Comments on: John Ashberry’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”

By: neomodernist

neomodernist — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:22:47 +0000

I think that Ashbery is greatly overrated as the result of belonging to, and appealing to, coteries of people who value the appearance of cleverness over other things. Apparently, since modernism, the tacit orthodoxy is that every poet if not every poem is a unique linguistic code and must be deciphered as if it were the Rosetta Stone. W. C. Williams suggests (he doesn’t state it) that in a comment that each poem must have a unique form. I sometimes run across pieces of Ashbery’s (and I read them) and they seem either unintelligible or irrelevant to any interest or concern of mine. Just totally irrelevant.

By: TC

TC — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:35:16 +0000

In the most recent (April 9, 2009) issue of The New York Review of Books there’s an article about John Ashbery that I found extremely enlightening. Thanks for typing out “Paradoxes and Oxymorons.” I heard someone say recently that writing can be a form of reading, and vice-versa. While the idea seems not too grounded in reality, isn’t there something about a poem we really like that makes us want to write it out?

By: Priya

Priya — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:26:59 +0000

i hate ashbery!!!

By: Tom Himmelspach

Tom Himmelspach — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Good choice.
In Vectors, James Richardson writes, “Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.”
It must be true that poets write “to reach others” as you say, but the value is in insight. I think of Dickenson’s poem about telling the truth “slant.” Perhaps your meaning in distinguishing “plain language” from poetry relates to language that abandons the discovery process and says only what the reader expects to hear.