Homecomings: The Poet's Prose of Ashbery, Schuyler and Spicer
Homecomings: The Poet's Prose of Ashbery, Schuyler and Spicer
This chapter explores first Jack Spicer's unfinished detective novel, which stages the ‘return’ to San Francisco of aspiring poet J. J. Ralston, who, after several years of academic work on the east coast, comes home precisely to find an origin become unrecognisable. The second is John Ashbery's and James Schuyler's co-authored A Nest of Ninnies. The emphasis on possession and self-identity are somewhat at odds with the poetics of ‘dictation’, the ‘outside’, ‘correspondences’ and haunting, which say nothing of Spicer's pronouncement. A Nest of Ninnies ends on no such note of ‘hereness’ and geographical and cultural continuity, as one might well imagine. In Spicer, Ashbery and Schuyler, one sees where American transatlantic cosmopolitan modernism also invariably, dialectically tended, while the museum fades into its other, which, since Henry James, has at least also been its double: the shopping mall, which Europe's ghosts ask no better than to haunt.
Keywords: Jack Spicer, J. J. Ralston, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Nest of Ninnies, cosmopolitan modernism, Henry James
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
