Using the novel Herzog to explain the poetry of Ashbery. (A moment of clarity today about Ashbery’s poetry) — it was the novel Herzog but without the markers of punctuation and font Bellow uses to differentiate between letters (epistles), thoughts, speech, (indirect and direct discourse) and narration. It was, in a word, (formally speaking) Herzog without the punctuation. A declining to discrimminate between first person and third, between what the first person thought and what the second person said and what the third person wrote that he had once thought. All idea, language, lost their point of origin, in time and in person, and was put on the same flat plane.
This made Ashbery’s poems harder to read than Herzog. On the positive side it made reality in a way reversible: between what Herzog said he did and what he said he said or imagined he wrote or said, there did remain a difference with Ashbery, but so uncertainly, that what was imagined could have been, and what was said now could have been written before, and what was written before might be the poem you now read.
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