1975 book by John Ashbery
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is a 1975 poetry collection by the American writer John Ashbery. The title, shared with its final poem, comes from the painting of the same name by the Late Renaissance artist Parmigianino. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the only book to have received all three awards.
Published when he was approaching the age of 50, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was a major breakthrough after a career marked by relative obscurity, and either lukewarm or outright hostile reviews.
Background.
Ashbery developed an early, idiosyncratic, avant-garde poetic style that attracted little critical notice—and the few reviews he did receive were usually negative. His first collection, "Some Trees"(1956), was chosen by W. H. Auden as the winner of that year's Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. Despite this, evidence suggests that Auden—whom Ashbery frequently described as his most significant literary influence—did not actually enjoy Ashbery's writing.
Ashbery adopted an avant-garde style for "The Tennis Court Oath"(1962) at the cost of brutally negative reviews. Critics derided the book as incomprehensible and absent of any redeeming qualities, which almost drove Ashbery to quit writing poetry altogether.
He was grouped with the so called "New York School", a loose collection of modern poets with ties to the contemporary art and new music scenes in New York City. The group included his close friend Frank O'Hara, as well as Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest. Though Ashbery thought the label was ridiculous—he lived in Paris, not New York, from 1956 until the mid-1960s—it helped to raise his profile. His third collection, "Rivers and Mountains"(1966), was nominated for a National Book Award and received modest praise from critics.
Asked in 1976 about the widely held opinion that his early poems were "too difficult", if not outright impossible to understand, he replied:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;At first, I was puzzled and hurt. I try to communicate—make clear, interpret—things which seem mysterious. The difficulty of my poetry isn't for its own sake; it is meant to reflect the difficulty of living, the everchanging, minute adjustments that go on around us and which we respond to from moment to moment—the difficulty of living in passing time, which is both difficult and automatic, since we all somehow manage it.
Having resigned himself to the idea that he would always be met with "this incomprehension" from the few readers he had, he said he decided to "make the best of a bad situation of someone who was destined never to have an audience"—though he realized the irony that, after "Self-Portrait", he had in fact finally drawn an audience.
Ashbery and Parmigianino's painting.
Ashbery first saw a copy of Parmigianino's Mannerist painting "Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror" in 1950. At that time, Ashbery was pursuing an M.A. in English Literature at Columbia University. Having no plans for the summer and dreading that he would fail his upcoming final exams, he decided on impulse to postpone the exams, return home to Sodus, New York, and visit O'Hara in Boston. On the train home from Boston, he read the July 16 "New York Times" and came across "The Magic and Mystery of Artist Parmigianino", a review of a new book on Parmigianino by the art historian Sydney Freedberg. The article included a reproduction of "Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror", which had had such a profound impression on him that he wrote to friends about the "truly divine Parmigianino."
In 1959, Ashbery viewed the original painting at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He was struck by "the strangeness and perfection of the whole enterprise, and the dreamlike image of the beautiful young man", and especially its title lingered in his memory. During a 1973 trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts, he purchased an inexpensive portfolio of Parmigianino's artwork from the window of a bookstore. The painting stirred him into contemplation once again, and he "slowly began to write a poem about it."
Publication.
The first edition was published by Viking Press on May 15, 1975. The edition ran to 3,500 hardcover copies and featured a blue, green, and black geometric design on the dust jacket. A party was held at Gotham Book Mart in midtown Manhattan to celebrate the publication. Two paperback editions were published the next year, by Penguin Books in the United States and Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom. It became Ashbery's first book published with Carcanet.
Ashbery dedicated "Self-Portrait" to his partner and later husband, David Kermani. It was his second dedication to Kermani, after "Three Poems"(1973), with many more to follow. After first meeting in 1970, they became lifelong partners.
Cover designs.
The Penguin paperback cover features a glamorous photo portrait of Ashbery by Darragh Park. Journalist Thomas Vinciguerra described Ashbery's pose as if "[stood] in all hunky glory, hips slightly cocked", wearing a "windowpane shirt open to midchest" and "tight slacks [that] have no belt loops." Matthew Zapruder wrote that his look was a "simultaneously ill-advised and completely stylish ensemble." Susan M. Schultz said the "cheesy" cover resembled a somewhat "cheap romance novel, like the kind you'd see near the checkout counter of a drugstore."
The bold look contrasted sharply with the conservative, uniformly preppy style Ashbery had adhered to throughout the 1960s. David Lehman recalled that, when he met Ashbery in 1967, the poet typically wore "a tie and a jacket and he always looked very natty." According to Lehman, his change in style reflected the progress of the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, as Ashbery could present himself as "more visibly and publicly who he was."
Parmigianino's painting was not reproduced in early editions, a decision lamented by the critic Fred Moramarco, who said readers would be better able to appreciate the "reverberations" between the two works if they could view them simultaneously. Moramarco pointed out that the painting and poem had been published side-by-side in the January–February 1975 issue of the magazine "Art in America". Later editions of the book have incorporated the painting into the cover design.
Contents.
The collection contains 35 poems, comprising a mix of new and previously published works; the latter had appeared in various American literary magazines between November 1972 and April 1975. A decade after its publication, 11 of its verse were collected as part of Ashbery's "Selected Poems"(1985). The entire book was included in his "Collected Poems 1956–1987", published by the Library of America in 2008.
Poems.
