Ashbery with one r

Always liked the poet Ashbery, at least I liked the thought of what he was doing, even though most of my friends didn't, many of whom were violent in their dislike. Ashbery always seemed to me to be a writer willing to try all styles until he found something that fit him, and that what fit him didn't always work until it did. He's essentially a major imitator with enough stamina and forbearance to persist in his imitations until the imitation becomes something much less imitative, a poetic object of his own dedicated creation that appears to be 'new.'

The sound in an Ashbery poem is fermented sound, the outbreath of a great deal of time spent reading modern European literature and the inbreath of someone consciously considering the history of the graphic arts. Reading Ashbery, one can imagine him opening a book of someone else's poetry in order to get started on his own writing and, if that didn't get him started, searching out a monograph of a pre-Raphaelite painter to try to acheive the same result.

It's from reading Ashbery--not too much reading of him, just enough in my case--that I came face-to-face with the notion that a writer's style is born from obsession. In Ashbery's case the obsession is cultural; I think he sincerely believed that life should imitate art. But of course life doesn't imitate art, and that's where everything seems to get confusing in his poems. 

There's a great deal of self-consciousness in every Ashbery poem of his that I ever read but it's not particularly pretentious, at least I don't find it so. Even though he often wrote long, prolix poems I always felt Ashberry was humble enough to know he was just reaching the surface of things.