Recently, while writing about ekphrastic poetry in a few reviews, I was reminded of my fondness for John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” perhaps the best known contemporary poem inspired by a painting. First published in the August 1974 issue of Poetry, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” later served as the title poem for Ashbery’s celebrated 1975 collection that won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Currently, in honor of Ashbery’s 80th birthday this month (July 28), Poetry features the original pages of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” at its online archives site.
Coincidentally, at the time of its publication I was a first-year graduate student in Ashbery’s poetry writing class at Brooklyn College. The graduate program in creative writing had just begun, and this was his first teaching position after nearly a decade (1955-1965) of writing art criticism in Paris for the Herald Tribune, then working until 1972 as an executive editor at Art News in New York. Indeed, the 1974 contributor’s note in Poetry accompanying “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” announced to everyone that John had joined the faculty at Brooklyn College.
I remember well the excitement surrounding the volume’s release as my classmates and I attended the publication party. The date written by John beneath his inscription in my copy of the book indicates Monday, May 12, as the evening of the reception. I also recall other celebrations, at Ashbery’s Chelsea apartment and elsewhere, as the book became famous for its unusual feat, in a single year receiving each of the three major book awards for poetry, what we jokingly labeled as winning the “Triple Crown,” a term I’ve seen repeated a number of times in print over the decades. A few years later I was thrilled and honored when John wrote a prefatory note for my first book of poems, choosing to borrow a couple of lines from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to describe unexpected perceptions and contemplations he found in my work.
Although at the time everyone knew he’d achieved something extraordinary, even today I’m amazed by the great amount of attention this lone book of poetry and that particular title poem have garnered. I’m not aware of any poem from the last forty years that has had as much critical commentary written about it. Indeed, one might have to look back to Ginsberg’s “Howl” to find a recent poem with a greater history of commentary. Over the more than three decades that have passed, I’ve noted the ongoing resonance and persistent guidance “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” yet demonstrates for many readers and writers of poetry.
This week as I returned to read Ashbery’s poem once more, I again quickly realized how significant this work has become, both as a touchstone for late-twentieth-century poetry and as an influence for many contemporary poets continuing into the twenty-first century, though not all necessarily initiating precisely his particular style of writing. Most who have followed in Ashbery’s footsteps have written with a greatly liberated sense of connection between observation and speculation, producing meditative poems containing playful and intellectual self-reflection often presented with language or imagery that surprises, at times maybe even befuddles some in its audience. Certainly, such a way of relating one’s perceptions to readers was not new; however, Ashbery’s speaker in this poem seemed almost to reinvigorate interest in poetry where “words are only speculation / (From the Latin speculum, mirror),” as the poet proposes.
“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” begins as an examination of the sixteenth-century Parmigianino painting of the same title. In fact, the speaker’s opening lines sound similar to some of the descriptive and engaging language one might find in Ashbery’s numerous reviews or essays on artworks and artists: “As Parmigianino did it, the right hand / Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away, as though to protect / What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams, / Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together / In a movement supporting the face, which swims / Toward and away like the hand / Except that it is in repose.”
Not surprisingly, Ashbery once acknowledged in an interview with David Lehman: “That was the first time I ever took a painting as the subject for a poem. And I did it only after I left Art News and supposed that I wouldn’t be involved with writing about art anymore. It was as though I had been consciously avoiding this particular input while I was in the business of being an art editor, as though I shouldn’t be writing what is so close to my daily business.” Indeed, Ashbery had first seen the original painting in Vienna fifteen years before he rediscovered it in a collection of reproductions bought while browsing at a small bookstore and decided to focus upon it for his new poem.
However, as many reviewers and literary critics have noted throughout the years since its publication, much of the poem’s strength lies in its revelations about Ashbery’s perceptions, his self-portrait as a poet who nevertheless knows words, like the brush strokes in a painting, may not always be fully sufficient in rendering experience. One may view art as a fictitious substitute, though a valuable representation, for actual experience. Even “the portrait / Is the reflection once removed,” placed at a distance, as well as reversed and distorted by the physical shape of an object: “The surface / Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases / Significantly.” Similarly, Ashbery suggests the words in poems sometimes prove inadequate: “They seek and cannot find the meaning in music, / We see only postures of the dream.”
