On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry Review

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(More customer reviews)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.

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In readings attuned to the textual, sexual and historical specificities of Ashbery's poetic project, from "Some Trees" through the vast summation of "Flow Chart", Shoptaw introduces readers to the poet's processes of production. The first reader with full access to Ashbery's manuscripts and source materials, he is able to reveal the poet at work. He shows us, for instance, how Ashbery built "Europe" and "The Skaters" upon children's books picked up at a Paris "quai" and how he drew on his own unpublished lyrics for the long dialogue "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'". Shoptaw argues that Ashbery's poems are less self-referential or non-representational than misrepresentative: fractious assemblies of odd details, cryptic substitutions, and artful and artless discourses. He traces Ashbery's misrepresentative poetics to diverse sources - Walt Whitman, Raymond Roussel, W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Jackson Pollock, and Elliot Carter, among others. Ashbery's poetry, as Shoptaw demonstrates, is inevitably "homotextual" while refraining from taking homosexuality as a topic.Ashbery disorients his poems with unexpected silences, lapses or wrong turns in arguments, mock confessions, and sudden abstractions. As this book reveals, Ashbery's misrepresentations yield a richer and stranger representation of ordinary experience. Ashbery takes his paradoxical stand on the outside looking out of an American culture and history we recognize as our own.

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