Don't give up. It's too soon. Things break.

What John Ashbery teaches us About the plural self, the collision of voices, and holding onto hope.

Dear readers,

I’m preparing to give a talk at a conference here at Yale tomorrow on the 50th anniversary of the publication of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror—that triple threat of a book. In 1976, it won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ashbery is one of my favorite poets. In some ways, he is the poet who made me become a poet, though my poetry is not much like his—except for a few poems here and there. Still, I’ve always been shaped by Ashbery’s interest in city life, art, and the way his poems enact thinking on the page, engaging with experiences as varied as jouissance and anomie.

In this newsletter, I’m going to discuss one of Ashbery’s poems and ask: What can we take from reading Ashbery? I’ll offer some exercises and prompts to help you channel his playful genius into your own work.