Throughout the poem readers witness a blending of personae, particularly the way pronouns shift and at times mix the painter with the poet. Although Ashbery appears to be addressing Parmigianino in the poem, the voice of the speaker also seems self-reflexive sometimes, so much so that a certain amount of confusion contributes to an already ample supply of attractive or amusing ambiguity filled with allusive remarks: “you could be fooled for a moment / Before you realize the reflection / Isn’t yours. You feel then like one of those / Hoffmann characters who have been deprived / Of a reflection, except that the whole of me / Is seen to be supplanted by the strict / Otherness of the painter in his / Other room. We have surprised him / At work, but no, he has surprised us / As he works.”
Later in the poem, Ashbery speaks of confusion with the way time is perceived and portrayed, perhaps even delayed or stayed, by forms of art: “I used to think they were all alike, / That the present always looked the same to everybody / But this confusion drains away as one / Is always cresting into one’s present. / Yet the ‘poetic,’ straw-colored space / Of the long corridor that leads back to painting, / Its darkening opposite—is this / Some figment of ‘art,’ not to be imagined / As real, let alone special?” The speaker even cleverly relates how the original artwork endures, but is often distanced from viewers, and routinely all that remains are poor surrogates: “the public / Is pushing through the museum now so as to / Be out by closing time. You can’t live there. / The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how: / Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime / To learn and are reduced to the status of / Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates / Are rare.”
John Ashbery has always been unpredictable and has experimented with different manners of narrative (or lack of narrative) within his poems, often incorporating seemingly arbitrary or stray elements and apparently disjointed phrases into his work. As he stated in his interview with Lehman: “Art with any serious aspirations toward realism still has to take into account the fact that reality escapes laws of perspective and logic, and does not naturally take the form of a sonnet or a sonata.”
In his poetry-writing classes, Ashbery always emphasized this attitude. Frequently, he assigned exercises that would free students from conscious construction of a poem and urge them to write pieces arising from the subconscious. I remember times he asked my classmates and me to borrow lines randomly from one another to start a poem or recommended we write an imaginary translation of a poem from another language that we don’t understand. Indeed, I once jokingly chose John’s own poem, “Glazunoviana,” as the text to translate, and I wrote my own poem ignoring meaning in the original; instead, I solely used the lyrical sounds of the lines in his work for inspiration.
John later introduced me to the music of Glazunov, as well as other classical composers, when a core group of four members from class gathered at his apartment for an informal seminar. In turn, Ashbery always expressed curiosity about elements of pop culture. In fact, I recall a time when we were driving from Brooklyn to John’s Manhattan apartment, and all the while the four of us were being quizzed by our curious teacher about rock music and other aspects of current culture. He especially seemed to want to know about the rise of those rock or folk singers and recent other American trends whose beginnings he may have missed during his years in Europe. Clearly, Ashbery’s interest in bringing folklore or popular culture—even movie stars, song lyrics, or cartoon characters—into his writing can be seen in many of his poems over the years.
On one occasion, during another small gathering of members from our class at Ashbery’s apartment, some of us played a form of the “exquisite corpse” game in which we alternated placing lines of poetry on a page in John’s typewriter. (In fact, when he took his turn and sat to type his lines, Ashbery’s posture appeared nearly identical to that represented in the well-known portrait of him by Larry Rivers. Even now, each time I see the image of John hunched over his typewriter, I’m brought back to that evening.) When we completed the poem and read it aloud, we immediately realized how someone else’s contribution might have unexpectedly altered our own perspectives, forcing each of us to draw more on our imaginations and maybe reach further into the subconscious, perhaps not all that different from the manner Parmigianino’s painting stirred Ashbery’s imaginative reactions.
Consequently, I’m not surprised by a passage in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” about playing such games as ways for seeking inspiration. This portion has become one of my favorite sections, a part of the poem that suggests distraction from intent and distortion of form can help create interesting art: “This always / Happens, as in the game where / A whispered phrase passed around the room / Ends up as something completely different. / It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike / What the artist intended. Often he finds / He has omitted the thing he started out to say.” As a result, the poet or painter may “create something new.” Significantly, readers will note that the final phrase of the poem will again mention “whispers.”
As the poem comes closer to its end, the speaker addresses two crucial concepts captured during the contemplation of Parmigianino’s painting: otherness and time. Of course, the painter’s reflection in the mirror, as well as its depiction in the portrait, represents a sense of otherness. But so too does the artwork derived from the mind of the poet, whose eventual creation comes as a pleasant revelation, something one could not consciously cause, but one invents when allowing thought association and wordplay during the composition process. Perhaps for the poet, the persona developed in the writing of a poem and revealed through its speaker stands as the equivalent of the artist’s mirror reflection, closely resembling the author, yet in places distorted or even reversed.
