ashbery - chapman

John Ashbery's poetry is in keeping with the surrealist tradition, though not in its entirety, as it is a little more mainstream, more accessible, more in keeping with the bigger names of the American literary scene of the fifties and sixties. While the writing in this poetry is, on the whole, much more cohesive and comprehensible than, say, Dadaist works, or other sparkling pieces of modernism such as Ulysses, but the narrative (for lack of better phrasing) is still disjointed. In Ashbery's How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher, he writes,

And the reader is carried away
By a great shadow under the sea.

Behind the steering wheel
The boy took out his own forehead (27-30).

The speaker describes a burial of him or herself within the earth, creating a paradox between life and death and divinity. There is then a disjointed created by the break in quatrains, as demonstrated by the four lines listed above. It's as though there are two narratives being broken into one another, and while the first one being ended by the first two lines given, one of the sepulcher, the second one doesn't even segues—it jumps into this surreal tale, and in this way, it draws upon surrealism by doing more with it. Surrealism seeks to bring to art a dream state, where both dreams and surrealist art bring logical things into illogical contexts. Here, two dream-like things are being put together in a disjointed way, but because these things are both lucid, both hallucinatory, it works well, and also does not alienate the reader, because the images are concretely described through common yet poetic syntax.