Here is another Lines Press publication from 1966. John Ashbery wrote the introduction. Not sure if this introduction is reprinted anywhere. If not, it is now.
INTRODUCTION
The first person singular occurs throughout these
poems, like a key signature in music, but the poems are not meant as
autobiography and in fact tell us nothing about the poet. The “I” is really a kind of familiar-sounding
threshold that brings us immediately into contact with the unfamiliar world one
step away – “the” world. The poet is
this world. He has “camouflaged himself
to look like everything, if camouflage is the art of calling attention to
things by trying to make them invisible.
The poems are simultaneously big, important and world-ordering; and
small, odd and private. They cover
everything, elbow the reader out of themselves, and camouflage him into the
memory of his intentions when he began to read the poem.
JB
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