John Ashbery
Quick answer: John Ashbery craft guide: tonal drift, pronoun slippage and meaning as process. Learn how his difficult poems work and what they teach your writing.
John Ashbery (1927-2017) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in a single sweep for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), a feat no other book of poems has managed. A central figure of the New York School alongside Frank O'Hara, he spent a decade in Paris writing art criticism, and published more than twenty collections across sixty years. W.H. Auden chose his first book, Some Trees, for the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1956.
Readers either surrender to Ashbery or resent him, because his poems refuse to mean the way prose means. His defenders say the poems reproduce the actual experience of thinking, its drift, static and sudden clarities. Either way, no poet offers better training in what a poem can do besides deliver a message.
The signature moves
Move one: tonal drift. An Ashbery poem can slide from philosophy seminar to soap opera to weather report in a single stanza, each register handled fluently, none allowed to claim authority. The shifting itself becomes the subject: how a mind actually sounds across ten minutes.
Move two: pronoun slippage. You, I, we and he trade places mid-poem, so the reader keeps adjusting who is speaking to whom. He described wanting the poems to be open to multiple positions rather than fixed autobiography. Move three: the repurposed cliche. Ashbery loves stock phrases, business jargon, movie talk, greeting-card sentiment, placed where their secondhandness turns strange and expressive. Move four: meaning as weather rather than destination. Long poems like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, his meditation on a sixteenth-century painting by Parmigianino, keep approaching a conclusion, dissolving it, and approaching again, and the movement is the point.
What you can learn
You do not need to write like Ashbery to profit from him. Practise tonal control by drafting a stanza in three registers, formal, chatty, technical, then splicing the best of each; you will learn how much of what you call your voice is actually a single unexamined register. Try one poem where the pronouns deliberately shift and notice how the space for the reader enlarges.
Collect cliches for a week, then build a poem that quotes them with new pressure. And loosen your grip on paraphrase: write a draft that keeps changing its subject the way an afternoon does, then edit for music and momentum instead of message. Even if you return to clearer modes, your transitions will never be lazy again.
Where to start reading
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) is the landmark; its title poem is his most discussed work. Some Trees (1956) shows the elegant beginnings. Houseboat Days (1977) is often recommended as the friendliest entry, and the much-anthologised shorter pieces, including his instruction-like poem Paradoxes and Oxymorons, address the reader's confusion directly and wittily.
What poets can take from this
- Write one stanza three ways, in three registers, and splice the best lines.
- Allow a pronoun to change referent once per poem and watch the space open.
- Keep a notebook page of overheard cliches and redeploy three of them.
- When a draft resists paraphrase, revise for rhythm and momentum instead.
- Read one Ashbery poem aloud without trying to decode it, then reread slowly.
Try it yourself
Write a poem that begins as a weather report, drifts into a memory that may not be yours, and ends in instructions to an unnamed you, letting the tone shift at least twice without announcing the shifts.
Questions
Why is John Ashbery considered difficult?
His poems drift between tones and subjects, shift pronouns, and resist paraphrase, aiming to reproduce the experience of thinking rather than deliver statements. Reading him for music and movement first, meaning second, is the standard advice.
What is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror about?
The title poem meditates on Parmigianino's sixteenth-century self-portrait painted on a convex surface, using it to explore how any self-representation distorts. The 1975 book won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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