How to Enjoy John Ashbery - by Joshua Corey

Dream of a Rarebit Fiend

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How to Enjoy John Ashbery<br>A letter to my book group

Joshua Corey<br>Jul 01, 2026

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My forthcoming novel, The Last Words of Jack Ruby, which will be published sixty-three years to the day after Jack Ruby pulled the trigger on Lee Harvey Oswald, is now available for pre-order from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and wherever books are sold. Nothing sets up a new book for success like a large number of pre-orders, so if you want to read the JFK assassination novel that Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson has called “taut, lyrical, and deeply unsettling,” pre-order today!

For the past six months I’ve been leading a book group in Lake Forest—ten folks who were reading together for more than twenty years before I showed up. It’s my favorite sort of group, mostly unconcerned with keeping up with whatever’s being ballyhooed in The New York Times; instead we read a mixture of classics and contemporary works. They’ve read Proust and Joyce and Nabokov, Woolf and Ballard and Conrad; they’re a formidably well-read bunch, and it’s a pleasure to discuss literature with them entirely for the joy of it, for its own sake. Since I joined the group we’ve read Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, Rachel Cusk’s Outline, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, James Joyce’s Dubliners, and we’ve just finished Yiyun Li’s strange and beguiling The Book of Goose. It’s the very best sort of teaching; I don’t have to grade a single paper!<br>The one thing they hadn’t read much of before I took over as facilitator was poetry. Like many otherwise supremely literate people, they’re nervous about poetry; too many people have been taught to respond to poems as though they were some kind of test they’re bound to fail, and who enjoys that? We started with 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman, which is kind of starting at the deep end, but I thought they’d respond to Berryman’s tragicomic theatricality and they did, pretty much. Now we’re about to read John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and I think it’s safe to say they’re a bit intimidated. So I wrote them an email, a little guide to enjoying Ashbery’s work, which I reprint here in adapted form for readers of the Fiend.

John Ashbery is frequently spoken of as a philosophical and discursive poet, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens; he is often described as difficult, even inaccessible or hermetic. But I think there’s a great deal to enjoy in his poems: startling turns of phrase, wit, moments of insight, beautiful sounds and images. In the broadest sense, these are poems about the experience of experience. In other words, his poems are rarely about a particular place, person, landscape, or idea; instead, they are self-conscious explorations of what it feels like to think. “Meaning yes, but message no,” Ashbery once said. “There is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.”<br>Ashbery is perhaps our supreme modern poet of what John Keats called, in one of his letters, negative capability: “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Ashbery writes as he wants us to read, with our judgment suspended, embracing contradiction, skating from one phrase into the next. Ashbery is a very Emersonian poet; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays are best understood as a series of startling sentences, each of which tries to slap the reader into fresh attentiveness, without too much concern for coherence of argument. As Emerson wrote in “Circles”: “Our moods do not believe in each other.” Or as Ashbery wrote in “Homeless Heart”: “Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing.”<br>It might be helpful to think about Ashbery’s very twentieth-century work (sophisticated, urbane, ironic) in relation to other twentieth-century art forms like abstract painting (he made his living as an art critic for many years) or atonal music. When you look at a de Kooning painting, for instance, you can ask yourself what the painting is “about,” or you can simply enjoy the colors and tones and textures and let the mood of the thing wash over you:

Willem de Kooning, Composition, 1955. Oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas.<br>If you listen to a piece of atonal music by Anton Webern, you will quickly become frustrated if you listen for the melody, because there isn’t one. But the patterns of symmetry that organize the music—more visible in the score than they are audible to the ear—will eventually make themselves felt to the listener.

We might isolate something similar to Webern’s atonal logic in Ashbery’s line breaks; he is a master of enjambment, which I’ve come to feel is the key distinction between words broken into lines and a real poem. In Barry Edelstein’s invaluable Thinking Shakespeare, he argues that “characters do their thinking at line...