lyric.^30 Merleau-Ponty
states that phenomenology is a philosophy ‘for which the world is
already there’ and it is an attempt to achieve ‘a direct and primi-
tive contact with the world’ (p. vii). Usefully he maintains that
phenomenology is a ‘rigorous science’ (p. vii), but an investigation
which has at its core ‘a matter of describing and not analysing’ (p.
viii). Understood in this light a phenomenological impulse has as
its aim not the objectifi cation of the world into reducible knowl-
edge, but ‘an account of space–time and the world as we live them’
(p. vii). Ashbery comments that ‘Most of my poems are about the
experience of experience... and the particular experience is of
lesser interest to me than the way it fi lters through me.’^31
‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ takes as its starting point
and subject matter sixteenth-century Italian Mannerist painter
Francesco Parmigianino’s self-portrait, ‘the fi rst mirror portrait’.^32