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John Shoptaw has written about Ashbery as a gay poet, both in his book on Ashbery and in his article on him in _The Tribe of John_. _Flow Chart_ is indeed an amazing book. Really a memoir of the poet and his poetry (as well as its reception). Susan Scott Hamilton <[log in to unmask]> wrote: "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." Very interesting. I am familiar with that feeling of 'weariness' that can sometimes overwhelm you reading Ashes. Sometimes it's like you're feasting on whipped cream... I think it perhaps is the result of an aesthetic that was designed as a reaction to the stuff that was coming out of a particular time and place, and has now become fetishised, institutionalised, decontextualised. I see it often in the poets in NZ - Wystan Curnow, who posts his heartfelt and elegant post-structuralist fallacies here regularly,is a classic example - who are under the spell of the Language group, but do not understand the purpose of the poetics built by that group. They take the 'forms' - the empty shells - of the work of people like Andrews and Silliman, but are blind to the sociological and political views that underpin them, justify them. What you end up with is a whole lotta sub-neo-Symbolist sludge, which makes pretty, prettily vague poems out of forms designed to bite. One thinks of the phrase Rosenberg used to describe the sloppy late Abstract Expressionist work - 'apocalyptic wallpaper'. I think that the decline of avant-garde poetics is intimately related to the decline of the challenge to capitalism in the West which follwed the massive struggles - and explosion of new ideas in art and academia - of the late sixties and first half of the seventies. I think that the apolitical aestheticism that postmodernism/poststructuralism/identity 'politics' and theory legitimise is a response to the marginalising of academics, intellectuals and artists in Western society. Someone once called poststructuralists "the shock troops of neo-liberalism"...I think one of the key functions of poststructuralism is to valourise and mystify the impotence of academics and intellectuals. How else do you get out of bed in the morning?` Now class struggle apprears (stress that last word, it's still too early to be sure) to be on the rise again, with the anticapitalist movement putting tens of thousands on the streets in the West and South America, amongst other parts of the Third World, in turmoil, it will be intersting to see how pen pushers et al react. Already, in the last few years, we have seen dramatic declines in the influence of 1980s Gods like Derrida and Andrea Dworkin, and a rise, within academia at least, of interest in more earthy, pseudo-(often very pseudo-) sociological stuff like, for instance, postcolonial studies. But April Galleons as the last good book???? How did you come to pick that one? It is exceedingly mannered, compared to its successors Flow Chart and Hotel Lautreamont. I think that Flow Chart is an amazing book, a real attempt by Ashes to break out of his solipsism... Cheers Scott X-Apparently-To: [log in to unmask] via web804.mail.yahoo.com X-Track: 6: 40 Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 14:44:24 +0100 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.71.1712.3 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.71.1712.3 Subject: Re: John Ashbery From: "David Kennedy" To: X-Unsub: To leave, send text 'leave poetryetc' to [log in to unmask] Reply-To: [log in to unmask] Sender: [log in to unmask] Yes, there is an interesting chapter in Ian Gregson's book The Male Image about Lil' Johnny Ashbery and the Noo Yawk Skool camp male voice. He argues that what started out as subversive is now ossified, what started as polyphony is now monotonous etc. Ian's most interesting point is that where Sontag's famous essay on camp originally had it wrong because it de-politicised camp, she now appears to be right because Ashbery's tone is actually apolitical. "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." Be keen to hear what gay listees think of this... cheers David PS: I think Bill's right too although I lost interest later than April Galleons. ===== "Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life, we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ Susan M. Schultz University of Hawai`i-Manoa http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/schultz http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/mags/tinfish --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!