Howard, Richard. “Pursuits and Followings.” Poetry 120.5
(August 1972): 296-303.
(296-98) Briefly outlines individual poems in the work, using
the poet’s said description of each, as pretexts to the larger work.
Focuses on prose form as a point earlier poetry was coming to, because
only prose enables the work’s mission to “elude the notion of project”
to achieve, in the poet’s words, “the meaningless but real snippets that
are today’s doing.”
Helms, Alan. “Growing Up Together.” Partisan Review 39.4
(Fall 1972): 621-26.
On 625: “T.P. will excite aficionados of his work, but it probably
won’t, as an introduction, win him new converts.”
Koethe, John. “Ashbery’s Meditations.” Parnassus: Poetry
in Review 1.1 (Fall/Winter
1972): 89-93.
A review of T.P. Encourages the critic to look beyond aesthetic
terms, exploring the work as a meditation on existence, where art is an
inexhaustible pursuit of unanswerable questions.
Shapiro, David Joel. “The Meaning of Meaninglessness: The Poetry
of John Ashbery.”
Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1973.
The author writes, in Dissertation Abstracts International, “Three
Poems presents Ashbery’s mature prose meditations. It is a sequence
describing failure in love, and the tendency is toward a solipsism in which
private art alone is finally affirmed.”
Donadio, Stephen. “Poetry and Public Experience.” Commentary
55.2 (February 1973):
63-72.
Critical praise of T.P as “nothing less than the invention of the form
in English.” Examines fluidity of language and the influence of Dante
and Wordsworth.
DiPiero, W.S. “John Ashbery: The Romantic as Problem Solver.”
American Poetry
Review 2.4 (July / August 1973): 39-42.
Considers the work as “a book of arguments with and about art,” with
specific attention to themes of time and change. Examines poems individually.
Considers dramatic ability that defines the work as poetry.
Hollo, Anselm. “‘Gifts to Our Spirit’: John Ashbery’s Three Poems.”
Crazy Horse 14
(November 1973): 17-8.
A short review in praise of the work, focusing on its gift to the reader
of “the very heart of a system of transcendence.”
Mazzocco, Robert. “Very Different Cats.” The New York Review
of Books (December
13, 1973): 45-7.
Reviews the work, comparing and contrasting the poet with Beckett,
with attention to the themes of flux and love, truth and vocabulary.
“‘Inspirational’ truth [is]…ultimately the port at which Three Poems berths.”
Bloom, Janet, and Losada, Robert. “Craft Interview with John Ashbery.”
The Craft of
Poetry: Interviews from the New York Quarterly, ed. William Packard
(New York, 1974): 111-32.
J.A. says “I played Elliott Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra a lot while
I was writing “The New Spirit” (114). Discusses the themes in N.S.
of acceptance (116), confusion (118-9), time (121-2) and Tarot (122), the
possible relation of the word “fragment” in N.S. to the longer poem “Fragment,”
and optimism and rebirth in N.S. and connection with “The System” (131-2).
Osti, Louis A. “The Craft of John Ashbery: An Interview by Louis
A. Osti.”
Confrontation 9 (Fall 1974): 84-96.
The poet briefly discusses his motivations in writing T.P. in prose.
(89-90)
Kermani, David K. John Ashbery: a comprehensive bibliography,
including his art
criticism, and with selected notes from unpublished materials.
New York, 1976. A vital and exhaustive resource, comprehensive to
publishing date. Includes works of literature and art criticism by
or translated by J.A., contributions to works of literature and art criticism
by or translated by J.A., editorships, and miscellanea, including published
remarks, interviews, recordings, artworks, performances in plays, musical
settings and reviews of J.A.’s work.
Moramarco, Fred. “John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara: The Painterly
Poets.” Journal of
Modern Literature 5.3 (September 1976): 436-62.
Discussion of T.P. on 453-55, 459-61. Explores “the painterly
sensibility evident throughout Ashbery’s work, linked to the meditative
mode that…flourished fully in Three Poems.” Discusses the theme
of “a work of art as a record of its own composition” and of the artist’s
“absence in our present experience.” Examines the impact of Giorgio
de Chirico’s Hebdomeros on the work.
Shattuck, Roger. “Poet in the Wings.” The New York Review
of Books 25.4 (March 23,
1978): 38-40.
