Stop Trying to Understand John Ashbery. Here’s How to Actually Enjoy Him.

I still remember the first time I tried to read John Ashbery. I sat in a coffee shop, a copy of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” open in front of me, and within three lines I felt like a fraud. Everyone called him a genius, but I couldn’t find the plot, the message, the point. I closed the book and decided Ashbery wasn’t for me.

That was five years ago. I was wrong. Not about Ashbery—about how to read him.

The point of Ashbery’s poetry is not to decode it — it’s to live inside it for a moment.

Most people approach his work the way they approach a crossword puzzle: hunt for the hidden meaning, crack the code, feel smart. But Ashbery’s poems aren’t puzzles. They’re weather. They’re music. They’re the feeling of walking through a city at twilight when your thoughts drift and tangle. If you treat them as a riddle, you’ll always lose. If you treat them as an experience, you’ll never want to leave.

You’ve probably felt that familiar anxiety when you encounter something you don’t ‘get’. Your brain screams: work harder, find the answer. But Ashbery built his entire career on one subversive idea: that meaning isn’t something you extract from a poem—it’s something you create inside it. His opacity is not a failure. It’s an invitation.

His difficulty is not a wall; it’s an open door. Most people just try to smash through it instead of walking through.

Consider the opening of one of his most famous poems, “The Painter”: “Sitting between the sea and the buildings / He enjoyed painting the sea’s gray. / He painted the sea’s portrait. / The sea didn’t like it.” On the surface, it’s nonsense. But if you stop asking ‘what does it mean’ and let the images conjure something—a frustrated artist, an indifferent ocean, the vanity of creation—the poem opens up. It becomes funny, sad, true. You don’t need an expert to explain it. You just need to feel your way through.

This is the liberation Ashbery offers. He frees you from the tyranny of authoritative interpretation. No professor’s footnotes, no single correct reading. The poem happens between the words and your own memory, your own emotions, your own half-formed thoughts. You have been taught that poetry needs to mean something. Ashbery is here to liberate you from that lie.

I saw this firsthand when I finally returned to Ashbery after years of avoiding him. I read “Some Trees” aloud in my apartment, letting the words fall without trying to catch them. The rhythm felt like breathing. The images—”These are amazing: each / Joining a neighbor, as though speech / Were a still performance”—didn’t explain anything, but they moved me. I felt something release in my chest. That’s when I understood: Ashbery’s poems aren’t about being ‘figured out.’ They’re about being lived through.

The same principle applies to any art that scares you. Modernist painting. Avant-garde film. Abstract jazz. The urge to ‘understand’ is the very thing that blocks enjoyment. Instead, commit to one emotional lane: curiosity, surrender, even confusion. Let the piece wash over you. Notice what you feel before you try to name it.

So next time you pick up a poem by Ashbery—or any ‘difficult’ work—do one simple thing: stop trying to get it right. Stop searching for the hidden message. Just listen to the sounds, follow the associative leaps, and let the words do whatever they want. The fog is not the obstacle. The fog is the experience.