Out of the Endless Bathos
This chapter surveys the “other tradition” within Ashbery’s oeuvre: “bad” poetry. It argues that Ashbery’s courting of “badness”—understood, in quotation marks, to refer to intentional failure, or what Susan Sontag calls “the good taste of bad taste” in “Notes on Camp”—mounts a critique of the very foundations of value judgment in the arts. Ashbery’s “bad” nature poems, in particular, overturn normative standards of value established by the New Criticism and replace them with a “new bathos” that also evades avant-garde norms of experimental rigor. “Bad” nature poems such as “Variations, Calypso, and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox” and “I Saw No Need” transform the kitschy nature of so many conventional nature poems into an object of potent critique, allowing Ashbery to write against and to “queer” the avant-garde fantasy that art can become nature.