ABSTRACT

Ashbery's poetry tends to provoke strong reactions because of its experimental handling of language and poetic form: his poems resist conventional explanation and paraphrase, refuse to present a coherent speaking self that can be identified with the poet, and lack traditional subject matter and easily grasped significance. As he points out, rather than addressing "a particular subject and treating it formally in a kind of essay," "my poetry ... has an exploratory quality and I don't have it all mapped out before I sit down to write" (Packard, 1974). Ashbery readily admits that this quality leads his poetry in unpredictable and even bewildering directions but defends such unsettling journeys into the unknown as an integral part of his work's raison d'etre:

[M]y intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that's already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him[.] (Packard, 1974)

Unlike many poets, Ashbery is less concerned with relating a specific event than with conveying what he calls "the experience of experience" :

[T]he particular occasion is of less interest to me than the way a happening or experience filters through me.... I'm trying to set down a generalized transcript of what's really going on in our minds all day long. (Poulin, 1981)

In Ashbery's pluralistic worldview, "things are in a continual state of motion," so any attempt to fit the overwhelming flux and variety of experience into a coherent, tidy explanation is viewed with skepticism (Stitt, 1983). Because he is much more interested in process than any finished product, the actual subject of his poems is often the "poem creating itself," the process of its own coming into being (Poulin, 1981).