From “Impossible” Writing to a Poetics of Intimacy: John Ashbery's Reading of Gertrude Stein

• Emily Setina ^[1]
  1. [1] Baylor University

     Baylor University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, ISSN 0016-6928, ISSN-e 2160-0228, Vol. 45, Nº. 1, 2012 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Learning to Read), págs. 143-166
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In 1957, a young John Ashbery reviewed Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation for Poetry magazine. Titled “The Impossible,” the essay explores difficulty as a means of readerly intimacy and participation. Ashbery's later “G.M.P.” describes the pathos of the writer's impossible desire to be “really understood”; the early essay, which I revisit in its published form and through notes and drafts, makes an argument about difficult writing itself: that it can demand not just intellectual but affective response. Ashbery calls attention to a poetics of intimacy in Stanzas and reads its grand representational goals in relation, rather than opposition, to personality.