authenticity / extinction

The poetry of John Ashbery also performs innumerable acts of humorously displacing the author (and his hyperactive mind) yet Ashbery remains a narrowly “human” author. The acrobatics of pronouns, riffs on tradition, sleight-of-hand appropriation and high-low juggling reveal an almost professorial Ashbery in the end, witty and wise but confined to a Museum of Modern Art version of the 20 th Century. This may be preferable to the academic version or the experimental version, but still not good enough. Extinction is no longer an existential condition to be evoked in abstract constructions or deconstructions of thinking. Extinction is becoming a species fact we’ll have to internalize. Although Ashbery is still today our parental avant-garde, we no longer have the sense that we are more exposed than we want to be. Yet we are, and Nichol won’t let us forget it. With bpNichol, we are walking in the wilderness along with the ghosts of Darwin and Freud. And as if the shit has hit the fan, and we can no longer avoid how Freud found the origin of our creativity in the infant’s erotic attachment to its feces, its instinct to play with it.

THE AUTHENTIC POET IN THE LATE 20th CENTURY:
TED, BP, AND ARAKI YASUSADA,
David Rosenberg,
fascicle 3