/lit/ - Literature

>John Lawrence Ashbery (1927 – 2017) was an American poet and art critic.
>Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age." Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephanie Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".
>Ashbery published more than 20 volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, his work still proves controversial. Ashbery said he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, not a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."

>>20866437
This seems to me to have as much poetic worth as his earlier offering; i.e. none at all. So at least he's consistent.

>>20866437
What?

Bump

>>20866437
>The plush leaves the chattels in barrels
This is leaving me particularly stumped.

Bump

>>20866437
"Forgotten" fuck off

>>20869252
wdhmbt

Not that hard to follow compared to other Ashbery. Two figures, maybe the street musicians, are described at the start. One dies either physically or symbolically, while the other is left in a sort of existential wandering, until realizing a sort of epiphany that allows them to "hate and forget each other".

This then shifts to the narrator who may or may not be one of the street musicians, playing a sort of tune that is both old (forgotten showtunes), but future-looking (possibility of free declamation). Could be a meta meditation on what Ashbery is doing in his poetry. This description of the musician then shifts into a sort of past (tensed) image of an Eden, though mixed with modern trash, yet an 'our' is able to find a sort of vulgar liberty within it (possibly the earlier two figures before their loss). One can read it as a modern take on Orpheus and Eurydice, a schism leading one left to wander and find solace in music.

>>20870314
eggsplain the plush leaving the chattels in barrels

>>20870657
Notice 'leaves' can be read as noun or verb, and the verb can either mean to leave (The plush deserts the chattel) or to leave behind (The plush leaves behind the chattel), and the last line talks of autumn.

In autumn, plush (richness) does leave the leaves as they turn decrepit and fall, so there's a play off autumnal imagery, but there are many ways to rearrange the syntax and definitions and each creates an entirely different modulation of meaning, not to mention the "obscure family being evicted" is a surreal metaphor. Trying to pinpoint a specific meaning is impossible due to the complexity of the punning, but Ashbery seems to be mainly describing autumnal loss in a surreal way, mixed with some Edenic undertones (an obscure family being evicted).