In his debut collection, Some Trees (1956), John Ashbery poses a question that resonates across his oeuvre and much modern art: “How could he explain to them his prayer / that nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?” When Ashbery asks this strange question, he joins a host of transatlantic avant-gardists—from the Dadaists to the 1960s neo-avant-gardists and beyond—who have dreamed the paradoxical dream of turning art into nature. Invisible Terrain examines Ashbery’s poetic mediation of this fantasy, reading his work alongside an array of practitioners, from Wordsworth to Warhol, as an exemplary case study of avant-garde transvaluation of Western nature aesthetics. Ashbery takes his coordinates from a constellation of British, American, and continental European poetic and visual art practices—from romantic nature poet John Clare’s presentational immediacy to the French “New Realism” movement’s “direct appropriation of the real” in the early 1960s—that share an emphasis on somehow transforming the material of art into a “second nature.” Nature, as Ashbery and his company understand it, is a vanguard horizon, a metaphor for art, that which lies beyond “art as we know it.” The fact that the artist can never realize this aesthetic fiction—which overturns what we generally mean by “art” and “nature”—makes it all the more powerful as a tool for staking out the limits of art. In chronicling Ashbery’s articulation of “a completely new kind of realism,” Invisible Terrain tells the larger story of nature’s transformation into a resolutely unnatural aesthetic resource in twentieth-century art and literature. But in documenting Ashbery’s eventual turn against this avant-garde tradition—most conspicuously in his archive of campy, intentionally “bad” nature poems—the project also registers queer resistance to the normative concept of nature itself as a governing conceit for art. The story begins in the late 1940s with the Abstract Expressionist valorization of process, surface, and immediacy—summed up by Jackson Pollock’s famous quip, “I am Nature”—that so influenced Ashbery’s early quest for transparent, anti-mimetic modes of composition. It ends with “Breezeway,” a poem about Hurricane Sandy and climate change. Along the way, Invisible Terrain documents Ashbery’s strategic literalization of the stream-of-consciousness metaphor, his pastoral dispersal of the lyric subject during the politically fraught Vietnam era, and his investment in “bad” nature poetry.
This chapter examines John Ashbery’s early work in the context of the French neo-avant-garde of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It argues that Ashbery’s reading of the cubist poet Pierre Reverdy and close proximity to the “New Realism” movement in France (Ashbery’s home for nearly a decade from the mid-1950s to 1965) inform the collage technique of his notorious second collection, The Tennis Court Oath, and the suave lyricism of his third collection, Rivers and Mountains. Ashbery responds to the aestheticized concept of “nature”—the idea that art creates a “second nature”—that underpins neo-avant-garde practices of the “New Realist,” as codified by their chief theorist Pierre Restany. In idealizing poetry that would be “like a natural landscape in a world of painted ones,” Ashbery subscribes to the long-standing avant-garde fantasy of turning art into nature—a fantasy that reaches a new level of sophistication and transparency in his early masterpiece, “The Skaters.”
On June 17, 1948, just over a month before his 21st birthday, John Ashbery wrote his first sestina, “The Painter.” A homage to masterpieces such as W.H. Auden’s “Paysage Moralisé” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Miracle for Breakfast,” it would be the earliest of his poems to appear in ...
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