Cinema as Poetic Experience: John Ashbery’s Poetry of Cinemagoing

John Ashbery’s poetry is shot through with accounts of cinemagoing: childhood trips to the movies, odes to cinematic cliches, poems about film noir. These specific references, however, exist alongside more abstract theoretical expressions of cinema’s aesthetic force. This paper is an attempt to reconcile Ashbery’s more specific accounts of cinemagoing with the poetic abstractions in order to make a claim about cinematic experience that perhaps differs from more conventional accounts held by film theory. To do so, it will proceed in two ways. First, through historical contextualization of Ashbery’s relationship to the cinema from archival research of Ashbery’s papers housed at the Harvard University library. With that historical context, the paper moves to a close reading of one of Ashbery’s poems, “The Lonedale Operator,” from his book A Wave (1984). Titled after the D.W. Griffith film of the same name, this poem was Ashbery’s attempt to write a poem about his first cinematic experience. I read this poem through Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Poetry as Experience (1986), which offers a philosophical account of experience through the poetry of Paul Celan. With the historical context and Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical framework, this paper uses Ashbery’s poetry on cinemagoing to put forth a theory of cinematic experience as poetic experience.

 

Thomas Quist is a PhD candidate in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His work has or will appear in World Picture, Discourse, and Mubi Notebook. He co-runs the Critical Function writing workshop and was an organizer of the Figural Analysis working group sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute. His dissertation is on cinematic experience after one leaves the theater.