Activity

Though Ashbery and Oppen were writing at the same time, none of this elemental or vital contact with materials is available for Ashbery—there is no primary relationship to matter, no craft really. His matters are verbal, prefabricated, demotic; they are made elsewhere and by others, and what they o…

Such workers are in a curious position. They are not owners—in other words, they are not entitled to the profits from the firm—but they are proxies, often, for the will of the owners. Indeed, a technical writer seems a perfect example of the double-edged nature of Taylorization for white-collar wor…

[...] If “The Instruction Manual” is a set of instructions, an ars poetica—and Ashbery wrote many of these—it is one for a poet that never emerged, a how-to that Ashbery never took up. It is a set of instructions made to be disobeyed, perhaps because it makes his poetry all too simple and diagramma…

O’Hara’s use of exclamation and apostrophe, performing an attitude toward proper names, toward celebrity and brand, anticipates particularly well the new affective grammars and styles of interactive service work as they have developed in the half century since the publication of Lunch Poems. O’Hara…