Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
The collection that won Ashbery the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award simultaneously; the only book of poetry to do so. The title poem, a 552-line meditation on Parmigianino's strange self-portrait, is the most sustained and rewarding poem about art-making in the 20th century. Ashbery's famous difficulty is not obscurantism but accuracy: consciousness really does flow like this.
Ashbery's vague pronouns are the sticking point. One reader complains “you don't know the 'it' in most of them,” and never gets a referent to hold onto. Others call the poems “words strung together for no reason other than to befuddle” and describe images that pile up without resolving, “nothing is connected to anything.” Even a broadly favorable period review conceded the book was a mixed bag, warning of “the pit of arrant gibberish that yawns below” the successes. The triple prize sweep and Harold Bloom's outsized praise make disliking it feel like breaking an unspoken club rule, and one reader who wanted a poet more concrete and controlled found the closing title piece reads more like an essay than a poem.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
