💬 John Ashbery’s 99th birthday is tomorrow!
I loved reading Robert Wood Lynn’s substack post this week where he gives JA flowers and talks about his experience with JA’s work, which is very familiar to my own:
“what is remarkable about this poem is not how [JA] sinks his little word-ship, but the salvage operation he makes at the end—this is the human gesture that AI is still a ways away from understanding. Ashbery has done poetry’s version of breaking the fourth wall by establishing the poem as a character in the poem, the intermediary O’Hara imagines between speaker and reader. The poem is a smokescreen for the speaker the whole time, who hides behind it—appearing only once at the end of the second stanza to briefly substitute his definition of play”
It’s really hard to explain JA and poets love to write about his work because there are so many ways to break it apart and look at it again, which is part of the play and genius of it!
Here is a poem by JA, “Down by the Station, Early in the Morning”
