Special Author: John Ashbery (Q3177)

SPECIAL AUTHOR: JOHN ASHBERY (Q3177)

AUTUMN 2012

Convenor: Daniel Kane, Arts B 335, ext. 7887, email:

Office Hours: TBA

Time and Place:

Formal Assessment:

John Ashbery is perhaps the United States’ most important (if forever controversial) post-war American poet. Ashbery’s poetry is claimed by literary camps and coteries from across the ‘mainstream’, ‘innovative’ and ‘avant-garde’ spectrum. Ashbery has been celebrated as a visionary and dismissed as a fraud. He’s been situated within an American Romantic tradition that begins with Whitman and aligned with the 20th century European avant-garde. This is due in large part to the fact that Ashbery is never still – his writing ranges from the wildly disjunctive experiments of The Tennis Court Oath to his prizewinning breakthrough Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror to the genteel, melancholic lyrics characterizing Ashbery’s style from the mid-1990s through today. Whatever the case, Ashbery’s demanding work deserves our sustained attention.

Starting with his first book Some Trees and working our way through his major experiments in form (The Tennis Court Oath, collaborative books including The Vermont Notebook, and Ashbery’sepic Flow Chart), participants in this module will learn not just a great deal about Ashbery’s poetry, but about the post-war American avant-garde more generally speaking. Our understanding of Ashbery will be informed by reading into his central role in Abstract Expressionism (as art critic for Art News, as collaborator with relevant artists, and as a writer who produce a number of important poetic ekphrases); his friendship and collaborations with Beat Generation figures; his exchanges with Pop Art and the Warhol scene; his engagement with experimental cinema practitioners; and, more recently, his emergence as an important voice in queer writing.

Along the way, module participants will delight in Ashbery’s complex blend of discourses that embrace the narrative, the campy, the “personal,” the metaphysical, and even mystical. We will focus lovingly on individual lines and stanzas of Ashbery’s poetry. We will assess the poet’s work critically. We will refuse (for the most part) to adhere to any one of the ‘party lines’ we associate with Ashbery criticism, even as we learn from them. By the end of the module, we will understand the historical and literary contexts of Ashbery’s work, as we will be motivated to return to his poetry anew, curious, and alert.

Preparing & Giving Presentations

All students on the module will give a presentation. For your presentations, you (and your partner, if you want one) need to research and read a single poem by John Ashbery. Present your reading to the class in as systematic a way as you can. Your presentation must incorporate at least one secondary source – an article commenting on the poem you have chosen to present on, for example. Relevant passages from your secondary source(s) and the poem itself should be provided to the class either in a handout or in a (very) short PowerPoint presentation. See this as an opportunity to have a conversation with an expert in the relevant topic you’re discussing.

After your presentation, you should be prepared to answer questions from class-members.

ALL PRESENTATIONS SHOULD BE NO SHORTER THAN 10 MINUTES AND NO LONGER THAN 15 MINUTES.

The Ashbery Resource Center is a wonderful – you guessed it – resource for bibliographical material on all aspects of Ashbery’s career. Do make use of this.

Useful tips on giving academic presentations can be found on the following sites:

REQUIRED BOOKS FOR PURCHASE

Ashbery, John. The mooring of starting out. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1997.Print.

Ashbery, John, and Joe Brainard. Vermont Notebook. Granary Books, 2001. Print.

Ashbery, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems. Penguin (Non-Classics), 1990. Print.

Ashbery, John. A Wave. Carcanet Press Ltd, 1984. Print.

Ashbery, John. Flow chart. New York: Knopf, 1991. Print.

Ashbery, John. Wakefulness. Carcanet Press Ltd, 1998. Print.

Ashbery, John. Girls on the Run. Carcanet Press Ltd, 1999. Print.

Ashbery, John. Where Shall I Wander. Carcanet Press Ltd, 2005. Print.

Ashbery, John. Planisphere. Carcanet Press Ltd, 2009. Print.

Ashbery, John and James Schuyler. A Nest of Ninnies. Dalkey Archive Press, 2009. Print.

