‘we are where we exchanged / positions’

Chapter 4 considers Ashbery’s engagement with and reception by English poets from the late 1980s onwards, particularly in relation to Mark Ford. It is the first discussion of these two poets that attends to their extensive correspondence. It portrays Ashbery’s relationship with Ford as a successful enactment of the idea of reciprocal influence, a form of engagement which allows Ashbery a means to ‘shake off his own influence’ late in his career, and to retain his status as a ‘major minor writer’. It presents Ford as a particularly subtle inheritor of Ashbery’s aesthetic: one who has perceived and elaborated on Ashbery’s ‘other tradition’ of English poetry, rather than the more direct and explicit forms of imitation and appropriation practised by other younger poets, including John Ash.