“thinking about other things”

In an essay in Poetry Matthew Bevis says:

[John] Ashbery once suggested that his poetry would be doing its job only if its audience was intermittently aware of it while thinking about other things at the same time.

Ashbery has certainly designed his poems to be hard to follow, impossible to follow, actually, that being one of his goals. Ashbery loves the slippery pronoun, especially “it.” To what is a particular “it” referring? It’s often impossible to know!

I’ve written poems, inspired by Ashbery among many another, that meander around, going in and out of narrative, go in and out of sense. I’ve even stood up before an audience at a reading and let them know that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s okay if their minds wander. “Tune in and out. You will still hear interesting things.”

source:

“In Search of Distraction”

by Matthew Bevis

Poetry

edited by Don Share

November 2017, vol. 211 no. 2

Chicago, IL