"Ashbery is the most famous contemporary gay poet. His deployment of a
tactic that now looks like a refusal ever to speak directly or deal
straightforwardly with felt experience has the effect of trivialising
gays,
of insinuating the idea that gays are evasive and frivolous."
I presume this is a quote from the Ian Gregson book - which I haven't
read, so it may be presumptuous to comment on it, but anyway... Various
things strike me on this: firstly, why should Ashbery "speak directly"
about "felt experience" if he finds speaking obliquely to be more
interesting? And why should it be seen negatively as a "refusal",
rather than a positive desire to do something else? Surely Ashbery's
poetry only "trivialises gays" if you perceive it as trivial in the
first place, and only insinuates the idea that they are evasive and
frivolous if you have that idea to start with? I would query the idea
that if one is American and gay one has some kind of responsibility in
one's writing to somehow "deal with" being American and gay: seems like
reductive determinism to me, like the idea that art should be "relevant"
in some banally straightforward sense, which leaves us all precisely
where we are, in our little boxes made of ticky-tacky, one per
'interest-group'. I am neither American, nor gay, and I contrive to find
Ashbery's work, mostly from "Self-Portrait" through "Houseboat Days" to
"As We Know", speaking fairly forcefully to me about being human. I
think the later books have their moments, but I haven't been quite as
compelled by them as I was, and still am, by those three, possibly for
personal reasons to do with the time and place I first read them, I'd
guess, or partly, anyhow.
Dave
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