"On Autumn Lake" makes ironic use of "Engrish" in its opening lines:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ; ;poem ;Leading liot act to foriage is activity
Of Chinese philosopher here on Autumn Lake thoughtfully inserted in
Plovince of Quebec—stop it! I will not. ;/poem ;
Stephen J. Ross called these lines "a cringe-worthy parody of speech" and compared them with other instances from Ashbery's oeuvre of "orientalist" tropes in (purposefully) "bad taste", some more nuanced than others. Bonnie Costello quoted these lines—and, unlike the previous two critics, included "stop it! I will not"—as part of an analysis of Ashbery's relationship with the reader. The poet is "constantly testing his authorial power" and "will provoke the reader with perverse behavior, momentarily suspending the fact that the reader can veto by his indifference." But elsewhere, these instances of authorial "self-assurance" are counterposed and "repeatedly mocked by images of the reader's forgetfulness, lapses of attention, ultimate silence. ... The writer doesn't have mastery over the reader ... or even over his text, except insofar as he has preempted the reader's recalcitrance by including it."
Style.
As with much of Ashbery's poetry, "Self-Portrait" was influenced by contemporary developments in modern art, particularly painting. Since his early career, he felt poetry lagged behind the other arts, and sought to appropriate the techniques and effects of avant-garde painting, such as Cubism's "simultaneity" and abstract expressionism's "idea that the work is a sort of record of its own coming-into-existence", though he emphasized that his method was not random "like flinging a bucket of words on the page, as Pollock had with paint."
Ashbery was receptive to the idea that his poems could be understood as works of Mannerism—the Late Renaissance style that included Parmigianino's eponymous painting—but only the "pure novelty" of early Mannerists like Parmigianino, not the artificiality associated with the movement's later period.
Interpretation.
Critics generally described "Self-Portrait" as some of Ashbery's most accessible poetry, especially when compared to his more challenging, avant-garde work like the earlier collection "The Tennis Court Oath"(1962) or the book-length poem "Flow Chart"(1991). Nevertheless, attempts at interpreting—or even comprehending—the poems in "Self-Portrait" remain difficult.
Ashbery did not regard the collection as more accessible than his earlier work. In a 1976 interview with Richard Kostelanetz for "The New York Times", he said the title poem only seemed "more accessible" because of its "essayistic thrust" but close reading would reveal it to be as "disjunct and fragmented" as his earlier poem "Europe", from "The Tennis Court Oath"(1962). "It's really not about the Parmigianino painting," Ashbery said; the ostensible subject was merely "a pretext for a lot of reflections and asides that are as tenuously connected to the core as they are in many of my poems which ... tend to spread out from a core idea." Kostelanetz said Ashbery's "most profound heresy" was the belief "that a poem "should" remain mostly inscrutable, no matter how long or closely anyone studies it."
Although Ashbery refrained from imposing his own interpretation on the reader, he rejected the idea that his poetry was political. For instance, Stephen Paul Miller wrote an essay theorizing that "Self-Portrait" was an elaborate commentary on the Watergate scandal, noting the poem was first published by "Poetry" in August 1974—the same month Richard Nixon announced his resignation. Ashbery told Miller that the poem had "nothing to do with Watergate, and more importantly, it was written before Watergate happened," to which Miller replied it made "absolutely no difference" to him when the poem had been written. In Miller's recollection, Ashbery joked "So you're comparing me to Nixon? Someday you'll get yours," then asserted that his poetry was not political in nature.
Critical response.
The initial academic and press reviews were generally positive, and especially praised the titular poem. Many critics described the collection as Ashbery's best work to date and among the best works of contemporary American poetry.
Harold Bloom's influence on other critics.
Much of the early literary critic and peer opinion was heavily influenced by Harold Bloom, an early champion of Ashbery who had predicted the poet would "come to dominate the last third of the century as Yeats dominated the first." Bloom—a high-profile literary critic best known as the author of "The Anxiety of Influence"(1973)—had applauded Ashbery's early works and considered him as a "strong" or "great" American poet, a successor to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Wallace Stevens. Bloom's review of "Self-Portrait", published in "The New Republic", was quoted in a blurb for the book's dust jacket:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;This beautiful book is equal or superior to Ashbery's previous masterwork, "The Double Dream of Spring" ... Not even in that collection did Ashbery maintain so continuous a level of what I am compelled to judge as poetic greatness. ... No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time. ... The book will be a major part of our imaginative history, and is an inevitable comfort in our current darkness.
References to Stevens were commonplace in early reviews of the "Self-Portrait" collection and, whether they reflected or rejected Bloom's interpretation, they demonstrated his influence in any case. Although Bloom raised Ashbery's profile, other critics have objected to his stewardship of Ashbery's reputation. In 1975, John N. Morris mocked the tone of Bloom's blurb as over-bearing and portentous, sarcastically calling him "solemn and tremendous as History Itself":
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;How very discouraging it sounds—another damned masterpiece! Good God! Will we never catch up? What's mainly wrong with utterances like Bloom's is their deterrent effect. I suspect that Ashbery in this book is pretty nearly as good as Bloom says he is, and I hope that the dustjacket drums and thunder won't put readers off.
In Susan M. Schultz's reading, Bloom's reviews imposed his own ideas and denigrated any of Ashbery's qualities beyond or contrary to his Stevens-centered analysis. Schultz interpreted parts of Ashbery's poetry, beginning with "Self-Portrait", as veiled retorts to Bloom and other literary theorists who would narrowly categorize the bounds of his work.
In academic literary journals.
In