"I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them"
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Ashbery’s line is a small manifesto disguised as a shrug. He refuses the confessional bargain - the expectation that art should function like testimony, neatly matching a life event to a legible poem. “With experiences in mind” concedes the obvious: living feeds the work. The pivot comes fast: he doesn’t write about experience, he writes out of it. That preposition swap quietly relocates the poem’s center of gravity. Experience isn’t the subject on display; it’s the pressure behind the language, the shove that sends syntax and association ricocheting into surprise.
The intent is protective and liberating at once. Protective, because it denies the reader the easy pry-bar of biography. Liberating, because it frames experience as raw energy rather than content that must be processed into narrative. The subtext is an argument with a culture that treats poems like receipts: prove you felt something, show us what happened, translate your private life into public meaning. Ashbery insists the opposite: the real event is what the mind does when it collides with lived time, how perception stutters, reroutes, contradicts itself.
Context matters here. Ashbery’s work, shaped by surrealism, New York School cool, and an era increasingly hungry for “authentic” self-revelation, often stages consciousness mid-motion - digressive, funny, evasive, intimate without being intimate about anything in particular. Writing “out of” experience explains that signature slipperiness: not a refusal to feel, but a refusal to reduce feeling to plot. The poem becomes aftermath, not diary.
The intent is protective and liberating at once. Protective, because it denies the reader the easy pry-bar of biography. Liberating, because it frames experience as raw energy rather than content that must be processed into narrative. The subtext is an argument with a culture that treats poems like receipts: prove you felt something, show us what happened, translate your private life into public meaning. Ashbery insists the opposite: the real event is what the mind does when it collides with lived time, how perception stutters, reroutes, contradicts itself.
Context matters here. Ashbery’s work, shaped by surrealism, New York School cool, and an era increasingly hungry for “authentic” self-revelation, often stages consciousness mid-motion - digressive, funny, evasive, intimate without being intimate about anything in particular. Writing “out of” experience explains that signature slipperiness: not a refusal to feel, but a refusal to reduce feeling to plot. The poem becomes aftermath, not diary.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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