Dean Young: John Ashbery (July 2001)

In this lecture, Dean Young takes on the poetry of John Ashbery, considering both the craft elements of slippage and play that define his work as well as naming its wide ranging influences of styles and artists, past and current. Responding to the obscurity many readers cite in the work, Young looks at what the nature of that obscurity is: how Ashbery’s language enacts liberty, inherent lack of fixity, and discovers potentiality; he focuses, in order to consider these effects, on Ashbery’s poem “Philosophy of Life.”