The Season is Stalled

The final chapter, a survey of Ashbery’s prolific “late period,” argues that the archive of “bad” nature poetry examined in Chapter 4 is shadowed by a related archive of poetry about climate change. Where Ashbery’s later work has gained a reputation for being lighter and more in touch with the great English nonsense tradition than his earlier work, I argue that the work since April Galleons (1987) constitutes a sustained attempt to reckon with the sublimely unimaginable crisis of climate change. Ashbery’s later work does mediate the “real world,” while ecology, long absent from Ashbery’s work, erupts into it in the years following the discovery of the ozone layer hole in the mid-1980s. From “The Ice Storm” and “Korean Soap Opera” to Girls on the Run and “Breezeway,” Ashbery’s later poems of the ecosublime assume an urgently diagnostic aura.