Finished: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery). It's a poem about what is says...a self-portrait in a convex mirror, but oh so long and complicated. I just read several poems by John Ashbery, actually, including this one, one of his most famous, and included in his Pulitzer Price winning poetry collection of the same name, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. As I said, it was long and complicated, and I'm not sure I understand it all. Every so often I would read a section of lines and "get it". I'd get those few lines...but then, the poem would travel off on a wordy tangent I didn't quite grasp. That happened quite a bit. :-)

I went and looked at the actual self-portrait which the poem was about, Italian artist of the 1500's, Francesco Mazzola. It helped me when I read the poem a second time! I also read Ashbery's My Philosophy of Life, Just Walking Around, At North Farm (which I really liked), Glazunoviana, Crossroads in the Past, Paradoxes and Oxymorons, and Sleepers Awake (which I chuckled at).

I've included a few of my favorite lines from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Sleepers Awake, and then the entire short, but sweet, At North Farm below. :-)

From Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:

The glass chose to reflect only what he saw
Which was enough for his purpose: his image
Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle.
The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest? The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture.
Pope Clement and his court were "stupefied"
By it, according to Vasari, and promised a commission
That never materialized. The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move
As little as possible.

And this from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:

As philosophers have often pointed out, at least
This thing, the mute, undivided present,
Has the justification of logic, which
In this instance isn't a bad thing
Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling
Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result
Into a caricature of itself. This always
Happens, as in the game where
A whispered phrase passed around the room
Ends up as something completely different.
It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike
What the artist intended. Often he finds
He has omitted the thing he started out to say
In the first place. Seduced by flowers,
Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though
Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining
He had a say in the matter and exercised
An option of which he was hardly conscious,
Unaware that necessity circumvents such resolutions.
So as to create something new
For itself, that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.

From Sleepers Awake:

Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.

Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.

Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey.

Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him.

Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick.

Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising,

but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so.

Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.

No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again.

At North Farm

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?