 |
 |
INTERVIEWER
You have often been characterized as a solipsist, and I wonder if this isn’t related to your reputation for obscurity. The way the details of a poem will be so clear, but the context, the surrounding situation, unclear. Perhaps this is more a matter of perspective than any desire to befuddle.
ASHBERY
This is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it’s not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems—really, I just want to make it more photographic. I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too. Let me read you a comment which appeared in a review of my most recent book, from some newspaper in Virginia. It says: “John Ashbery is emerging as a very important poet, if not by unanimous critical consent then certainly by the admiration and awe he inspires in younger poets. Oddly, no one understands Ashbery.” |
 Download a PDF of the full interview |
|
|
|
|
| Related Links |
- . . . by an Earthquake, Issue No. 135
- Two Poems, Issue No. 41
- Two Poems, Issue No. 79
- Two Poems, Issue No. 116
- Two Poems, Issue No. 123
- Two Poems, Issue No. 154
- Three Poems, Issue No. 47
- The System, Issue No. 53
- The New Spirit, Issue No. 50
- Rain Moving In, Issue No. 90
- Obsidian House, Issue No. 163
- Further Adventures, Issue No. 43
- from Flow Chart, Issue No. 118
- Two Poems, Issue No. 40
|
|
|
|
