Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet

Ashbery's closural gesture of sending his reader from one book to another is not the only frustration that is happening. Just as the word foehn sends the reader to the dictionary and perverts the novel's closure, so does finding the definition of foehn offer little closural traction within the novel. The final sentence, after all, does not take place in Bavaria, where foehns generally occur. It is an empty gesture that references nothing but itself. This foehn does what foehns more generally do: it blows in fog.

8 In citations within the text, I will refer to John Ashbery's books of poetry and prose as follows:

AWK, As We Know DDS, Double Dream of Spring RS, Reported Sightings ST, Some Trees W, A Wave

9 In his chapter "Homosexuality and the Matter of Style," Yingling makes a claim similar to Shoptaw's. He explores how gay writers have

often found literature less a matter of self-expression and more a matter of coding: from Byron to John Ashbery, the consistent locus of parody in gay texts suggests a self-consciousness about what texts may and may not do. (25)

I will suggest, taking Yingling and Shoptaw's insights as foundational but not complete, that in Ashbery, coding is not an endpoint: it serves to particularize gay experience and if not self-express at least self-locate. Coding does not just not say to avoid self-nominalization, but in Ashbery particularly, it avoids saying in order to declaw the violences of the nominalizing process, thus allowing new forms of identity and identification within gay self-nominalization.

WORKS CITED

Altieri, Charles. "Ashbery as Love Poet." The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Susan Schultz. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995.

-----. "Contemporary Poetry as Philosophy: Subjective Agency in John Ashbery and C. K. Williams." Contemporary Literature 33 (1992): 214-42.

Ashbery, John. As We Know. New York: Penguin, 1979.

-----. Can You Hear, Bird? New York: Farrar, 1995.

-----. The Double Dream of Spring. New York: Ecco, 1970.

----- (with James Schuyler). A Nest of Ninnies. New York: Dutton, 1969.

-----. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987. Ed. David Bergman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

-----. Some Trees. New York: Ecco, 1978.

-----. The Vermont Notebook. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.

-----. A Wave. New York: Viking, 1984.

Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Coote, Stephen, ed. The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Edelman, Lee. Homographesis. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Imbriglio, Catherine. "'Our Days Put On Such Reticence': The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery's Some Trees." Contemporary Literature 36.2 (1995): 24989.

Keeling, John. "The Moment Unravels: Reading John Ashbery's 'Litany.'" Twentieth Century Literature 38.2 (1992): 125-51.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.

Preminger, Alex, and T. V. F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.