John Ashbery's Quick Question and Its Forms of Inventiveness
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U Ottawa L'universiw Canadienne Canada's University FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES ^=1 FACULTY of GRADUATE and ET POSTOCTORALES U Ottawa POSDOCTORAL STUDIES
u Ottawa L'UniversiW canadienne Canada's university FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES ^=1 FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND ET POSTOCTORALES U Ottawa POSDOCTORAL STUDIES L'Universitc canathenne Canada's unh'ersity Matthew Gerald marc Mongrain AUTEMDElXtWsF/TUTHORWTHESIS M.A. (English Literature) Department of English TAOJLTETlCClO'EPARTEWNTrFMi Light from Canada: The Poetics of James Schuyler TITRE DE LA THESE / TITLE OF THESIS David Jarraway DIRECTEUR (DIRECTRICE) DE LA THESE / THESIS SUPERVISOR CO-DIRECTEUR (CO-DIRECTRICE) DE LA THESE / THESIS CO-SUPERVISOR Bernhard Radloff David Rampton Gary W. Slater Le Doyen de la Faculte des etudes superieures et postdoctorales / Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Light from Canada: The Poetics of James Schuyler Matthew Mongrain Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree in English Literature Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Matthew Mongrain, Ottawa, Canada, 2010 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-73877-1 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-73877-1 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. -
Forms of Polyphonic Communication in John Ashbery's Poetry
“That you too were the I”: Forms of polyphonic communication in John Ashbery’s poetry Elina Siltanen Pro Gradu Thesis English philology Department of English University of Turku April 2008 TURUN YLIOPISTO Englannin kielen laitos / Humanistinen tiedekunta SILTANEN, ELINA: “That you too were the I”: Forms of polyphonic communication in John Ashbery’s poetry Pro gradu -tutkielma, 114 s. Englantilainen filologia Huhtikuu 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tarkastelen tutkimuksessani amerikkalaisen John Ashberyn (1927–) runoudessa ilmenevää moniäänisyyttä. Runoutta pidetään yleensä yksiäänisenä puheena, kun taas romaanin ajatellaan erityisesti Mihail Bahtinin vaikutuksesta olevan luonnostaan moniääninen kirjallisuudenlaji. Ashberyn postmoderni runous haastaa tämän käsityksen. Ashbery tunnetaan vakiintuneita runouskäsityksiä vastaan kirjoittavana avantgarde-runoilijana. Pääasiallisina tutkimuskohteinani ovat Ashberyn pitkä runoelma nimeltä ”Litany” (1979) sekä lyhyiden runojen valikoima Your Name Here (2000). Vertailukohtana tarkastelen Ashberyn yhdessä James Schuylerin kanssa kirjoittamaa romaania A Nest of Ninnies (1969). Teoreettisena pohjana on käytetty Ashberyä käsittelevän muun tutkimuksen lisäksi muun muassa jälkistrukturalistisiin teorioihin liittyviä ajatuksia pronominien vaikutuksesta siihen miten lukija muodostaa käsityksen subjektiivisesta läsnäolosta runossa. Ashbery käyttää persoonapronomineja ilman selkeitä viittaussuhteita. Viittaussuhteiden hämärtymisen -
Literariness in John Ashbery's Plays
Tadeusz Pióro Beyond Parody: Literariness in John Ashbery’s Plays John Ashbery wrote his first play, The Heroes, in 1950, a few years before he began to make his name as a poet. The Compromise, his only three-act play, came next (in 1955, a year before the publication of Some Trees), and his last play thus far, The Philosopher, limited, like The Heroes, to one act, was written in 1960. Critics usually find these dra- mas worth mentioning when they can be used to explain, illustrate or contextualize something in Ashbery’s poems, yet in and of themselves they have received scant atten- tion. Such neglect, relative though it be, is nevertheless curious, since precisely because of their proleptic significance the plays should merit greater scrutiny, even if their appar- ent straightforwardness and simplicity might seem to be at odds with the complexities of the poems, so much so that extended analysis appears risibly redundant. But even treat- ing the plays as, first and foremost, parodic, as David Lehman and Kevin Killian have done, deflects attention from a quality they share with many poems by Ashbery, and it is this quality I would like to examine in some detail, primarily as it appears in his dramas. I call it literariness, and even though the term does not have currency in critical dis- course, I find it useful as a kind of shorthand for several simultaneously present aspects of some, but not very many, literary texts. The most important of these aspects for my purposes here is the text’s relation to what Edward Mendelson has called “the world outside.” This expression comes up in Geoff Ward’s account of influence in Ashbery’s work. -
Modern Poetry Seminar “Shifting Poetics: from High Modernism to Eco-Poetics to Black Lives Matter”
