Poet as Art Critic, The

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2005 by Yau, John

Three years later, in an essay on Pierre Reverdy, Ashbery wrote:

The lines drift across the page as overheard human speech drifts across our hearing: fragments of conversation, dismembered advertising slogans or warning signs in the Metro appear and remain the rock crystal of the poem. And far from banishing poetry to the unconscious, he lets it move freely in and out of the conscious and unconscious. Since we do not inhabit either world exclusively, the result is moving and lifelike.6

Elsewhere in this review, while comparing Reverdy to the film director Robert Bresson, who "created an ascetically transparent world,"7 Ashbery wrote:

Like Reverdy he has a keen ear for le langage de la tribu and a deep feeling for nature. Trees, clouds, lakes, automobiles, the texture of a woman's skin and of her dress are shown for what they are and are also undetachable from the story being told; they are like electrodes in the limpid bath of a precise context.8

Already masterful in his ability to shift tones and focus, Ashbery has consciously rejected transparency, received notions of realism in poetry, and confession, all of which were (and still are) believed to be allegorical narratives that naturally culminate in revelation, universal truth, or epiphany. All too often, these states of illuminated insight are familiar and border on cliché. The revelation is not something the poet discovers in the process of writing, but is something he or she already possesses, and must figure out how to package. Such poems are full of detachable symbols and images, triggers that set off the reader's sympathetic Pavlovian response. Ashbery is against both the predictable and the detachable, which allows a poem to be reduced to a theme or be summed up.

Ashbery's interest in both "counterfeit reality" and the "lifelike" helps explain why, nearly twenty years after writing about Stein and Reverdy, he would write his widely acclaimed poem, "SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror." The poem is ostensibly about Parmigianino's trompe l'oeil painting, a counterfeit reality that depicts the artist as if he is looking into a convex mirror. By being a "mirror" of the absent painter, the self-portrait displaces the viewer who is standing where the artist once stood. We see his imprisoned reflection looking back at us. On both the visceral level and in a larger sense, the artist's absence reminds us of our immediate and impending departure. At the same time, the painter stares at us, locked inside the wooden sphere, his hand in the foreground, as if protecting him from us and from time. This is one of the ways Ashbery describes the portrait:

Don't poetry and art share the paradox of embodying a frozen time, while outside its domain time ("autumn leaves") keeps surging ahead?

Ashbery's description of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is particularly apt about both his own writing and Parmigianino's arresting and disturbing painting:

We live in a quandary, but it is not a dualistic conflict between inner and outer reality; it is rather a question of deciding how much the outer reality is our reality, how far we can advance into it and still keep a toe-hold on the inner, private one.9