A discussion of J.A.’s Houseboat Days. Briefly considers “The
New Spirit”: “presents a set of clarified moments cubistically, free of
perspective.”
Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Tangled Versions of the Truth’: Ammons and
Ashbery at Fifty.”
The American Poetry Review (September/October 1978): 5-11.
This important critic briefly discusses the work in discussing the
resonating quality of the poet’s titles and imagery with other of his works.
Altieri, Charles. “Motives in Metaphor: John Ashbery and the Modernist
Long Poem.”
Genre 11 (Winter 1978): 653-87.
An extensive study by an important critic. Discusses the poet’s
“rationale for a different way of locating the interface between aesthetic
and existential qualities,” and examines the function of pronouns.
Considers the work “Ashbery’s most sustained meditation on the need for
new images of the mind’s powers,” and suggests it redefines Stevens’ “nobility
of imagination.” Asserts that the work suggests “the long poem must
learn to submit to the skeptical forms of lucidity” while remaining focused
yet diffusing.
Molesworth, Charles. “‘This Leaving-Out Business’: The Poetry
of John Ashbery.” In
his The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry (Columbia,
Missouri, 1979), ch.9. See especially 172-76. “The work’s main
concern is the theme of individuation, the reemergence of a new self out
of the old.” Analyzes complexity and the “threat of nihilism,” with
particular focus on “The System,” in which the author asserts J.A. attempts
to provide the answer of how to escape the “trap of temporality” by embracing
its humanizing function.
Sayre, Henry M. “‘A Recurring Wave / of Arrival’: Ashbery’s Endings.”
Poet and
Critic 11.3 (1979): 39-44.
Discusses the poet’s call in T.P. for art to conclude by remaining
open. (40)
Shapiro, David. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry.
New York, 1979.
Essential text for the Ashbery enthusiast and scholar alike, from a
leading Ashbery scholar. Offers insights on T.P. throughout.
See especially chapter 6 for specific attention to the work.
Fredman, Stephen Albert. “Sentences: Three Works of American Prose
Poetry.” Ph.D.
Dissertation, Stanford University, 1980.
The author writes, in Dissertation Abstracts International, that “This
study explores the possibility of a non-generic poetry in sentences,” and
that the poet “uses the sentences of Three Poems to investigate the shifting
interplay between self and other.”
Lehman, David. Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery.
London, 1980.
A cornerstone of J.A. criticism. Includes six essays addressing
T.P., chapters 1-5, 9. Provides notes and bibliographic references.
Essential for the Ashbery student.
Shapiro, Marianne. “John Ashbery: The New Spirit.” Water
Table 1 (1980): 58-73.
A useful, extremely close analysis of the poem with particular attention
to form, time and symbols.
Donoghue, Denis. “Sign Language.” The New York Review of
Books 26.21-22 (January
24, 1980): 36-9.
An analysis of J.A.’s As We Know. On 37, considers “the recession
from acts to attitudes” in T.P. and its space-making capability.
Kostelanetz, Richard. “John Ashbery (1976).” In his The
Old Poetries and the New, ch.
9 (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981). Provides quotations from J.A.,
in which he discusses his motivation and intent in writing, and influences
that helped shape the work. “I was wondering: What about writing
prose poetry in which the ugliness of prose would be exploited and put
to the uses of poetry?”
Miller, Susan Hawkins. “The Poetics of the Postmodern American
Prose Poem.” Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of Oregon, 1981.
Chapter 3 centers on T.P. The author writes of the analytic prose
poem, in Dissertation Abstracts International, that “its unique verbal
space which may extend to well over fifty pages…united with particular
syntactic deformations and an absence of any defining or explanatory framework,
allows Ashbery to articulate a radical concept of self and consciousness.”
Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Mysteries of Construction’: The Dream Songs
of John Ashbery.” In
her The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton, New Jersey,
1981), ch. 7. In her introduction to The Poetics, the author writes
“To limit discussion of ‘modern poetry’ to ‘modern verse’ would be…to eliminate
some of the most influential verbal art of the period.” Chapter 7
(248-87) discusses the irrelevancy of choice in the conflict between dream
and reality (250-51) and the notion that the dream itself is the haunting
reality (252), resonance with other of the poet’s works (260), and deceptive
syntax that ensures “fidelity to the dream process” (270-72).
Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse.
Cambridge, 1983.
Analysis of Williams, Creeley and Ashbery, with some study of other
poets. Chapter 3 offers thorough and crucial study of T.P.
Ross, Andrew. “The Alcatraz Effect: Belief and Postmodernity.”
SubStance 13.1
(1984): 71-84.
Addresses the work briefly, in a discussion of “Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror.”
Labrie, Ross. “John Ashbery: An Interview by Ross Labrie.”
The American Poetry
Review (May/June 1984): 29-33.
J.A. discusses Tarot in T.P. (29), his happiness with the “landscape”
effect of the work (31), and his intent to “‘democratize’ poetry” with
prose (31).
Bloom, Harold. “The Charity of the Hard Moments.” In his
Modern Critical Views:
John Ashbery (New York, 1985). Originally published in Salmagundi
22-23 (1973): 103-31. Also reprinted in American Poetry Since 1960:
Some Critical Perspectives, ed. Robert B. Shaw (Great Britain, 1973); and
in Figures of Capable Imagination (1976).
An able article by one of the most well-known thinkers on the subject.
Discusses “the abandonment of Ashbery’s rhetorical evasiveness,” influence-anxiety,
and considers the notion that “Ananke, the Beautiful Necessity…is the governing
deity of…T.P.” 103-08 provides lengthy analysis of the work, addressing
individually the three poems.
Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery. New
York, 1985.
An important work essential to the Ashbery scholar. Compiles
essays from top Ashbery critics. Introduction, chronology and bibliographic
references.
Kalstone, David. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Modern
Critical Views: John
Ashbery, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1985). Originally published
in his Five Temperaments (Oxford, 1977), ch. 5.
Examines “deliberate demolition” and polarities of inclusiveness and
exclusiveness in T.P. Explores T.P.’s “new fluidity” effect on later
works. See also “A Final Note” in Five Temperaments: considers “the
rhythms and recognitions” of T.P. as they stress “the activity of consciousness
and not its power to fix or communicate its content.”
Raaberg, G. Gwen. “Surrealist Strategy in Mythic and Ironic Modes:
The Poetry of
Octavio Paz and John Ashbery.” Proceedings of the 10th Congress
of the International Comparative Literature Association 2 (1985): 321-26.
Considers J.A.’s attempt in T.P. to reconcile dream and reality to
link the poet to surrealism.
Murphy, John. “John Ashbery: An Interview with John Murphy.”
Poetry Review 75.2
(August 1985): 20-25.
The poet mentions the work as a favorite (20), and discusses his intentions
with the prose form.
Miller, S.H. “Psychic Geometry: John Ashbery’s Prose Poems.”
American Poetry 3.1
(Fall 1985): 24-42.
Examines the conflict of prose form as poetry. “It is this very
contradictoriness that makes the prose poem appealing to postmodern poets.”
Rapaport, Herman. “Deconstructing Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Ashbery,
Derrida, Blanchot.”
Criticism 27.4 (Fall 1985): 387-400.
Considers collapsibility and vagueness, in a discussion of the relationship
between self and other, in terms of holocaust and the breaking down of
the system.
Martens, Klaus. “Rage For Definition: The Long Poem As ‘Sequence’.”
Poetry and
Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge: Papers
from the International Poetry Symposium, Eichsteatt, 1983 (Regensburg,
1986): 350-65.
On 357, briefly alludes to T.P. in relation to J.A.’s long poem preference,
and quotes the poet’s intent to support his “Litany” by writing T.P.
Ross, Andrew. “Doubting John Thomas.” In his The Failure
of Modernism: Symptoms
of American Poetry (New York, 1986), ch. 6. Examines absence
of “voice” and the poet’s “refusal” of notions of originality often associated
with it, implicates Freudian concepts of fetishism in the work’s “disavowal,
or at least the transformation, of temporality,” and questions what David
Shapiro calls J.A.’s “tolerance for negativity.”
Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Homeward Ho!’: Silicon Valley Pushkin.”
The American Poetry
Review (November/December 1986): 37-46.
Defends the work against charges of monotony (45).
McDowell, Robert. “How Good Is John Ashbery?” The American
Scholar 56.2 (Spring
1987): 275-86.
On 285, discusses the poet’s denial of consequence in “The System”
to support a critique of his later poems as “mannered and inaccurate repetition.”
