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John Ashbery Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec
Collection Clefs Concours
– Anglais – Littérature Neuilly : Atlande,
2019 Broché. 240 pages. ISBN 978-2350306056. 19€
Reviewed by Noëlle Cuny Université de Haute-Alsace (Mulhouse)
Jennifer
Kilgore-Caradec’s handbook, commissioned by Atlande to cater for the needs of the
2019-2021 agrégation students, was designed to be exactly that: a
pocket-size toolbox full of quick-reference lists, timelines, biographical
sketches, intertextual references, and selected thematic points of entry into John
Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). But it is also much
more than that. It is engaging enough to make anyone new to avant-garde 1970s
poetry like myself curious of these strange, “disjunct”, “difficult” poems, let
alone an agrégation student who (consider it for a minute!) may depend
on this for their future career.
The opening is very clear about objectives. This is about taking and passing a notoriously hard competitive
exam. So let’s not waste time and money travelling to Boston to “sit at [the
poet’s] desk while trying to write your own poem, as Harvard undergraduates are
now encouraged to do” [9]. And yet… can a fledgling poet or critic not be
excused for trying to put themselves in the shoes, or at least following in the
footsteps of a writer they admire? Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec herself, as I know
from having enjoyed her famed tour of Modernist Paris, is a great (and brisk)
walker of inspirational places. Under her guidance, it becomes clear that a
writer’s experience of exile, of cross-cultural exchange and networking, are
things to be felt rather than heard about in ex-cathedra lessons or even read about in handbooks. But some of
Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec’s taste for place made it into her brilliant little book,
one of whose fiches thématiques is aptly entitled “Sightings and
pathways through Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”. Tracking John Ashbery
and his contemporaries is fun because it is like a walk in the city, or a trip
from coast to coast, or over the Atlantic, or indeed a mental hike, a moving
mindscape, as Ashbery himself put it in Richard Moore’s film USA Poetry
in 1966: “scenery, objects, and people tend to be kind of disappearing and what
it is involved with is it to make concrete passing states of mind, mental
things” [62]. In the poet’s account, it had to do with living in Paris and
feeling disconnected from one’s native language. Similarly, the author of this
handbook is a true cosmopolitan, one who knows how much is gained from moving
about, or simply from hanging out, from not being home. Page 50 is a perfect
night out in New York City in the late 40s: Cedar Tavern, the San Remo bar in
the Village, and the Wellworth Café in Harlem. As the reader is soon made
aware, a sense of displacement is crucial to understanding poetry as
transformative process.
Chapter two provides literary context:
the Black Mountain College and its polar opposite, New Criticism; the Beat
poets; Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960; the three
generations of the New York School; “The Movement’’ in Britain; American
Confessional Poetry; Postmodernism; the San Francisco Avant-Garde;
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry. Apart from the hard facts about these groups that just
need to be known, the lessons of this chapter are twofold: 1) do not be fooled
by Ashbery’s apparent apolitical aloofness: his poems are to be read also in
their political context, such as the Nixon years; 2) in the spirit of
multipractice communities such as the Black Mountain College, language is music
is poetry is painting. Musicians as different as Franz Lizst and John Cage were
among Ashbery’s major influences, and “painting’s creative processes influenced
[New York School] poetics” [55]. At this point the central idea of
self-scrutiny or self-contemplation is introduced, in an elegant phrase
characterizing the painterly poetics of Ashbery and his group: “Mimesis could
be about the ‘me’: Pollock had emphasized: ‘I am nature’” [55]. Two pages
devoted to the self-portrait tradition later follow up on this [127-128], with
a list of predecessors to Ashbery’s particular reworking of the genre, where
the face to be seen is someone else’s from four centuries ago and the ‘me’ is
flux and change rather than set features.
Chapters three and four offer reading
aids for the collection itself, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975):
an exploration of French connections, the American bicentennial, climate / ecology
/ ambiance, the poetics of transcendence, and light effects. Collage is
discussed over ten valuable pages as the main modus operandi, and
numerous leads are provided as to potential or documented sources for the
pieces of the puzzle or its subtext: Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot,
W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Proust, Raymond Roussel, Bossuet, Matisse… Given
the importance of juxtaposition in the reading / viewing / listening protocols
that had been put in place since the early phases of Modernism and have been
current ever since, chapter three might have been the right place to present
the magazines in which the poems first appeared as a framing kind of collage,
and perhaps to invite students to consider the poems in their native milieu.
The surrounding poems in the October 1974 issue of Poetry must have colored
early readings of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, with their insistence on
death and burial, and the war from which the USA had just withdrawn still on
everybody’s minds. This might have further strengthened Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec’s contextualizing of the poem within
the ambiance of democratic self-doubt of the years around the Bicentennial [81-82
and 132-134].
