Your Name Here

In "Your Name Here", a title suggested by bullfight posters hawked to tourists who then fill in their name as "terero", John Ashbery continues to examine preoccupations of age, loss, childhood memories and how the magic of dreams can transform daily living.

Everyone wants to subscribe to a deed of heroism, especially if the risks are largely imaginary. The headline announcing a daring deed; in the tourist shop a poster promising a spectacular, sun-drenched corrida, and there is a space between the legendary bullfighters for one more sequined matador: '(Your Name Here)'. That is how the individual, whom Hardy declared must at heart remain 'unread eternally,' manages to read out of the isolated 'I' into other selves. It does not appropriate, it does not exercise negative capability, but rather attempts a kind of adventuring in voices, landscapes, loves and lives, and a coming back to - well, not precisely to oneself, because what, precisely, in the end, can one say is oneself? But coming back to a place that seems like home, where 'Your name' is naturally 'here'. The poems in Your Name Here were written before, during and after John Ashbery's rumbustious 'child sequence' Girls on the Run (1999); they are the innocent productions of the adult imagination following not Darger's weird pictorial narrative but the even weirder narrative of everyday life, everyday dreaming.