SOURCE: "John Ashbery: The Way Time Feels As It Passes," in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, June, 1992, pp. 1-13.

In the following essay, Zinnes discusses Ashbery's literary career, poetic style, central motifs, and the influence of avant-garde music and art on his work.

Writing about John Ashbery is difficult, not because his work is itself difficult or obscure or elusive. It frequently is not. Yet from the beginning he was a puzzle. In a panel on postmodernism as early as December 1979, the poet David Antin could declare, in seemingly contradictory terms, that the poet "brought grandeur to Pop" and that his poems are "sublime claptrap." Yet the puzzle of John Ashbery can be solved—without perhaps totally eliminating contradictory conclusions, and always bearing in mind what the poet wrote in his collected "art chronicles" (Reported Sightings, 1991): "it is impossible to refute a statement made in a poem...