However, art also exists as a tool that holds its subject in place, preserving a moment in time, so that the past is always evident in the present. As Ashbery’s speaker observes: “This past / Is now here: the painter’s / Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving / Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned / Frequency.” Just as artists of the past influence the present, so too do future viewers cooperate in shaping reaction to it. Indeed, in many ways an artwork becomes dependent upon its spectators for fabrication of new or evolving perspectives and further appreciation.
If the artist can only supply a surface image, as Parmigianino does (“everything is surface. The surface is what’s there . . ..”), then it is up to the spectators to provide depth. In his work—just as the personae of the painter and the poet sometimes seem to blend—Ashbery also merges the two functions when he acts both as spectator and artist, and with this disclosure, Ashbery indirectly appears to invite his readers to do likewise, to speculate (remembering the word’s root means “mirror”), engaging in self-reflection as part of their response to the poem he’s written. Perhaps he includes his readers when he prefers the plural pronoun near the poem’s end: “We have seen the city: it is the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect.”
Knowing one of the poet’s prime instruments is his use of memory, a tool that filters elements of reality and supplies readers with revealing misremembered details or important assorted distortions, perhaps parallel to the misshapen and wrongly proportioned items in Parmigianino’s portrait, Ashbery may be additionally recognizing his own frailty as an artist—the inherent inadequacy of any artist—and speaking of his shared ruminations in the last lines of the poem, where he refers to the “cold pockets / Of remembrance, whispers out of time.” In any case, those whispers he offers in this poem about an artist of another time also continue to be heard by today’s readers, more than thirty years later, and surely will be perceived as significant by inquisitive readers with novel perceptions long into the future.
Coincidentally, at the time of its publication I was a first-year graduate student in Ashbery’s poetry writing class at Brooklyn College. The graduate program in creative writing had just begun, and this was his first teaching position after nearly a decade (1955-1965) of writing art criticism in Paris for the Herald Tribune, then working until 1972 as an executive editor at Art News in New York. Indeed, the 1974 contributor’s note in Poetry accompanying “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” announced to everyone that John had joined the faculty at Brooklyn College.
I remember well the excitement surrounding the volume’s release as my classmates and I attended the publication party. The date written by John beneath his inscription in my copy of the book indicates Monday, May 12, as the evening of the reception. I also recall other celebrations, at Ashbery’s Chelsea apartment and elsewhere, as the book became famous for its unusual feat, in a single year receiving each of the three major book awards for poetry, what we jokingly labeled as winning the “Triple Crown,” a term I’ve seen repeated a number of times in print over the decades. A few years later I was thrilled and honored when John wrote a prefatory note for my first book of poems, choosing to borrow a couple of lines from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to describe unexpected perceptions and contemplations he found in my work.
Although at the time everyone knew he’d achieved something extraordinary, even today I’m amazed by the great amount of attention this lone book of poetry and that particular title poem have garnered. I’m not aware of any poem from the last forty years that has had as much critical commentary written about it. Indeed, one might have to look back to Ginsberg’s “Howl” to find a recent poem with a greater history of commentary. Over the more than three decades that have passed, I’ve noted the ongoing resonance and persistent guidance “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” yet demonstrates for many readers and writers of poetry.
This week as I returned to read Ashbery’s poem once more, I again quickly realized how significant this work has become, both as a touchstone for late-twentieth-century poetry and as an influence for many contemporary poets continuing into the twenty-first century, though not all necessarily initiating precisely his particular style of writing. Most who have followed in Ashbery’s footsteps have written with a greatly liberated sense of connection between observation and speculation, producing meditative poems containing playful and intellectual self-reflection often presented with language or imagery that surprises, at times maybe even befuddles some in its audience. Certainly, such a way of relating one’s perceptions to readers was not new; however, Ashbery’s speaker in this poem seemed almost to reinvigorate interest in poetry where “words are only speculation / (From the Latin speculum, mirror),” as the poet proposes.
“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” begins as an examination of the sixteenth-century Parmigianino painting of the same title. In fact, the speaker’s opening lines sound similar to some of the descriptive and engaging language one might find in Ashbery’s numerous reviews or essays on artworks and artists: “As Parmigianino did it, the right hand / Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away, as though to protect / What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams, / Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together / In a movement supporting the face, which swims / Toward and away like the hand / Except that it is in repose.”
