Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
by John Ashbery
Summary
The book's long title poem takes as its subject a painting: Parmigianino's sixteenth century self portrait, painted onto a curved wooden panel to match the convex mirror he used to study his own reflection, and John Ashbery uses that centuries old trick of optics to ask what a poem, or a mind, can actually capture of a self that keeps shifting even as it is being observed.
Ashbery writes in a discursive, often disjunctive syntax that drifts between formal meditation, offhand conversational aside, and sudden lyric precision, sometimes within a single long sentence, so that meaning in his poems tends to accumulate and dissolve rather than arrive and stay fixed. The title poem runs far longer than a typical lyric, moving in and out of direct description of Parmigianino's painting and back into the poet's own present moment thinking about it, treating the centuries between the painting and the poem as a subject in its own right rather than a gap to bridge. The rest of the collection extends that same restless attentiveness to smaller, more occasional poems, all sharing the book's underlying interest in how consciousness and art each fail, in their own particular ways, to hold a stable picture of anything, including themselves.
Reading the book means slowing down for long, winding sentences that resist paraphrase, more interested in the movement of a mind thinking than in arriving at a settled conclusion. It suits a reader drawn to genuinely difficult, exploratory poetry, comfortable following syntax that keeps changing direction rather than one that states its meaning plainly and moves on.
Historical Context & Significance
The collection achieved something no book had managed before: it won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, all in 1976, sweeping the three major American poetry prizes in a single year.
Ashbery had lived in France from 1955 to 1965 and worked for years as an art critic, a background that shaped his close, patient attention to Parmigianino's painting in the title poem, before returning to the United States and eventually becoming Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor at Bard College, where he taught for decades. The book is now widely considered the high point of Ashbery's long career and one of the central texts of postwar American poetry's more experimental wing, and its triple prize sweep remains cited whenever critics discuss how thoroughly a single difficult, formally demanding book can dominate a literary year.