💬 David Shurman Wallace on the poetry (and witness) of John Ashberry:
Increasingly, consumers are offered the image of art-making as a subgenre of celebrity, and the works of art themselves are allowed to remain laudable but forgettable byproducts. For the serious reader or writer, perhaps celebrity is beside the point, but most find the social orbit difficult to escape; the result is thousands of voices clamoring against the algorithm, riffing on the same jokes. Poetry — good or bad, distinct or homogenous — is somewhere else… In a time when “the right to be forgotten” — the ability to have one’s internet trail removed from search — feels increasingly difficult to secure, there is something prescient in Ashbery’s inwardness. So much of the beauty of the New York School relied on its essentially non-public interiority — the sense that there was a secret between friends you weren’t quite in on, but might glimpse for a moment. That we are moving away from Ashbery’s aesthetics makes it all the more important to remember the link between the creation of small, informal communities and a curiosity about new language.