Week 1

Primary Reading:Some Trees (in The Mooring of Starting Out)

Secondary Reading: Catherine Imbriglio, "Our Days Put on Such Reticence": The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery's "Some Trees" (Available on Study Direct)

Week 2

Primary Reading: The Tennis Court Oath (in The Mooring of Starting Out)

Secondary Reading: Harold Bloom, ‘John Ashbery: The Charity of the Hard Moments’ (Available on Study Direct)

Week 3

Primary Reading: Rivers and Mountains (in The Mooring of Starting Out)

Secondary Reading: Charles Bernstein, ‘The Meandering Yang Tze’

Brian McHale, ‘How (Not) to Read Postmodernist Long Poems: The Case of Ashbery's

"The Skaters"’ (Available on Study Direct)

Week 4

Primary Reading: The Double Dream of Spring (in The Mooring of Starting Out); A Nest of Ninnies

Secondary Reading: James Longenbach, ‘Ashbery and the Individual Talent’ (Available on Study Direct)

On ‘Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape’

Week 5

Primary Reading: Three Poems (in The Mooring of Starting Out)

Secondary Reading: Jeff Staiger, ‘Tone, Knowledge, and Spirit in John Ashbery's "The System"’ (Available on Study Direct)

Week 6

Primary Reading: Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Vermont Notebook

Secondary Reading: Lee Edleman, ‘The Pose of Imposture’ (Available on Study Direct)

John Boening's short review of ‘Vermont Notebook’ (Available on Study Direct)

Week 7

READING WEEK

Week 8

Primary Reading: A Wave

Secondary Reading: ‘Finding What Will Suffice: John Ashbery’s ‘A Wave’ (Available on Study Direct)

Week 9

Primary Reading: Flow Chart

Secondary Reading: Martin Kevorkian, ‘John Ashbery’sFlow Chart’ (Available on Study Direct)

Week 10

Primary Reading: Wakefulness and Girls on the Run

Secondary Reading: Michael Leddy, review of Girls on the Run (Available on Study Direct)

Marjorie Perloff, review of Wakefulness

Week 11

Primary Reading: Where Shall I Wander

Secondary Reading: Rother, James. ‘A Glint of Bullino Hefted’

Week 12

Primary Reading: Planisphere

Secondary Reading: Helen Vendler, ‘John Ashbery, Toying With Words’

Daniel Pritchard, ‘Diet Verse: the Latest John Ashbery’

WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashbery, John, and Mark Ford. John Ashbery in conversation with Mark Ford. London; Chester Springs, PA: Between the Lines, 2003. Print.

---.Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press, 2001. Print.

---. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987 (art criticism), edited by David Bergman, Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.

---. Selected Prose, edited by Eugene Richie, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor,MI), 2005.

Blasing, MutluKonuk. Politics and form in postmodern poetry : O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

Bloom, Harold. John Ashbery. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Print.

Burckhardt, Rudy. Poetry films by Rudy Burckhardt. New York, NY: St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1998. VHS.

Davidson, Michael. On the outskirts of form : practicing cultural poetics. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Print.

Diggory, Terence and Stephen Paul Miller The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets.

DuBois, Andrew. Ashbery’s forms of attention. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Print.

Epstein, Andrew. Beautiful enemies : friendship and postwar American poetry. Oxford [England]; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.

Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s prose : the crisis in American verse. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Print.

Herd, David. John Ashbery and American poetry. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Print.

Kelly, Lionel. Poetry and the sense of panic : critical essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Print.

Lehman, David. Beyond amazement : new essays on John Ashbery. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. Print.

Lehman, David. The last avant-garde : the making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Print.

MA), 2000.

Nelson, Maggie. Women, the New York School, and other true abstractions. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. Print.

Perloff, Marjorie. The poetics of indeterminacy : Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. Print.

Schultz, Susan M. The tribe of John : Ashbery and contemporary poetry. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Print.

Shoptaw, John. On the outside looking out : John Ashbery’s poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Print.

Silverberg, Mark. The New York School poets and the neo-avant-garde : between radical art and radical chic. Farnham, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Print.

Vincent, John Emil. John Ashbery and You: His Later Poems. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Print