Ashbery- Minji Kim

           One of the ways of figuring out the purpose of author in his or her writing or the theme of a literature is to connect sentences, phrases and words together. This process is crucial especially in poems since, compared to other type of literature including such as novel, poems are consisted of less lines and sentences. Therefore, associating meanings of words and each line together in poems is more important than any other types of literature because readers have less context clues in finding themes. The easiest way of analyzing poem is utilizing and connecting each line in individual stanza and associate themes from each stanza to build one unitary theme.

However, John Ashbery, who is one of the most famous avant-garde American contemporary poets, completely ignores the traditional ways of writing poems and has developed his own techniques in constructing hid poems so that readers cannot follow the real intention of his works. Ashbery’s collection of poems called The Tennis Court Oath is characterized by surrealistic components that make readers hard to understand the theme of each poem. The most distinct techniques he has developed throughout his poems are automatic writing and use of memories in his poems.

Like other surrealist authors, Ashbery uses automatic writing in his poem in order to show the nature of human’s thought process which is usually unorganized and led by chance. One of Ashbery’s poems called Thoughts of a Young Girl is a good example of automatic writing.

     “It is such a beautiful day I had to write you a letter

                  From the tower, and to show I’m not mad:

                  I only slipped on the cake of soap of the air

                 And drowned in the bathtub of the world.

                 You were to good to cry much over me.

                  And now I let you go. Signed, The Dwarf.”

The first two sentences of this stanza are telling about why the speaker of this poem wants to write a letter. However, soon the speaker suddenly shifts his or her thought of writing a letter to the thought of the cake of soap of the air. Then the speaker creates another sharp change in his or her thought to “you” and the “Dwarf”. This stanza does not have a specific theme but rather Ashbery illustrates automatic writing that does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer. Since Ashbery uses automatic writing and chance operation in his poem, each line of the stanza does not associate each other and impossible to make connection between lines.

           Also, according to Andre Breton, the definition of surrealism is a combination of reality and dream like state. This characteristic of surrealism is also well developed in Ashbery’s work. For instance, Ashbery inserted one of his childhood memories in the middle of the poem called How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher. In this poem, Ashbery starts the poem by talking about light and darkness, which are coming from sepulcher, and then suddenly talks about his memories, which are based on his real stories. Therefore, Ashbery’s association of unreality, which is represented by sepulcher, lights, and darkness, and the reality, which demonstrated by his memory of childhood, follows one of the most important concepts of surrealism, which is the mixture of reality and unreality.