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Chutes And Ladders: John Ashbery's Poetics As Experience, Alexander Ibo Zondervan

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I’ve always found it difficult to say just what I think is happening in John Ashbery’s poetry, even when I recognize that I’ve undergone something through the course of reading. With Ashbery, I find myself becoming conscious of how I construct meaning from language, and I understand this self-reflexivity as a “poetics as experience.” Ashbery had read or at least been aware of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens—all of which explore how consciousness manifests through language. I read these figures through American pragmatism, which views writing as an activity that follows perception …