A History of American Literature

620 The American Century: Literature since 1945

and readers alike are victims of “an absolute and total misunderstanding (but not

fatal)”; and the result is that nearly everything he has written, from parodies of other

poets (“Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” (1962)) through

surrealistic love poems (“To You” (1958)) to autobiography (“Alive for an Instant”

(1962)), is edged with a verbal grin that is simultaneously playful and grim.

Apart from O’Hara, however, the most significant poet associated with the New

York group is John Ashbery (1927–). Ashbery has written in a variety of genres.

A Nest of Ninnies (1969), written with James Schuyler, is a novel satirizing the

vacuous lives of two suburban families. The Heroes (1952), The Compromise (1956),

and The Philosopher (1956) are plays that exploit and sometimes travesty conventional

forms from classical myth to detective story drama. The international edition of the

New York Herald Tribune became the outlet for his extensive art criticism. But it is

for his poetry that he has become well known. Ashbery published his first book of

poems, Turandot and Other Poems, in 1953. Other notable volumes include Some

Trees (1956), The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers and Mountains (1966), Self-

Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), A Wave (1984), Flow Chart (1991), Chinese

Whispers (2000), and A Worldly Country (2007). Ashbery first encountered O’Hara

at Harvard, and when O’Hara moved to Manhattan in 1951 the two met regularly.

“Frank got me interested in contemporary music,” Ashbery has recalled. “American

painting seemed the most exciting art around,” he added, “and most of my feeling

for Rothko and Pollock came through Frank.” The enthusiasms the two poets shared

generated at least some similar tendencies in their poetry. There is the same

commitment to the work as personal idiom, for instance, the discontinuous activities

of individual experience: “I know that I braid too much my own / snapped-off

perceptions as they come to me /,” admits Ashbery in “The One Thing That Can Save

America,” “They are private and always will be.” There is, too, a similar estrangement

from simple mimesis, a shared belief that poetry does not reflect reality but

constitutes it – which leads, in turn, to a relentless opposition to systematics (“there’s

no excuse / For always deducing the general from particulars”), consistency (“I often

change my mind about my poetry,” he has said), and the illusion of meaning. “What

does it mean??????????????” he asks of one of his poems, during the course of writing

it; and the fourteen question marks slyly subvert the assumptions, the need for cause

and explanation, that lie behind the question. “Most of my poems are about the

experience of experience,” Ashbery has remarked, in one of his rare moments of

elucidation, “... and the particular experience is of lesser interest to me than the way

it filters through me.” “I believe this is the way in which it happens with most people,”

he declares, “and I’m trying to record a kind of generalized transcript of what’s really

going on in our minds all day long.” According to these terms, if the poem is a verbal

graph of the consciousness, then the poet is a transparent medium through which

the experiences of the day flow; and the words of the poem, in turn, constitute the

notations, the signs that cease to apply as quickly and imperceptibly as the experiences

they signify, and the moment of consciousness that acted as signifier.

Another way of putting all this, and signaling the difference between Ashbery and

O’Hara, is to say that Ashbery’s is a poetry of absence. Ashbery has said as much

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