Chapter five focuses on the title poem. Parmigianino
is presented, the creator of the Mannerist cinquecento curio that is the
original Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; an admirably brief history of
self-portraits as a genre is offered; and the successive covers of John
Ashbery’s 1975 collection are discussed, in their illustrative dialogue with
the poems. This is a most welcome initiative. It opens up interpretation to
more materialist approaches; the baffled reader feels empowered, as students do
when asked to comment on visual and editorial paraphernalia rather than the
too-obscure verse itself, little knowing that they are, in the process, really
making their entrance into the revered and dreaded temple. The central part of
the chapter on the title poem is a strong study of its intertext, which
presents itself as an invitation to follow these ramifications further or to
tease out new connections. Here as elsewhere, I salute the author’s careful
inclusion of the most recent work on Ashbury, much of it French (the now
classic John Ashbury : À contre-voix de l’Amérique, by A. Cazé,
Pierre-Yves Pétillon’s Histoire de la Littérature Américaine, as wells
as books by Hélène Aji, Caroline Pollentier and Xavier Kalck, of the French
Society for Modernist Studies), and some of it only a few months old (Anne
Lauterbach’s Youtube-broadcast talk at the Sorbonne in October 2019).
Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec’s
writing is at its best when it models itself on the congenial informality of
its object to suddenly zoom in, in very narrow focus, on a particularly telling
co-occurrence of cognitive events in the poem and material events in the code
of the printed page. For example, when trying to account for what happens
between lines 21-26 and lines 44-46, remembering how important Wallace Stevens
was to Ashbery, she writes: The evocation of the souls offers the abstraction that
Stevens prescribed. Captivity and constraint are central to much of the first
section […] The poetic voice describes being trapped within one’s own art. And
then something pops, the description flip-flops back on itself […] Our moment
of attention animates the soul as it animates the poem, in an original
hypallage, at the point where in the first published version of the poem in 1974,
there was a stanza break. [141] This is one of those fine moments in the handbook when
one feels the persistence of the original magazine as the collage-like medium
which began to fashion the reception – the message, in a sense – of this extremely
rich poem. These pages also show that far from a well-wrought urn the poem is a
rhizomic, open-ended object en devenir (the Deleuzian overtones are not
fortuitous, and some recent open-access commentary indicates how productive a
Deleuzian reading of this poem can be). One winces briefly to see Parmigianino referred to as “the little cheese
painter”, as the author playfully imagines the student unfamiliar with Italian
unsettled by the odd-sounding nickname [143], but this is just another sign of
Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec’s wonderful ability to sense and anticipate the
catches in her students’ thought-processes. One is agreeably stimulated by the
erudite ease of her authoritative yet warm and lively voice. Clearly, the user
of this manual is in the hands of a first-class researcher and teacher.
In her capacity as a Geoffrey Hill expert, Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec is also well
equipped to convey a sense of the collective and emulative effort that poetry
writing can be. In several places, this book makes it evident what a novel and
productive angle of approach the Hill-Ashbery conjunction is. Formally, there is a small number of imperfections: some font size
variation, a couple of typos, two lines of verse unseparated in the important quote
p. 141. But it is a remarkably clean text, in spite of the daunting delivery
deadlines that are one of the constraints of publishing for a French concours
(other limitations pertaining to the genre include the absence of an index and the
absence of images, the latter making it necessary for the student to have a
connected viewing device at hand while reading the handbook to look up the
numerous musical or visual pieces pointed to as elements of the Ashberian
collage). The writing is reader-friendly and helpful in its transitions, with
short, manageable and clearly titled subchapters. Another sign of the author’s rare capacity for teacherly empathy is her
sensitivity to time management issues and prioritizing. The bibliography is
“very select” indeed, but usefully itemized and hierarchized for concours
preparation purposes. One is assured that listening to all four minutes of
Liszt’s “Grand Galop Chromatique” is time well spent, and that looking at
Ashbery’s visual collages is worth one’s while when trying to understand how
his poetry works. I am unsure what non-specialist students in a hurry will make
of chapter seven, an endeavour to assess the impact of John Ashbery’s work by
tracing a wide constellation of poets he may or may not have interacted with
and of potential heirs to his style [175-190], but the appendices are
invaluable time savers: lists of artists and musicians Ashbery met and/or wrote
about and of French authors translated by him, as well as an ambitious cultural
timeline spanning a century and a half and juxtaposing literary / artistic with
mass culture landmarks and social / political events. While all interpretations offered by Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec are backed
up with considerable research and show great confidence navigating vast tracts
of twentieth-century French / British / American poetry and art, plenty of room
is left for creative hypothesis and open questioning, as it should be. As
chapter six covers Ashbery’s other works beside Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror, interpretations are put forward that are invitations to make
further connections of one’s own. Is there an echo of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis”
in “Absolute Clearance”, or actual dialogue with the younger poet in “Tenebrae”
(from Wakefulness) [159]? Is there a reminiscence of Elisabeth Bishop in
“The Short Answer” (from Quick Question) [171]? These and other such
suggestions elsewhere in the book are in fact so compelling as to count as
authoritative readings, interwoven as they are with more established
comparisons with T.S. Eliot, with Shakespeare, with French Surrealism... And so
we are given not only the quintessence of significant research on Ashbery but a
new John Ashbery, a collaged portrait curated with love and admiration for “a
poet for the age”: one whose writing nurtures in its young readers a wholesome
indignation in the presence of politics that, like the poem “But Seriously” (Commotion
of the Birds, 2017), begins in “a famous New-York strip-club joint and ends
with a film about the mob” [173], of anthropogenic climate change [106-116 and
201-202] and of sick “so-called orthodoxies” [204].
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