John Ashbery and You approaches Ashbery's critically neglected recent poetry with an ear to his use of the supremely elastic pronoun "you" and an eye toward his construction of his books as books. Together, these devices produce effects new to Ashbery's oeuvre and offer readers new ways "in" to his work. John Ashbery and You argues that starting with April Galleons (1987), and reaching an apex in Your Name Here (2000), the poet has been paying increasingly keen and affectionate attention to his readers. Vincent tracks these techniques but above all offers his readers tools to reapproach a dauntingly difficult body of work.

Some critics have suggested that Ashbery is producing books too quickly for criticism to keep up or that the later books represent, as Vincent summarizes it, "a kind of logorrhea . . . and therefore don't really register as separate events as much as episodic eruptions of one big volcano which is the Later Ashbery." Vincent contends that critics are not keeping up with Ashbery not so much because it is all of a piece, but rather because his work varies so much from volume to volume. Each of the volumes from the latter part of Ashbery's career represents an individual and different poetic project, depending precisely on the unit of the book to produce its effects.

By showing us that the entry point to Ashbery is not any given individual poem within a volume, but the entire volume, Vincent gives us a new and productive approach to reading the recent work of one of our most challenging poets.

About the Author

JOHN EMIL VINCENT is a poet and critic. He teaches English and American Studies at Wesleyan University. His book Queer Lyrics was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

Reviews

Vincent is a wonderful guide to Ashbery's work; he has read the books over and again, and his own style often resembles Ashbery's, ranging from high academic discourse to slang, from poetic to prosaic diction. This is an ambitious work, moving as it does in several directions, and it is eminently readable.

* author of A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry *

John Ashbery and You makes a significant contribution to modernist studies, literary criticism, and queer theory. Vincent's scholarship is impressive and on a level with related work by Helen Vendler and Lee Edelman.

* author of Love's Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics *

Of all [the recent] 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.

Book Information
ISBN 9780820329734
Author John Emil Vincent
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Georgia Press
Publisher University of Georgia Press
Weight(grams) 426g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 19mm