SOURCE: "John Ashbery's Flow Chart: John Ashbery and the Theorists on John Ashbery Against the Critics Against John Ashbery," in New Literary History, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 459-76.

In the following essay, Kevorkian explores the interactive relationship between Ashbery and his critics. According to Kevorkian, Ashbery's poetry reveals a pattern of "revenge" and "linguistic parasitism" through which he both engages and subtly responds to his critical audience.

That's a phrase I've been saying and hearing for so many years—the people against. Nan Patterson—the people against Harry K. Thaw, and now the People against Mary Dugan. I have used that phrase so often that I've almost forgotten its meaning—and, Gentlemen, it has a very deep one.

John Ashbery's poetry asks its Gentlereaders not so much to recover some "deep" significance, but rather to hear its capacity to nudge toward oblivion the ordinary meanings of almost ordinary...