Not surprisingly, Ashbery once acknowledged in an interview with David Lehman: “That was the first time I ever took a painting as the subject for a poem. And I did it only after I left Art News and supposed that I wouldn’t be involved with writing about art anymore. It was as though I had been consciously avoiding this particular input while I was in the business of being an art editor, as though I shouldn’t be writing what is so close to my daily business.” Indeed, Ashbery had first seen the original painting in Vienna fifteen years before he rediscovered it in a collection of reproductions bought while browsing at a small bookstore and decided to focus upon it for his new poem.
However, as many reviewers and literary critics have noted throughout the years since its publication, much of the poem’s strength lies in its revelations about Ashbery’s perceptions, his self-portrait as a poet who nevertheless knows words, like the brush strokes in a painting, may not always be fully sufficient in rendering experience. One may view art as a fictitious substitute, though a valuable representation, for actual experience. Even “the portrait / Is the reflection once removed,” placed at a distance, as well as reversed and distorted by the physical shape of an object: “The surface / Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases / Significantly.” Similarly, Ashbery suggests the words in poems sometimes prove inadequate: “They seek and cannot find the meaning in music, / We see only postures of the dream.”
Throughout the poem readers witness a blending of personae, particularly the way pronouns shift and at times mix the painter with the poet. Although Ashbery appears to be addressing Parmigianino in the poem, the voice of the speaker also seems self-reflexive sometimes, so much so that a certain amount of confusion contributes to an already ample supply of attractive or amusing ambiguity filled with allusive remarks: “you could be fooled for a moment / Before you realize the reflection / Isn’t yours. You feel then like one of those / Hoffmann characters who have been deprived / Of a reflection, except that the whole of me / Is seen to be supplanted by the strict / Otherness of the painter in his / Other room. We have surprised him / At work, but no, he has surprised us / As he works.”
Later in the poem, Ashbery speaks of confusion with the way time is perceived and portrayed, perhaps even delayed or stayed, by forms of art: “I used to think they were all alike, / That the present always looked the same to everybody / But this confusion drains away as one / Is always cresting into one’s present. / Yet the ‘poetic,’ straw-colored space / Of the long corridor that leads back to painting, / Its darkening opposite—is this / Some figment of ‘art,’ not to be imagined / As real, let alone special?” The speaker even cleverly relates how the original artwork endures, but is often distanced from viewers, and routinely all that remains are poor surrogates: “the public / Is pushing through the museum now so as to / Be out by closing time. You can’t live there. / The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how: / Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime / To learn and are reduced to the status of / Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates / Are rare.”
John Ashbery has always been unpredictable and has experimented with different manners of narrative (or lack of narrative) within his poems, often incorporating seemingly arbitrary or stray elements and apparently disjointed phrases into his work. As he stated in his interview with Lehman: “Art with any serious aspirations toward realism still has to take into account the fact that reality escapes laws of perspective and logic, and does not naturally take the form of a sonnet or a sonata.”
In his poetry-writing classes, Ashbery always emphasized this attitude. Frequently, he assigned exercises that would free students from conscious construction of a poem and urge them to write pieces arising from the subconscious. I remember times he asked my classmates and me to borrow lines randomly from one another to start a poem or recommended we write an imaginary translation of a poem from another language that we don’t understand. Indeed, I once jokingly chose John’s own poem, “Glazunoviana,” as the text to translate, and I wrote my own poem ignoring meaning in the original; instead, I solely used the lyrical sounds of the lines in his work for inspiration.
John later introduced me to the music of Glazunov, as well as other classical composers, when a core group of four members from class gathered at his apartment for an informal seminar. In turn, Ashbery always expressed curiosity about elements of pop culture. In fact, I recall a time when we were driving from Brooklyn to John’s Manhattan apartment, and all the while the four of us were being quizzed by our curious teacher about rock music and other aspects of current culture. He especially seemed to want to know about the rise of those rock or folk singers and recent other American trends whose beginnings he may have missed during his years in Europe. Clearly, Ashbery’s interest in bringing folklore or popular culture—even movie stars, song lyrics, or cartoon characters—into his writing can be seen in many of his poems over the years.
On one occasion, during another small gathering of members from our class at Ashbery’s apartment, some of us played a form of the “exquisite corpse” game in which we alternated placing lines of poetry on a page in John’s typewriter. (In fact, when he took his turn and sat to type his lines, Ashbery’s posture appeared nearly identical to that represented in the well-known portrait of him by Larry Rivers. Even now, each time I see the image of John hunched over his typewriter, I’m brought back to that evening.) When we completed the poem and read it aloud, we immediately realized how someone else’s contribution might have unexpectedly altered our own perspectives, forcing each of us to draw more on our imaginations and maybe reach further into the subconscious, perhaps not all that different from the manner Parmigianino’s painting stirred Ashbery’s imaginative reactions.
