A Serpentine Gesture: John Ashbery's Poetry and Phenomenology [Paperback]

In“A Serpentine Gesture”: John Ashbery’s Poetry and PhenomenologyElisabeth W. Joyce examines John Ashbery’s poetry through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is a process through which people reach outside of themselves for sensory information, map that experiential information against what they have previously encountered and what is culturally inculcated in them, and articulate shifts in their internal repositories through encounters with new material. Joyce argues that this process reflects Ashbery’s classic statement of poetry being the “experience of experience.” Through incisive close readings of Ashbery’s poems, Joyce examines how he explores this process of continual reverberation between what is sensed and what is considered about that sensation and, ultimately, how he renders these perceptions into the “serpentine gesture” of language.Elisabeth W. Joyceis a professor at Edinboro University. She is also the author ofCultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Gardeand“The Small Space of a Pause”: Susan Howe’s Poetry and the Spaces Between. This study by Elisabeth W. Joyce, which uses phenomenology in the way Ashbery uses a houseboat (sturdy, yet never still), allows the poetry to move. Joyce is a marvelous guide to Ashbery's work, tracing it line by line as it unspools into the future, that time when we find ourselves reading it with her.-- Susan M. Schultz, author ofA Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry