ABSTRACT
The role of poetics in the wake of rapid globalization after the Second World War can be viewed as a subset of relations between the increased mobility of postwar subjects across weakening sovereign borders and their flexible circulation to and from sites of refuge. There were no protections under French law should the authorities decide to apprehend these Americans who landed in France to evade Cold War doctrines through unofficial channels. Ashbery relies on lyric proximity as a makeshift tool of social measurement to chart the ebbs and flows of discursive encounters, a process that simultaneously involves a drive toward non-instrumental communication. Ashbery's poetic practices developed in exile re-enact language performances to explore the ways in which "Spaces, as they recede, become smaller". Cold War "containment", according to government documents from 1950, was a "policy of calculated and gradual coercion".