Consequently, I’m not surprised by a passage in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” about playing such games as ways for seeking inspiration. This portion has become one of my favorite sections, a part of the poem that suggests distraction from intent and distortion of form can help create interesting art: “This always / Happens, as in the game where / A whispered phrase passed around the room / Ends up as something completely different. / It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike / What the artist intended. Often he finds / He has omitted the thing he started out to say.” As a result, the poet or painter may “create something new.” Significantly, readers will note that the final phrase of the poem will again mention “whispers.”
As the poem comes closer to its end, the speaker addresses two crucial concepts captured during the contemplation of Parmigianino’s painting: otherness and time. Of course, the painter’s reflection in the mirror, as well as its depiction in the portrait, represents a sense of otherness. But so too does the artwork derived from the mind of the poet, whose eventual creation comes as a pleasant revelation, something one could not consciously cause, but one invents when allowing thought association and wordplay during the composition process. Perhaps for the poet, the persona developed in the writing of a poem and revealed through its speaker stands as the equivalent of the artist’s mirror reflection, closely resembling the author, yet in places distorted or even reversed.
However, art also exists as a tool that holds its subject in place, preserving a moment in time, so that the past is always evident in the present. As Ashbery’s speaker observes: “This past / Is now here: the painter’s / Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving / Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned / Frequency.” Just as artists of the past influence the present, so too do future viewers cooperate in shaping reaction to it. Indeed, in many ways an artwork becomes dependent upon its spectators for fabrication of new or evolving perspectives and further appreciation.
If the artist can only supply a surface image, as Parmigianino does (“everything is surface. The surface is what’s there . . ..”), then it is up to the spectators to provide depth. In his work—just as the personae of the painter and the poet sometimes seem to blend—Ashbery also merges the two functions when he acts both as spectator and artist, and with this disclosure, Ashbery indirectly appears to invite his readers to do likewise, to speculate (remembering the word’s root means “mirror”), engaging in self-reflection as part of their response to the poem he’s written. Perhaps he includes his readers when he prefers the plural pronoun near the poem’s end: “We have seen the city: it is the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect.”
Knowing one of the poet’s prime instruments is his use of memory, a tool that filters elements of reality and supplies readers with revealing misremembered details or important assorted distortions, perhaps parallel to the misshapen and wrongly proportioned items in Parmigianino’s portrait, Ashbery may be additionally recognizing his own frailty as an artist—the inherent inadequacy of any artist—and speaking of his shared ruminations in the last lines of the poem, where he refers to the “cold pockets / Of remembrance, whispers out of time.” In any case, those whispers he offers in this poem about an artist of another time also continue to be heard by today’s readers, more than thirty years later, and surely will be perceived as significant by inquisitive readers with novel perceptions long into the future.
5 comments:
Arion Press in San Francisco produced in 1984 an incredible limited edition of Ashbery's poem, featuring original prints by Richard Avedon, Elaine De Kooning, Willem De Kooning, Jim Dine, Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, and R. B. Kitaj (a contemporary British artist whose works frequently include literary allusions). The Rivers image of Ashbery Byrne has at the end of his entry is from that portfolio. It's out of print but sought after by collectors. If you go to Arion Press's website, this portfolio is #13.
Also, Ashbery's poem Girls on the Run was inspired by (and reproduces an image on the cover by) the outsider artist Henry Darger, whose life story is fascinating, disturbing, tragic. His art and story are both worth investigating.
Edward, thank you for sharing your reflections and memories among your comments regarding Ashbery's 'Self-Portrait'. What I see here is a good example for us all - an example of an observer of history who is simultaneously a participant in that history.
Hi there, awesome site. I thought the topics you posted on were very interesting. I tried to add your RSS to my feed reader and it a few. take a look at it, hopefully I can add you and follow.
Portrait Painting
Dear Mr. Byrne,
I am an artist in Germany, currently working on a piece (for public space) about artists' self-portraits and the reasons why people like to look at them. Of course, I thought of John Ashbery's poem and, while reflecting upon that, I came across this excellent analysis of yours. I would like to ask for your permission to quote a small portion (i.e. one paragraph) of this text for my project--which means that I would translate that into German, if you allow me to. Of course I would indicate your authorship and copyright.
I look forward to hearing your response!
Janet Grau
Dear Janet Grau,
Yes, you certainly may quote from the article. Thank you for your interest.
Best wishes,
Ed
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