MANY POEMS enact wild rides of the imagination, but John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which announced a new kind of craft in 1974, is also vivid in concreteness and its emphasis on form. Referencing a Mannerist painting by Parmigianino, Ashbery carefully elaborates size, angle, light, texture, and time (a “peculiar slant / Of memory”) to tease out his poem’s intellectual shape—an approach that draws particular attention to the piece’s own materiality. For a publisher of sensitivity, the work raises a particular question: how to publish a poem that brings the physicality of seeing, reading, and writing so distinctly to the fore?
Helen Vendler’s collaboration with Arion Press | Harvard Magazine Sep-Oct 2013 this is the long read worth every word indicated in the previous post.