San José State University Department of English and Comparative Literature ENGLISH 211: Modern Poetry Seminar “Shifting Poetics: From High Modernism to Eco-Poetics to Black Lives Matter” Spring 2021 Instructor: Prof. Alan Soldofsky Office Location: FO 106 Telephone: 408-924-4432 Email: [email protected] Virtual Office Hours: M, W 3:00 – 4:30 PM, and Th p.m. by appointment Class Days/Time: Synchronous Zoom Meetings M 7:00 – 8:30 PM; Asynchronous on Canvas (24/7) Classroom: Zoom Credit Units: 4 Credits Course Description This seminar is designed to engage students in an immersive study of salient themes and innovations in selected poets from the 20th and 21st centuries. The curriculum will include practice in close reading/explication of selected poems. The course will be taught in a partially synchronous distance learning mode, using SJSU’s Canvas and Zoom platforms, with weekly Monday Zoom class meetings, 7:00 – 8:15 p.m. The course may be taken two times for credit (toward an MA or MFA degree). Thematic Focus Shifting Cultural Politics and Poetics from High Modernism to Eco-Poetics to Black Lives Matter (1909 – 2021) The emphasis during the semester will be on the evolving poetics and associated cultural politics as viewed through various aesthetic movements in poetry from the high modernist period to the present. During the semester the curriculum will include reading one or more poems (online) by the following poets: W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, H. -
Late Modernist Poetics and George Schneeman's Collaborations with the New York School Poets
Timothy Keane Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: an international journal Vol 1, No 2 (2014) on-line ISSN 2393 - 1221 No Real Assurances: Late Modernist Poetics and George Schneeman’s Collaborations with the New York School Poets Timothy Keane City University of New York Abstract: Painter George Schneeman’s collaborations with the New York School poets represent an under-examined, vast body of visual-textual hybrids that resolve challenges to mid-and-late century American art through an indirect alliance with late modernist literary practices. Schneeman worked with New York poets intermittently from 1966 into the early 2000s. This article examines these collagist works from a formalist perspective, uncovering how they incorporate gestural techniques of abstract art and the poetic use of juxtaposition, vortices, analogies, and pictorial and lexical imagism to generate non-representational, enigmatic assemblages. I argue that these late modernist works represent an authentically experimental form, violating boundaries between art and writing, disrupting the venerated concept of single authorship, and resisting the demands of the marketplace by affirming for their creators a unity between art-making and daily life—ambitions that have underpinned every twentieth century avant-garde movement. On first seeing George Schneeman’s painting in the 1960s, poet Alice Notley asked herself, “Is this [art] new? Or old fashioned?”1 Notley was probably reacting to Schneeman’s unassuming, intimate representations of Tuscan landscape and what she called their “privacy of relationship.” The potential newness Notley detected in Schneeman’s “old-fashioned” art might be explained by how his small-scale and quiet paintings share none of the self-conscious flamboyance in much American painting of the 1960s and 1970s. -
“Putting My Queer Shoulder to the Wheel”: America's Homosexual
1 “Putting my Queer Shoulder to the Wheel”: America’s Homosexual Epics in the Twentieth Century Catherine A. Davies University College London UMI Number: U592005 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U592005 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 2 I, Catherine Davies, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Index Pages 4 Abstract 5 Introduction 47 “Stranger in America”: Hart Crane’s Homosexual Epic 105 “It occurs to me that I am America”: Ginsberg’s Epic Poems and the Queer Shoulder 165 “Narcissus bent / Above the gene pool”: Merrill’s Epic of Childlessness 203 John Ashbery’s Flow Chart: “The natural noise of the present” 247 Postscript 254 Bibliography 4 Abstract This thesis examines five poems by four twentieth-century poets who have explored the epic tradition. Some of the poems display an explicit concern with ideas of American nationhood, while others emulate the formal ambitions and encyclopaedic scope of the epic poem. -
The Poetics of John Ashbery
The Poetics of John Ashbery Gargi Bhattacharya Rabindra Bharati University Abstract John Ashbery (1927- ) takes the postmodernist polysemy of meaning in interpreting a work of art and the polyphony of styles in composing as his forte. He questions the various linguistic codes and makes us aware of the artificiality of the language. All political, ethical and aesthetic imperatives are rhetorical constructs. The writer uses language to persuade the reader to accept the formulated truth and he intervenes in the process of perception by his/her politics of representation. Though his iconoclastic approach towards writing and individuality of style has kept him aloof from mainstream academic syllabi, yet he has now become a prominent figure in Contemporary American Literature. It is interesting to note how Ashbery’s poetry revives the Romantic sensibility while applying the digitalized methods and the postmodern syndromes of immediacy, indeterminacy, disjunctive syntax, open-ended and multiplicity of interpretations. This paper explores the aesthetics of John