Olaf Risee vroeg me om een kort opstel over John Ashbery voor
In Letterland. De leesaantekening die ik schreef naar aanleiding van
Notes from the Air. Selected Later Poems staat nu
te lezen op mijn website.
Marjorie Perloff's
bespreking van hetzelfde boek is de moeite waard. Twee fragmenten die me aanspreken:
"Ashbery’s mode, in this and related poems, is not collage; indeed, it is not, as is generally claimed, disjunctive and fragmented. On the contrary, this is a poetry that exploits syntactic continuity and a kind of sequential normalcy, only to subvert them at every step by injecting alien items and unexpected references into the sequence. It’s a matter of careful construction, of finding the Flaubertian
mot juste or, in this case,
phrase juste."
"The
illogic of continuity is Ashbery’s signature, whether from line to line, poem to poem, or volume to volume."