Fink, Thomas A. “The Poetry of David Shapiro and Ann Lauterbach:
After Ashbery.”
The American Poetry Review (January/February 1988): 27-32.
Relates the work to Shapiro’s To An Idea (27), and discusses cliché
in the work (30).
Stitt, Peter. “John Ashbery.” Poets at Work: The Paris Review
Interviews, ed. George
Plimpton (New York, 1989), ch. 15. Originally published in Paris
Review 90 (Winter 1983): 30-59.
On 409, the poet addresses whether there is an “indispensable element
that makes poetry,” discussing “reacting to…minimalism” with the prose
of T.P. and stating “The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication
is poetry to me.”
Mills-Courts, Karen. Poetry as Epitaph: Representation and Poetic
Language.
Louisiana, 1990. Examines complexity of poetic form, especially
in “The Recital” as a kind of “pure performance,” in regard to authorial
presence. Analyzes the poet’s desire for “temporal meaning” in death
and implication that “something escapes.” “The question of being
is being …this postmodern poet writes the epitome of poetry as epitaph.”
Perloff, Marjorie. “Barthes, Ashbery, and the Zero Degree of Genre.”
In her Poetic
License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston, Illinois,
1990), ch. 13.
Examines “the constant interruption or undercutting of ‘beautiful and
simple design[s]’ by parody, pastiche, and the lampooning of the self”
in N.S. as the distinguishing quality from notions customarily applied
to the work, such as Yeats’ “primary” and “antithetical” and Stevens’ “reimagining
of the First Idea.” T.P. is a prime example of mise en scene of mimesis
and what Barthes called “mathesis” – “a complete field of knowledge.”
Quamme, Margaret Atkins. “The Interaction of Lyric and Narrative
in the Long Modern
American Poem.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University, 1990.
The author writes, in Dissertation Abstracts International, “An examination
of Ashbery’s Three Poems reveals a post-modernist heightening of consciousness
of the tensions between lyric and narrative.”
Monroe, Jonathan. “Idiom and Cliché in T.S. Eliot and John
Ashbery.” Contemporary
Literature 31.1 (Spring 1990): 17-36.
In the footnote on 33, addresses the poet’s “extended engagement” with
problematic prose-poetry in discussing the link between the poet and Baudelaire.
Murphy, Margueritte S. “John Ashbery’s Three Poems: Heteroglossia
in the American
Prose Poem.” American Poetry 7.2 (Winter 1990): 50-63.
Applies Bakhtinian concepts of multiple discourse to various selves
presented in the work. Special attention to “inclusionism” in the
prose form.
Baker, Peter. Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern
Long Poem. Gainesville,
Florida, 1991.
See for an extensive list of bibliographic references.
Benfey, Christopher. “Portraits and Puzzles.” The New Republic
204.24 (June 17, 1991):
42-8.
An analysis of J.A.’s Flow Chart. Briefly discusses T.P. (42-3)
to illustrate the poet’s recurring conflict between two extremes: “One
is the search for a Whitmanian form that can include everything; the other
is the attempt to eliminate everything extraneous.”
Murphy, Margueritte S. “John Ashbery’s Three Poems: Prose and
the Poetics of
Inclusion.” In her A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem
in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1992), chapter
5.
Study of the “inclusionism” of the prose form. See also Murphy’s
“John Ashbery’s Three Poems: Heteroglossia in the American Prose Poem,”
in American Poetry 7.2 (Winter 1990): 50-63.
Dewey, Anne. “The Relation Between Open Form and Collective Voice:
The Social
Origin of Processual Form in John Ashbery’s Three Poems and Ed Dorn’s
Gunslinger.” Sagetrieb 11.1-2 (Spring/Fall 1992): 47-66.
A comparison study toward “understanding the open-ended, processual
structure of what can be defined loosely as open form poetry…Parodies of
open form help to explain this conjunction of immediacy and the colloquial
as the basis of authentic voice.”
Keeling, John. “The Moment Unravels: Reading John Ashbery’s ‘Litany’.”
Twentieth
Century Literature 38.2 (Summer 1992): 125-51.
Briefly discusses T.P. (143-45), specifically the notion that the poet
“especially in his long poems, concludes with a return to his beginnings.”
