In an era where poetry is often dismissed as inaccessible and disconnected from everyday life, John Gibson challenges these assumptions. He argues that the enigmatic nature of poetry is not so different to that of philosophy. By contending with the complexity of poetry, we might be able to grapple with the difficulties of reality.

I recently assigned John Ashbery’s poem ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ in a philosophy course I am teaching on theories of the self. I assured the students that the poem would dramatize a point about what the philosopher Peter Goldie called ‘the mess inside.’ The mess is a matter of many things, but, in good part, it resides in the chaos of the often contradictory desires, anxieties, wants, beliefs, memories, and self-images that course through us over time, and not infrequently in the moment. It is a mess that explains many of our most tragic and/or hilarious failures as actors on the stage of life, and I told my students that certain strands of lyric poetry are especially good at thinking about why this is so. After explaining ways Ashbery’s poem enlivens our understanding of the cultural and psychological sources of this mess, I opened the lecture to discussion. After a pause, a student who obviously wasn’t feeling it asked, sincerely and more or less respectfully, ‘is Ashbery just saying Fuck You to the reader?’