A Permanent Anomaly: mirrors, time and immanence in John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

This article reads John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” as a long and excruciating meditation that creates a plane of immanence on which people, images, representations and events are arranged. Poetry, in Ashbery’s verses, does not eternalize the past, but triggers a flux of recombinant matter, continually renewed. Both Parmigianino’s “Autoritratto in uno specchio convesso” and the convex mirror it reproduces, thus, function as machines that, rather than replicating the world, produce new epistemic tools to look at it.