DRAGONS!

I finished reading John Ashbery's biographical chapter in The Last Avant Garde last night, and got well into Frank O'Hara's. I really enjoy the sections that discuss their respective processes, but am unsure whether I appreciate learning about them personally. I don't really care whether John Ashbery was apprehensive about discussing his homosexuality freely and openly. I'm sure that if this were true it would have some lasting impact on his work, but I don't necessarily want to know what a certain Ashbery poem means to him or why he wrote it. I guess that's New Criticism, something I am also suspicious of to a point, but I want to know more about what a poem means to me and what specifically about the poem makes it that way. Again, New Criticism.

The idea of cutting an artist completely out of their work has its obvious appeal. However, I think that one of the important points about Ashbery's intent, and as an extension his art, would be completely lost were we not to consider it. The idea that a poem doesn't have to be an extension of something, but rather can itself be an extension of itself, a completely imaginative product, is, I believe, important in "understanding" or even appreciating an art where artifice is more apparent, even celebrated, and conventional conceptions of "meaning" are at times abandoned. So if we were to consider Ashbery's intent syntactically or grammatically, or his ideas regarding language and poetry, this would fall outside the scope of New Criticism, yes? What I'm saying is I am interested and feel as though it is an important point in reading poetry to have a certain understanding of a poet's process for language, but see little to no interest or importance in personal circumstances that a poem may have resulted directly from. Does that make sense? I don't even know what I just typed. Jesus look at all those commas. Fuck. ,,, There's always something a little off putting when you read something about language or writing and the author makes a variety of grammatical errors and such. Oh well I'm just BLOGGING. I also

have an obsession.

Last night I couldn't sleep and kept thinking about poems and about how I should be writing what I was thinking down. I was thinking in line breaks and knowing just how certain things would sound and sound together. I talked to Carrie around three-ish and fell asleep, finally, seeing where things should break but not remembering the words themselves. I will arrange the words beautifully. So many surprises are coming around the next lines! Build up to nothing and then surprise them after a turn of a line. Yes! Let's all write poems and surprise our parents with our wit and line breaks! They'll never see it coming! My mom doesn't get any of my poems anyway.

Let's have a party where everyone has to wear this kind of shirt:



All we would need to do is go to a truck stop along the interstate and buy them. Nothing smaller than XXXL allowed, however. Dragons or tigers or, you know, whatever that kid from your high school wore.