SOURCE: "John Ashbery's 'A Wave': Privileging the Symbol," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 271-9.

In the following essay, Clark offers critical analysis of the poem "The Wave." According to Clark, "Ashbery's poetry is distinguished by an enigmatic style which privileges indeterminacy rather than the traditional symbolist style practiced by most modernist and postmodernist poets."

… [long poems] are in a way diaries or logbooks of a continuing experience that continues to provide new reflections and therefore [a long poem] gets to be much closer to a whole reality than the shorter ones do.

      John Ashbery
      Interview, New York Quarterly

That Ashbery believes long poems are "much closer to a whole reality" than shorter poems is telling. Despite their sometimes inhibiting length and poetics, his own long poems written since 1975 are considerably closer not only to "a whole reality" but to conventional poetic technique, one...