POEM OF THE WEEK

The first of the New York poet John Ashbery's collections to appear in Britain was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, published by Carcanet in 1977, when the poet was fifty. It remains one of the most celebrated poetry books of the post-war era: on 30 August, Carcanet reissued it in a "Thirtieth anniversary edition", with the titular portrait, by Parmigianino, on the cover. The question immediately arises, then: in what sense, or to what degree, is the book a self-portrait? 

It was once noted of Ashbery's poems that the pronouns generally seem to have been chosen at random, or "according to an elusive scheme which has nothing to do with representation". In "A Pact With Sudden Death", published in the TLS on November 21, 1980, the "person" of the protagonist is part of the "subject" – if we should call it that.



 
A Pact With Sudden Death
 
Clearly the song will have to wait
Until the time when everything is serious.
Martyrs of fixed eye, with a special sigh,
Set down their goads. The skies have endured
 
Too long to be blasted into perdition this way,
And they fall, awash with blood and flowers.
In the dream next door they are still changing,
And the wakening changes too, into life.
 
“Is this life?” Yes, the last minute was, too –
And the joy of informing takes over
Like the crackle of artillery fire in the outer suburbs
And I was going to wish that you too were the “I”
 
In the novel told in the first person that
This breathy waiting is, that we could crash through
The sobbing underbrush to the laughter that is under the ground,
Since anyone can wait. We have only to begin on time.
 
JOHN ASHBERY (1980)