On Friday, February 15, Dr. Tom Jesse will present “‘But Nobody Says So’: On John Ashbery’s Later Prose Poems” from 2:30-3:30pm in Wimberly 104.
Over the course of a career that began in the mid-1950s, American poet John Ashbery (1927-2017) published 28 collections of poems, won nearly every major award an American poet can win (including 1976’s “Triple Crown”: The Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, and The National Book Critics Circle Award), and attracted a large following of critics and scholars who have made his work the subject of countless reviews, monographs, journal articles, and dissertations. Comparatively little has been written, however, about his occasional use of prose forms throughout his lengthy career—and critics have been especially hesitant to engage with the prose poems published after the year 2000 (i.e., Ashbery’s “later period”). This presentation focuses exclusively on these recent prose poems to argue that, far from being an afterthought in the poet’s vast oeuvre, these texts actually represent some of Ashbery’s most innovative and entertaining experiments with language over the past twenty years. As readers and critics begin to assess the complete trajectory of Ashbery’s writing life, they can no longer afford to ignore the poet’s comedic, satiric, and—above all else—playful forays into the world of prose poetry.