TEMPORARY ASSUMPTION OF CRITICAL STANDING
John Ashbery's poetry self-disarticulates like a teenage lobster into cutting. I've always thus assumed that his true talents lay in the visual arts. Thanks to The Paris Review for the disabuse.
The poetry at least contains an occasional grig-like phrase, with sufficient energy to sproing to freedom in one's polypropylene frisee. The collages, however, redefine "inert." More coherent work issued from my childhood CCD classes, despite the multiple hindrances of safety scissors, censorious lay-teachers and source images from Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal.
Ashbery is a serial offender, and this latest act can but be construed as a plea for help. Stop him stop him before he publishes again.
For collage as an art form, see the Scissor Dances of Dr. Omed. Liquified then centrifuged brainstem, chilled and served in martini glass with tiny live crayfish as silt-dweller garni: yum.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
There's something about the academic machinery at present that makes Ashberrys inevitable, I think. It's the mysterious inexorable pressure of self-consciousness continually narrowing its own horizon until there's nothing but a black hole, sentient but incapable of light. God protect us all.
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