John Ashbery: “The Epidemic of the Way We Live Now”

Summary

All along I had known what buttons to press, but don't

you see, I had to experiment, not that my life depended on it,

but as a corrective to taking tht frqin to find out where it

wanted to go.

Then when I did that anyway, I was not so much charmed as

horrified

by the construction put upon it by even some quite close

friends,

some of whom accused me of being the “leopard man” who

had been terrorizing

the community by making howl-like sounds at night, out of

earshot

of the dance floor. Others, recognizing my disinterest,

nonetheless accused

me of playing mind-games that only the skilled

should ever attempt. My reply, then as always, was that

ignorance

of the law, far from being no excuse, is the law, and we'll see

who rakes in

the chips come Judgment Day.

Ashbery (1991: 123)

The avant-garde values of risk taking, process, and novelty are also John Ashbery's stylistic values, and his array of experimental techniques – mixed tones and dictions, grammatical and syntactic inconsistencies, referential instability, mixed metaphors, discontinuous forms – belongs to the repertoire of avant-garde verse. What makes for the difference – and the real novelty – of Ashbery's poetry is that he registers the changing cultural function of such techniques and increasingly acknowledges, after the early sixties, that experimental techniques and values are in fact consistent with the values of the larger cultural economy. And he turns his lateness to oppositional models of avant-garde writing to his advantage by calling such models into question even as he deploys them.