[Katy Evans-Bush]

Wow, I cross-posted with not only one but a couple of people! Excellent posts all. Mr H is holding us aloft here, I feel.

Apologies for what looks like tetchiness in my previous reply - it's actually me trying to phrase things properly. Before dinner.

Peter you don't need to give a caveat. I wish Philip had come back. I think the point is that were talking about someone who was an integrated mind. Once somebody is that, they can only be themselves. (This is why only real originals can be parodied.) And to this extent it's not their job to be perfect, it's only their job to be themselves.

I've written before about the classes he taught - to a very much greater extent than other poetry tutors, he didn't give rules, he gave pointers. The idea was that you were there to write as much like yourself as you could - not to mimic his taste or style. The range among the group was very broad, and as time has passed and people have been published, this has been noted. So this is the above principle put into action.

Here's a funny think. He admits somewhere that he had a big Ashbery period in his youth, but got over it, and never published any of it. Here, vis a vis that idea of negotiating with the form, is an amusing passage from his review of Rebel Angels, the anthology that "launched" New Formalism... actually, in the collected prose, this essay and the letter to Ian Duhig that follow it are intensely interesting. He writes to Ian explaining the book form an American vantage point, he having taken the opposite view of it from Ian's (who didn't get the politics). But it's important to note that he did not consider himself a New Formalist: "No. No room for membership cards in my wallet."

So here's the passage at hand:

Jarman and Mason probably wouldn't designate Ashbery a New Formalist though he's employed such highly conventional forms as the pantoum and the sestina as "devices for getting into remoter areas of consciousness." "The really bizarre requirements of a sestina," he told New York Quarterly, "I use as a probing tool rather than as a form in the traditional sense... rather like riding downhill on a bicycle and having the pedals push your feet. I wanted my feet pushed into places they wouldn't normally have taken." But surely this is precisely the function of "form in the traditional sense" - that serendipity provided by negotiation with a resistant medium...