Ashbery’s poetry. [Keywords: (De)Construction, Aesthetics, Poetics, Response, Contextualism, Digital media.] It is interesting to note how contemporary American poetry is zanus-faced. It is specially noted for innovation and experimentation. Although it gives new interpretation to life, inaugurates new styles of composing, evolves new poetics, yet it looks back at its predecessors for reviving the imagination and reflects the spirit of Emerson, Wallace Stevens or Poe. Several experimental aesthetic movements- Romanticism, Symbolism, Vorticism, Imagism, Surrealism, modernism, post- modernism, and post-structuralism have influenced different genres of poetry. However, the innovative spirit of the contemporary poets is not yet abated. If we distinguish between the aesthetic self, social self and the inner self, then Ashbery’s ruminations are mostly related to this third category or unconsciousness. -
German Romantic Tradition in John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander
Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis No 3920 Anglica Wratislaviensia LVII, Wrocław 2019 DOI: 10.19195/0301-7966.57.6 Paweł Marcinkiewicz ORCID: 0000-0002-7086-1805 University of Opole [email protected] Daniel Pietrek ORCID: 0000-0002-1582-6070 University of Opole [email protected] German Romantic Tradition in John Ashbery’s Where Shall I Wander Abstract: In popular critical and readerly reception, the New York School of poetry was shaped mostly by what Marjorie Perloff calls the tradition of indeterminacy. This was started by Arthur Rimbaud and, a few decades later, developed by Dadaists and Surrealists. Therefore, the tradition of French modernism seems to have been vital for John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuler, and Barbara Guest, and the poets themselves appeared to confirm this fact. They often visited France privately and as scholars, and lived there for extended periods of time. In the case of John Ashbery, his year-long Fulbright fellowship was prolonged to a decade. Moreover, the New York School poets contributed to the propagation of French literature, being translators, critics and editors of French authors. However, as John Ashbery’s late works prove, literary genealogies are far more complex. German Romantic tradition always exerted an important influence on John Ashbery, and it inspired the New York experimenter to contribute two major poems to the twenty-first century American literature: “Where Shall I Wander” and “Hölderlin Marginalia”. Keywords: New York School poetry, John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander, Caspar Friedrich, Fried- rich Hölderlin, German Romanticism In terms of its philosophical background and thematic scope, as well as the artistic methods it developed, the New York School of poetry—very much like its visual analogue, Abstract Expressionism—was probably the most genuinely American of all the twentieth-century avant-garde movements. -
Digital Media, Remediation, and North American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century
1 BORROWED COUNTRY: DIGITAL MEDIA, REMEDIATION, AND NORTH AMERICAN POETRY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY A dissertation presented by Jim McGrath to The Department of EngLish in partiaL fuLfiLLment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts August 2015 2 BORROWED COUNTRY: DIGITAL MEDIA, REMEDIATION, AND NORTH AMERICAN POETRY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY A dissertation presented by Jim McGrath ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partiaL fuLfiLLment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the CoLLege of SociaL Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University August 2015 3 ABSTRACT How have our ideas about reading and writing poetry been transformed by digitaL media? In “’Borrowed Country: DigitaL Media, Remediation, and North American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century,” I discuss five American poets who have variousLy discussed and made use of particuLar forms of digitaL media in their work: John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Kevin Young, Steve Roggenbuck, and Patricia Lockwood. I am interested in these poets because they circuLate work via traditionaL sites and networks of pubLication – individuaL voLumes and poetry journaLs in print – whiLe maintaining investments in the ways digitaL modes of writing and pubLishing have both changed these conventionaL sites of transmission and created additionaL venues in which to circulate poetry: e-books, web sites, sociaL media networks. The work of Ashbery, Carson, Young, Roggenbuck, and Lockwood reminds us in various ways that constant remediation is a condition of our hypermediated Lives. The poets surveyed here aLL write about culturaL objects as they change over time: they demonstrate how works are overshadowed or otherwise obscured by historicaL imperatives that desire broad strokes and tidy narratives, fragmented or erased by poor care or inattention over the passage of time, reprinted and resituated across various print and digitaL editions. -
The Pragmatics of Apprompted Poems
