At North Farm
{{short description|Poem}}
"At North Farm" is a poem by American poet and writer John Ashbery.
History and writing
The poem first appeared in The New Yorker in 1984.{{cite magazine|last=Ashbery|first=John|date=9 April 1984|title=At North Farm|magazine=The New Yorker}} It was the opening poem of Ashbery's 1984 collection A Wave.{{cite book|last=Waters|first=William|title=Poetry's Touch: On Lyric Address|year=2003|publisher=Cornell University Press}} It was written soon after Ashbery almost died due to an infection.{{cite book|last=Gray|first=Timothy|title=Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School|year=2010|publisher=University of Iowa Press}}
The poem is in part a reference to the epic poem Kalevala, which Ashbery revisited in his later poem "Finnish Rhapsody".{{cite journal|last=Stewart|first=Susan|year=1988|title=The Last Man|journal=The American Poetry Review|volume=17|issue=5|pages=9–16}}
Content
=Composition=
The poem loosely adheres to the form of a sonnet, with the traditional fourteen lines and the octet/sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet.{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/16/magazine/the-pleasures-of-poetry.html?pagewanted=all|title=THE PLEASURES OF POETRY|last=Lehman|first=David|date=16 December 1984|work=The New York Times|accessdate=30 December 2017}} Adhering to the format was not intentional on Ashbery's part.
=Themes=
In her review of A Wave, Helen Vendler wrote that the poem deals with the pains of aging using clichés.{{cite news|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/06/14/making-it-new/|title=Making It New|last=Vendler|first=Helen|date=14 June 1984|publisher=The New York Review of Books|accessdate=30 December 2017}}
=Allusions and influences=
The poem is evocative of W. H. Auden's work.{{cite web|url=https://bostonreview.net/gander-in-search-of-john-ashbery|title=In Search of John Ashbery|last=Gander|first=Forrest|date=1 July 2007|publisher=Boston Review|accessdate=30 December 2017}} Auden had an influence on Ashbery early poetry, an influence that diminished over the course of his career.
Stephen Greenblatt, writing in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, referred to the poem as "haunted by" Franz Kafka's brief parable "An Imperial Message".{{cite journal |last1=Greenblatt |first1=Stephen |title=Racial Memory and Literary History |journal=PMLA |date=2001 |volume=116 |issue=1 |pages=48–63 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/463640 |issn=0030-8129}}
Reception
External links
- [http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/ashbery/north.html At North Farm]