John Ashbery’s Inoperative Poetics

This essay examines Ashbery’s poetic disengagement from politics in the 1970s alongside strategic questions about productivism and the refusal to work that were emerging at the same time in anti-capitalist circles. I show that Ashbery’s refusal to be “political” in a conventional sense has significant socioeconomic import, insofar as his poetics resists the economic value of productivity that requires all aspects of subjective experience to be subject to teleological notions of time and progress. Ashbery instead develops a poetic temporality that embraces “standing still,” drawing on the lyric poem’s capacity to capture a short moment out of the linear narrative of everyday life. The mechanisms of poetic language in Ashbery’s writing, I argue, are intended to activate a form of personal self-realization that would enable broader political transformation. At stake in Ashbery’s endorsement of aestheticized non-participation, then, is the question of what constitutes effective resistance to capitalist production.