Contemporary Poetry

42 contemporary poetry

A peculiar slant

Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model

In the silence of the studio as he considers

Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait (p. 191 )

Successfully, Ashbery in this poem removes over four centuries
of distance between the portrait and the present. Moreover, these
lines suggest that a key role of writing and painting is to activate
memory; the memory referenced can be the impact of the tran-
scribing of the world (as in the self-portrait), or in Ashbery’s
more duplicitous world the procedure of recreating a memory of
the painter in the act of painting. In effect Ashbery attempts to
reinstall into his poem the dailiness of Parmigianino’s world, what
he terms ‘the strewn evidence... The small accidents and pleas-
ures / Of the day as it moved gracelessly on’ (p. 192 ). Pronouns
in Ashbery’s work generate considerable instability, and the poet
comments upon the ‘person’ in his work as an emerging force, not
a pre-existent entity before writing:

A person is someone given an embodiment out of these pro-

liferating refl ections that are occurring in a generalized mind

which eventually run together into the image of a specifi c

person ‘he’ or ‘me’ who was not there when the poem began.^34

Far from establishing stable relations between perceiver and per-
ceived, or speaker and subject, Ashbery’s poem constantly nego-
tiates the relationship between the ‘I’ and ‘you’. This highly
self-aware approach can result in a blurring of the identities of
artist and poet. The speaker’s commentary on Parmigianino’s
technique results in describing actions that become embedded in
the speaker’s own world. Take for example the section of the poem
where we are told that ‘The picture is almost fi nished’:

The surprise almost over, as when one looks out,

Startled by a snowfall which even now is

Ending in specks and sparkles of snow.

It happened while you were inside, asleep,

And there is no reason why you should have