On John Ashbery’s poetry

Abstract

This article is a meditation on the essence of John Ashbery’s poetry. To ask what Ashbery’s poems are “about” is to wrestle with the term’s own aboutness; or, to put it differently, such an inquiry comes with the odd realisation that what his poetry is “about” cannot itself be it. So it is either something else entirely, or one must reckon with the irreducible gap between “it” and its aboutness. There is no inside or outside to his poetry; no question of whether it is about itself or something other than itself. In other words, it is not a question of either/or, but an irresolution of one and the same, much like Heidegger’s aletheia: ‘letting Being be by not letting Being be’. The fundamental impossibility of either letting Being be or not, which in Heidegger takes the shape of his unending quest for the ‘elementary’ and ‘primordial’, or which in Richard Rorty’s reflection resembles the ultimate and absolute finality of the ‘final vocabulary’ (language/western metaphysics), is here imagined in the impossible concept of the ‘subaltern’—a concept whose ontological possibility is the negation of its ontic essence. It is as impossible as it is to situate Being, or to write what Ashbery writes about.