My Ashberyan Habits

Okay, so Ron has a piece on his blog about the New Yorker piece on Ashbery. Tons of people (most notably Gina and Janice) have mentioned that I should read it and that it's "odd."

I haven't read it. I'm a busy lazy man. But I have read this excerpt, posted by Ron:

This is how Ashbery reads. When he sits down with a books [sic] of poems by somebody else he goes through it quickly. He forms a first impression of a poem almost at once, and if he isn’t grabbed by it he’ll flip ahead and read something else. But if he’s caught up he’ll keep going, still reading quite fast, not making any attempt to understand what’s going on but feeling that on some other level something is clicking between him and the poem, something is working. He knows implicitly that he’s getting, thought he would find it difficult to say at this point what, exactly, he’s getting. It’s the sound of the poem, though not literally so – it’s not a mater of musicality or mellifluousness or anything like that, and he never reads poems aloud to himself – it’s something like the sound produced by meaning, which lets you know that there’s meaning there even though you don’t know what it is yet. Later, if he likes the poem, he will go back and read it more carefully, trying to get at its meaning in a more conventional way, but it’s really that first impression which counts. (He reads prose quite differently, particularly the sort of dense, baroque prose he loves, such as that of Proust or Henry James: extremely slowly, savoring every word.)

What is notable about this (or at least notable in my world) is that this is EXACTLY how I read, with the exception that if a poem sounds good in my head, I usually return to it later and read it aloud. Otherwise, this is me. I'm sorta like John Ashbery. Who'da thunk it?