John Ashbery Speaks To Readers Concerning The Composition Of 'the Other Tradition' And 'fantasia On The Nut-Brown Maid' Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday afternoon, January 11,2019 at 4: 35 p.m.; Saturday morning,
January 12 at 11: 19 a.m.; Monday morning, January 21 at 10: 25 a.m.;
Sunday morning, January 27 at 10: 22 a.m.; Monday morning, January 28 at 8: 10 a.m.

I never tackle my subjects straight on,
with a few exceptions, am adverse to reveal
what is really going on inside my head
and heart, so I write poems 'to one side',
as asides of sorts as I say in 'Tapestry'.
Life proves to be too close up to the lens;
you may have noticed I feel compelled
to use personal pronouns instead of nouns,
names in my efforts to conceal: I, you,
we, us, our.Especially you.(You tells
many of my stories.) You need to read
the poems carefully to consider what you
refers to: it tends to ambiguity, references
various long-developing ambivalent feelings.
Each poem presents a special case.Take that
of 'The Other Tradition': now, there's a poem
for you to discover. A lot happens therein:
mention is made of some friends of mine,
and 'you' looks up from a book midcourse,
thus becoming the poem's ‘object of attention'
all of a sudden, coming to somebody's rescue
at last, 'as a star absorbs the night'.Yeah.
Then there's'Fantasia On ‘The Nut-Brown Maid''.
He and She in this one.He said, she said.
And so on.The test.I've felt my life has
always been kind of like this poem—solitary,
going it alone, proclaiming loss, going to live
in the woods like Thoreau—damn convention,
what the critics have had to say! It's always
been about you and me and the test. You coming
to validate me. The pronouns? They're interchangeable—
'you', 'me', 'us' 'she'— asserting our identities.