GLR November-December 2023

lacks lyrical beauty or is in any way obscure. He was a prolific writer on art as well as poetry. Sometimes his other writings attracted com parative attention, as when Mary McCarthy grumbled that she wished his poetry were as clear as his prose. Unlike poets who require

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uninterrupted alone time, Ashbery was a profoundly social creature, enjoying people and building various interruptions into the flow of his poems. His poetry is nonlinear to begin with, often a series of observations, switchbacks, and outbursts, much like life itself, which he celebrated. By the 1970s, Ashbery was comfortable riding the wave of gay visibility, living with his long-time partner David Kermani, and talking openly, albeit playfully, about Gay Pride. Like Mer rill, Ashbery was not a noisy presence in the gay rights move ment of the 1970s and ’80s. He tended to his private poetic gardens, gave Harvard lectures on poetic subjects, and focused on his many friendships and on-again, off-again writing proj ects. In his longest poem, “Flow Chart,” written during the AIDS crisis and published in 1991, he assigns himself the role of one invisible gay person among many: It occurs to me in my home on the beach sometimes that others must have experiences identical to mine and are also unable to speak of them, that if we cared enough to go into each other’s psyche and explore around, some of the canned white entrepreneurial brain food could be reproduced in time to save the legions of the dispossessed, and elephants. Cotton quotes these lines but for some reason ends with the in correct word “disposed” and omits the final two words, “and elephants.” Not long after this, Ashbery’s work became the subject of a book by John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out (1995), which discussed the “homotextual” content of his work, an ap proach that Ashbery considered unduly reductive. He grum bled about being treated as a gay symbol, e.g., for New York City’s John Ashbery Day and for LGBT History Month in 2011. Cotton notes that he objected to “the notion that gay writ ers are sort of expected to talk about sex or their sex lives in public.” Ashbery was too private a person for that, and he rarely alluded to gayness as such in his poetry. He once told an inter viewer that “I don’t write about my life the way the confes sional poets do.” The late gay poet J. D. McClatchy once wrote that in the arts “the 20th century’s characteristic innovations [are] collage and abstraction.” If that is true, surely Ashbery’s place as one of the main anchors of this movement is secure. That he was a well-known gay icon, whether or not he enjoyed being one, is a source of pride in the larger community of gay people of which he clearly enjoyed being a part. November–December 2023 John Ashbery. Courtesy gettyimages.com.

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