Zinnes, Harriet. “John Ashbery: The Way Time Feels As It Passes.”
The Hollins Critic
29.3 (June 1992): 1-13.
Considers the work “truly characteristic of [Ashbery’s] genius…here
his disquieting meditations discovered their own music.” Discusses
the conflicts between philosophy and poetry and with present existence.
Uses “The Recital” in discussion of “the universal principle, the cosmic
mystery that is there in its essential affections but still eludes us.”
Schultz, Susan M. “‘The Lyric Crash’: The Theater of Subjectivity
in John Ashbery’s
Three Poems.” Sagetrieb 12.2 (Fall 1993): 137-48.
Examines intertextuality in the work and various criticism in an intriguing
study of the work as a question of genre. “In these three prose poems,
Ashbery presents himself as the reader of a text in which he is the only
actor; he reads the text of his own life as its language writes him.”
Hoeppner, Edward Haworth. Echoes and Moving Fields: Structure
and Subjectivity in
the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and John Ashbery. Lewisburg, 1994.
“An analysis of the topographical features of Merwin’s and Ashbery’s
work, a reflection upon the implications of several crucial tropes for
identity, and an assessment of the political implications of nonrepresentational
language”(Introduction). Scattered but valuable references to T.P.,
mostly in regard to analysis of other of J.A.’s works, but insights certainly
worth the read. Provides notes and extensive bibliographic references.
Shoptaw, John. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry.
Harvard, 1994.
Exhaustive, if not the most thorough picture of Ashbery’s career.
T.P. criticism throughout. See especially chapter 5 for specific
attention to the work. Valuable bibliographic references.
Schultz, Susan M., ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary
Poetry.
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1995.
An important work that collects essays by numerous notable Ashbery
critics. See Schultz’s introduction and chapters 3, 7, 10 and 12
for criticism of T.P.
Gardner, Thomas. “Bishop and Ashbery: Two Ways Out of Stevens.”
The Wallace
Stevens Journal 19.2 (Fall 1995): 201-18.
Considers the work in discussing how “Ashbery poems focus our attention
on language freed from marriage to a referent” (214), and how “poetry protects
and offers” by keeping “turns and tendencies visible” (215).
Norton, Jody. “‘Whispers Out of Time’: The Syntax of Being in
the Poetry of John
Ashbery.” Twentieth Century Literature 41.3 (Fall 1995): 281-305.
A study, in part, of “the liminality and transience of Ashbery’s poetic
identities.” Examines the notion in N.S. of destructiveness in wholeness,
and desire for understanding the subjectivity of the question of “your
being here.”
Stitt, Peter. Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets.
Iowa City, 1997.
See “Notes” (184-6) for valuable bibliographic references.
Longenbach, James. “Ashbery and the Individual Talent.”
American Literary History
9.1 (Spring 1997): 103-27.
An important piece of criticism that very briefly quotes T.P. (111)
in regard to the author’s need to ignore details of J.A.’s poetry “in order
to present a coherent narrative.” Provides bibliographic references.
Staiger, Jeff. “The Hitherside of History: Tone, Knowledge, and
Spirit in John Ashbery’s
‘The System’.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 39.1
(Spring 1997): 80-95.
An in-depth and able analysis of the poem which posits as its thesis
that the dilemmas raised by the poem are answered by its tone. “The
tone…offers, implicitly, the comprehension that eludes consciousness’s
explicit quest for it and suggests the arrival at an end state which consciousness
knows to be unattainable.”
Perloff, Marjorie. Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent
Occasions.
Evanston, Illinois, 1998.
Essay five, “Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms,” on 137-8 considers the
work in an exploration of the “third rhythm” in Beckett’s Still.
Sweet, David. “‘And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name’: John Ashbery,
the Plastic Arts,
and the Avant-Garde.” Comparative Literature 50.4 (Fall 1998):
316-32.
Pages 327-30 consider N.S. a “dialectics of ‘self’ and ‘other’,” as
“avant-garde…primarily as a meditation on the meaning of the avant-garde,
of the new.”
Kelley, Lionel, ed. Poetry and the Sense of Panic: Critical Essays
on Elizabeth Bishop
and John Ashbery. Atlanta, Georgia, 2000.
A fascinating new collection of essays. See chapters 1, 7 and
10 for T.P. criticism.