John Ashbery and you : his later books /

Every recent critic of Ashbery has struggled in trying to explain why he is so difficult to understand. In John Ashbery and American Poetry (CH, Mar'02, 39-3827), David Herd tries to explain the poet by placing him in the tradition of Walt Whitman; in Ashbery's Forms of Attention (CH, Feb'07, 44-3150), Andrew DuBois argues that the difficulty arises because poet's real subject is pure consciousness; and in On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry (CH, Jun'95, 32-5521), probably the most thorough analysis, John Shoptaw bases the poet's complexity on Ashbery's desire to obscure his homosexuality. Vincent, too, struggles with Ashbery's difficulty, and he complicates the task for himself by focusing on the poet's later books--his most difficult and obscure. He attempts to explain Ashbery's obscurity by focusing on the poet's use of the word "you" as an almost infinitely flexible pronoun and on his self-conscious interest in the structure and construction of his books as books. Of all these studies of Ashbery, Vincent's is the least weighed down by scholarly apparatus; accordingly, one can enjoy reading his close, careful analyses of individual poems. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty. P. J. Ferlazzo Northern Arizona University