ASHBERY: SURREALIST POETICS AND OTHER LINGUISTIC SHENANIGANS
John Ashbery sticks out among these chosen three because he became famous for his poetry and he is the sole American. Beyond his original poetry, Ashbery translated Symbolists like Arthur Rimbaud and Stephané Mallarmé along with Surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico and Andre Breton. His poetry rides the line between sense and nonsense, a poetry that bred countless imitators. It is a poetics that approaches reality crabwise, seeing things from the other side of making sense. Language is a toy, something played with, subverted, parodied, and explored. He parses everyday expressions and tired cliches through a funhouse mirror, combining humor and pathos, sometimes in the same line.
For example, here is a passage from Flow Chart:
“Nothing is required of you, yet all must render an accounting./
I said I was out hunting in the forest. How can it be that a man
can sup his fill, and still all around him find emptiness and drowsiness,/
if he must go to the grave this way, unattended? Yet certainly/
there are some bright spots, and when you listen to the laughter/
in the middle of these it makes for more than a cosmetic truth, an invitation/
to chivalry ringed by the dump fires of our deliberate civilization that has/
got some things going for it – that invented neighborliness, for instance?”
The poem “In Vain, Therefore,” from Hotel Lautréamont has this passage:
“A very few carry enough energy to
create a kinetic bonding arrangement.
These are the so-called sad ones
eating alone in restaurants,
drying their hair …”
Like Joyce and Beckett, an entire cottage industry has sprouted around deciphering Ashbery’s poems. Whether using the long line or the short line, the long form or the short form, Ashbery confronts and challenges the reader with a language both beautiful and confounding, riding the very edge between sense and nonsense.
The Driftless Area Review 
