SOURCE: "John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, Fall, 1982, pp. 493-514.

In the following essay, Costello explores the relationship between author and reader in Ashbery's verse.

 "My way is, to conjure you"
—Epilogue, As You Like It 

It has been fashionable in the last decade to discuss separately the writer's attention to his act of composition and the reader's experience of that composition. But rather little has been said about the writer's idea of the reader, about his dependence on the reader, his sense of the gap between fictive and actual reader, his efforts to overcome or deny that gap. Reading is as much Ashbery's subject as writing is, and it is through his idea of reading that his self-reflexiveness escapes banal solipsism and opens onto larger questions of communication. In Rivers and Mountains Ashbery first uses the reader as his...