LINES BY SOMEONE ELSE: THE PRAGMATICS OF APPROMPTED POEMS Kimberly Dawn Gibson Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2015 APPROVED: John ‘Haj’ Ross, Major Professor Bruce Bond, Committee Member Deborah Armintor, Committee Member Patricia Cukor-Avila, Director of the Department of Linguistics Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Gibson, Kimberly Dawn. Lines by someone else: The pragmatics of apprompted poems. Master of Arts (Linguistics), August 2015, 83 pp., 14 illustrations, references, 43 titles. Over the last sixty years, overtly intertextual poems with titles such as “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery” and “Poem Ending with a Line by George W. Bush” have been appearing at an increasing rate in magazines and collections. These poems wed themselves to other texts and authors in distinct ways, inviting readers to engage with poems which are, themselves, in conversation with lines from elsewhere. These poems, which I refer to as “apprompted” poems, explicitly challenge readers to investigate the intertextual conversation, and in doing so, they adopt inherent risks. My thesis will chart the various effects these poems can have for readers and the consequences they may hold for the texts from which they borrow. Literary critics such as Harold Bloom and J. H. Miller have described the act of borrowing as competitive and parasitic—“agon” is Bloom’s term for what he sees as the oedipal anxiety of poets and poets’ texts to their antecedents, but an investigation of this emerging genre in terms of linguistic pragmatics shows that apprompted poems are performing a wider range of acts in relation to their predecessors. -
The Lit the Yale Literary Magazine Fall 2010 Vol
THE LIT THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE FALL 2010 VOL. XXII, ISSUE II EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Christine Kwon + Andrew Saviano MANAGING EDITORS LITERARY EDITORS Orlando Hernández + Noah Warren Alice Hodgkins + Kenneth Reveiz SENIOR EDITORS Helen Tsykynovska + Nicolas Niarchos ASSSOCIATE EDITORS Janna Avner + Zeynep Pamuk DESIGNER Rachel Kauder Nalebuff ARTS EDITOR Susan Morrow EVENTS COORDINATORS Clayton Erwin + Jacque Feldman CIRCULATION AND Max de la Bruyère DISTRIBUTION PUBLISHER Sebastian Caliri ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER David Curtis PUBLICITY Juliana Hanle + Samuel Huber + Cora Lewis fig. 1. the board of the Yale Literary Magazine Operators’ Note We are happy to present this semester’s issue of the Lit. Designed as a technical manual, it is meant to offer an approachable guide to our student work. Although the writing was not solicited under any guidelines, the art was prompted to suit the design. All the work in the magazine is by undergraduates and has been selected by our staff in an anonymous process, as it is every semester. In addition to the an excerpt from a play. For our center section, we asked the real questions: Do you watch Bernard-Henri Lévy likes Charlie Rose. Steven Klein (who directed all of Madonna’s music videos, not to mention Lady Gaga’s Alejandro For our interview, we went a little deeper with John Ashbery. The Lit would like to extend our thanks to all the artists featured in this issue. And to our board of editors and our designer Rachel Kauder Nalebuff: thank you for being the people we would want to hang out with anyway. Sincerely, Christine Kwon & Andrew Saviano Editors-in-Chief 1 Before you begin: Table of Contents writing: by page Inversion, Robert Barton ........................................................................................ -
Selected Bibliograph | Writings on Art and Limited Editions
JOHN ASHBERY BIBLIOGRAPHY [2] John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927, he is well known as an art critic and poet. He is perhaps one of the best known Poets of the “New York School”. Ashbery graduated from Har- vard in 1947 where he wrote a study on his favourite poet Wallace Stevens. The poetry of Stevens has influenced Ashbery’s own poetry, however his poetry is characterized by originality in both his form of poems and their content. Ashbery received his B.A. degree in literature from Harvard in 1949 and moved to New York City where he was affiliated with poets Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and painters Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Nell Blaine, and Fairfield Porter.Ash- bery’s writings also include several plays, novels and distinguished works of literary criticism, as well as numerous English translations of French literature. He has also enjoyed a distinguished career as an art critic for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and Newsweek, and as editor of Art News. He is an authority, in particular, on the work of the late American realist painter Fairfield Porter. In addition to all regular editions, there have been many privately printed, small press and fine art edi- tions, as well as volumes combining several titles. Hanns Schimansky, one of the proof etchings for the Recital, with a prose poem by John Ashbery SELECTED WRITINGS ON ART AND OTHER WRITINGS Nouveau dictionnaire de la peinture moderne, published with the collaboration of John Ashbery. Paris : F.