SOURCE: "The Comic Thrust of Ashbery's Poetry," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Spring, 1984, pp. 1-14.

In the following essay, Fink explores the role of humor in Ashbery's verse.

Although John Ashbery's poems seldom cause even his most devoted readers to double over in laughter, his work is persistently humorous. Perhaps the most salient aspect of this humor can be defined in negative terms: a relatively high number of sentences in the poetry seem to "ask" not to be taken seriously as the direct expression of information that matters. For the seasoned reader of Ashbery, invisible (sometimes visible) quotation marks form around any statement that is the slightest bit portentous. Noticing that a poem in the recent Shadow Train (1981)¹ begins with the exhortation, "Trust me," one chuckles and realizes that this poet's language can, most of the time, only be trusted to be untrustworthy. And even...