Customer Reviews

On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry

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This book offers an incredibly rich and densely historicized account of Ashbery's poetry (through Flow Chart), with a lot of attention to the various contexts (Ashbery's time in France, the New York art scene) and sources (poetry, fiction, art, pop culture) that feed into the work. But Shoptaw is not just a patient and scrupulous researcher; he is also, quite simply, one of the most brilliant and persuasive poetry readers I've ever encountered. Every chapter is full of revelations--this is a book to be read slowly and savored, bit by bit. Every reader will have personal favorites; some of mine are the stunning analysis of "The Nut Brown Maid" (constructed, Shoptaw shows, from discarded manuscript fragments) and the wonderfully textured reading of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," a poem I think I hardly was reading at all until I read it again with Shoptaw as my guide.

It's also worth noting that Shoptaw was the first critic to bring Ashbery's homosexuality into the story, not as a "hidden content" but as something that helps shape what Shoptaw terms Ashbery's "misrepresentative poetics." I often find other versions of this kind of criticism vulgarly reductive, but Shoptaw's readings, even when they draw on Ashbery's biography, always hold up--probably because it is so clear that it is Ashbery's poetry, not his life, that is Shoptaw's real subject.

In short, this book provides an unsurpassed introduction to Ashbery: learned, subtle, and intelligent (and engagingly written to boot). My main caveat is that it is not suitable for anyone looking for the one key that will all at once unlock Ashbery's difficult and protean poetry. Though theoretically informed, Shoptaw's study does not cleave to any single perspective or agenda; theory serves reading rather than the reverse. Indeed, like its notoriously elusive subject, the book is simultanously conservative and avant garde--as one might deduce from the back cover, which carries enthusiastic blurbs from both Harold Bloom and Charles Bernstein.

I am doing extensive research for my master's thesis on Ashbery and this was by far the worst resource I could have invested in. My main complaint is that this book lacked coherence, though it seemed to have done thorough research. It did not clearly articulate ideas, but rather used every opportunity to quote fragments and attribute random details rather than clearly get at the heart of Ashbery's poetry. I found no useful arguments and it was very difficult to get through to what the author was saying. Very disappointed.