Ashbery Resource Center: Created Spaces

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This section, which is currently under construction, will include personal observations from David Kermani as a way to enrich the discussion of the Created Spaces concept. In addition to personal recollections, observations, and a chronology, it will highlight some connections between critical approaches to Ashbery's writing and the experience of living in Ashbery's domestic environments. Presented below are some of the diverse critical texts that will contribute to Kermani's reflections.

"Necessary Deranger," Marjorie Perloff’s review of Notes from the Air in Bookforum (December/January 2008), discusses Ashbery's syntax: "Ashbery’s mode, in this and related poems, is not collage; indeed, it is not, as is generally claimed, disjunctive and fragmented. On the contrary, this is a poetry that exploits syntactic continuity and a kind of sequential normalcy, only to subvert them at every step by injecting alien items and unexpected references into the sequence. It’s a matter of careful construction, of finding the Flaubertian mot juste, or, in this case, phrase juste. Only someone as learned, curious, wide-ranging, and expert in all manner of writing, music, and media works as Ashbery could bring it off. No wonder his poetry has proved so impervious to imitation."

Larissa MacFarquar's profile of Ashbery in the New Yorker also discusses Ashbery's syntax: "It's true that verbal abstractions can be jarring, but Ashbery's syntax is traditional and his transitions are rarely abrupt. He embeds images of startling newness in familiar phrases and warm, nostalgic images." ("'Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery," Volume LXXXI, Issue #35, 2005-11-07)

An essay about John Ashbery at the Poetry Foundation website quotes Jonathan Holden's observation that "it is Ashbery's genius not only to be able to execute syntax with heft, but to perceive that syntax in writing is the equivalent of 'composition' in painting: it has an intrinsic beauty and authority almost wholly independent of any specific context." The essay goes on to quote J.M. Brinnon's remarks about Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which appeared in New York Times Book Review: "dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet has even begun to explore. . . The influence of films now shows in Ashbery's deft control of just those cinematic devices a poet can most usefully appropriate. Crosscut, flashback, montage, close-up, fade-out—he employs them all to generate the kinetic excitement that starts on the first page of his book and continues to the last."

In Angus Fletcher's A New Theory for American Poetry; Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge, MA and London, England, Harvard, 2004), Fletcher presents aspects of his thesis in terms that resonate strongly as accurate descriptions of how Ashbery has created and inhabits those physical environments that he has created as physical counterparts to his literary structures (e.g. horizons, poetic description, diurnal rhythms).

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