Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Ashbery Ashberies

From an AP article on John Ashbery, whose "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" will claim much of my day:

Ashbery is a longtime breaker of rules, but he has so far honored the boundaries of his own name. Ashbery remains just Ashbery, a proper noun, the last name of one of the world's most admired poets. But why not pretend that the poet is an adjective, Ashbery-like, or a verb, "to Ashbery." The poet even offers a definition.

"To confuse the hell out of people," he says.

John Ashbery — movie fan and canonical poet (International Herald Tribune)

comments: 0