Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium)

Ashbery returns often to this subject and when he does, the image that he again and again uses to express the image-making power of the mind under poetry's sway is-as in the lush foliage of the lines above-that of the flower: "Now, / About what to put in your poem-painting," he writes, "Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium."' In his prose poem "Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are," Ashbery speaks about the invention of writing, "the cross-hatching technique which allowed our ancestors to exchange certain genetic traits for others," and he continues