pink dew of afterthoughts

I bought a copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery. I’ve been carrying it around with me like a secret.

It might be a perverse attraction. His writing is just so impossible. He is way beyond me. But it satisfies something inside me to dip into writing that’s so elegant and imaginative and vibrant, but doesn’t make any sense.

I study it, trying to see how he does it. I had to cut my poems down into shards of one or two sentences. I had to cut out a lot of random noise. Until I did that, they just didn’t seem like poems. And most of them still need work.

Ashbery puts together a relatively longer poem that doesn’t make any sense, and contains a lot of random noise, and it still seems to be a “poem.” Is it the language, the grammar, the sound-sense, some interrelationship between ideas, or is it just that he had the guts to do it?

Something interesting – certain of his lines and phrases jumped out at me because they seem like responses to some of the questions in my poems. I’d like to juxtapose these phrases with my poems, like postscripts. It would certainly seem eerie to me to see the interplay on the page. It would make me happy.

He does come up with some astonishing phrases. The title of this entry, “pink dew of afterthoughts,” is from Suite.

I’m collecting words to describe Ashbery’s work:

her·met·ic
Etymology: Medieval Latin hermeticus, from Hermet-, Hermes Trismegistus
1 a : of or relating to the Gnostic writings or teachings arising in the first three centuries A.D. and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
b : relating to or characterized by occultism or abstruseness : RECONDITE
2 [from the belief that Hermes Trismegistus invented a magic seal to keep vessels airtight] a : AIRTIGHT
b : impervious to external influence
c : RECLUSE, SOLITARY

re·con·dite
Etymology: Latin reconditus, past participle of recondere to conceal, from re- + condere to store up, from com- + -dere to put — more at COM-, DO
1 : hidden from sight : CONCEALED
2 : difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend : DEEP

id·i·o·lect
Etymology: idio- + -lect (as in dialect)
: the language or speech pattern of one individual at a particular period of life

(Also – sociolect; not in the MW online dictionary; probably means the speech pattern of a group.)