Nothing Poems Can Stay: Ephemerality as Postmodern Poetics from Frost to John Ashbery

This study theorizes ephemerality as a postmodern poetics logic, instead of simply a theme of loss or nostalgia. It traces a genealogy of transience from Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, on impermanence, and Sigman Freud’s reflections on value, and lastly, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “enduring ephemeral.” The study places ephemerality into a context that positions meaning as temporally contingent and fundamentally unstable. Therefore, the article argues that John Ashbery radicalizes ephemerality as he translates it into poetic form. With syntactic disjunction, temporal drift, indirection, and resistance to closure, Ashbery performs impermanence rather than representing it in his poetry. Meaning, therefore, becomes provisional and distributive, which engages the reader in a continual process of interpretation. In this way, ephemerality functions as both an aesthetic style and an epistemological condition of the postmodern poetry.