Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Poetics

Abstract

Among critics there is no disagreement about John Ashbery’s sexuality. Perhaps that is because Ashbery is actually a registered homosexual. He came out to the draft board and was exempted from military service during the Korean War (Shoptaw 5). On the other hand, Ashbery, while registered with the draft board, often does not “register” as a gay poet. For instance, the Penguin Anthology of Homosexual Verse (edited by Stephen Coote) does not include him, even though it was published years after Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the “Triple Crown” of American poetry prizes: Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. Ashbery’s absence in this anthology is even more striking when one considers that at the time of its publication by Penguin, Ashbery was one of the “Penguin Poets.” Critics do, however, pay enough attention to Ashbery’s sexuality to note that the masculine pronoun in Ashbery’s poetry can address “a friend,” “a lover,” or “the poet himself,” and when examining him as a love poet, critics make sure to consider the beloved as male.¹ These same critics, though, while they acknowledge that pronouns and reference are transformed in the aura of Ashbery’s sexuality, do little but remark the transformation.