A Fascinating Deep Dive Into John Ashbery’s Early Years
THE SONGS WE KNOW BEST John Ashbery’s Early Life By Karin Roffman Illustrated. 316 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30. “My own autobiography has never interested me very much,” John Ashbery once told an interviewer. “Whenever I try to think about it, I seem to draw a complete blank.” Over the course of his long career as one of America’s most celebrated poets, Ashbery has fiercely defied a central premise of the lyric poetic tradition: that a poem should be a “song of myself,” an utterance that springs from the circumstances of the writer’s life and gives insight into the author’s mind and feelings. “I have always been averse to talking about myself and so I don’t write about my life the way the confessional poets do,” he has said. Instead, Ashbery aims to create “paradigms of common experience which I hope other peopl...
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