The Truth Is in the Detail

The unsettling images in John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath (1962) were collaged from lines found in a children’s book. I’ve often privately repeated phrases like “his Swedish copper forehead” or “the lake a lilac cube.” This language is hermetic and synesthetic. Beautiful and puzzling, it evokes impossible—or barely possible—forms of aesthetic experience, what is sometimes termed the surreal.