Ashbery’s poetry increasingly adopted a collaged aesthetic, commingling art-historical imagery with kitschy Americana and pop-cultural explorations of identity. “His poems are famously difficult because they go to four different places at one time,” Bessa observed. “That clash prompted an idea of the concept.” During a sojourn in Paris, Ashbery labored on his 1962 collection of poems, The Tennis Court Oath. The book is “beyond comprehension,” Bessa said, “because he was collaging a lot of different sources.” Ashbery’s poetry is generally elliptical, with references cut-and-pasted from film, pop culture, literature, and art history. The lines of the 2009 poem “They Knew What They Wanted,” for instance, are entirely composed of movie titles beginning with the word “they.”
Thursday, October 04, 2018
In case you wondered …
… American Poet John Ashbery's Collage Art - Artsy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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