AustLit

'While the term ‘mode’ suggests something computerish, or mode as in moda, fashion, the poems in Ashbery Mode are less ‘coding’ or ‘trying on’ of style, more an absorption inside of a massive body of work. Ashbery’s poetry is a challenge for critics but great nourishment to poets. As the cover suggests, ‘we’ (koala) look up at these American heads, a cruel joke on the idea of Antipodes and perhaps a version of terra nullius from the American perspective. I am reminded of John Forbes’s ‘Antipodean Heads’, which starts: ‘I wish we could be nicer / like the Americans’, how we know so much of them, and keep looking up that way. In the ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ (1958) a group of Australian artists and the critic Bernard Shaw took a stance against abstract expressionism, the New American Painting exhibition, fearing its influence on local aesthetics. This collection, brought to life by editor Michael Farrell, indulges in North American influence, especially the charm of abstraction, freneticism and freedom of movement in poetry. Featuring poets who encountered John Ashbery and other international modernist poetry after 1958 let’s say, Ashbery Mode charts this epic influence in so called Australia. Just how nice are they ‘over there’? Ashbery Mode considers just how nice Australian poets can be, even and especially under the influence.' (Introduction)