27:4 Spring 1976

JOHN ASHBERY

All Kinds of Caresses

“All Kinds of Caresses” by John Ashbery was published in the Spring 1977 Chicago Review.  Ashbery had recently won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for his collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.  Like his cohort in the New York school, Ashbery is given to painterly abstraction and to appropriations of the language of everyday life.  His poetry is famously difficult; as he writes in the following poem, “It isn’t absolutely clear.”      

[DN, 1996]

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