Forties Flick
Forties Flick - meaning Summary
Domestic Scene, Existential Unease
Forties Flick presents a domestic interior that becomes a stage for quiet existential unease. Ashbery traces shadows, a woman at the window, and the slow movement of blinds to blur inside and outside, memory and artifice. The poem reflects on how familiar details and narrative conventions both conceal and reveal feeling—theatrical gestures, silence, and a laughing, almost fatalistic response to mortality—leaving perception itself uncertain.
Read Complete AnalysesThe shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall, Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals, Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space. In bra and panties she sidles to the window: Zip! Up with the blind. A fragile street scene offers itself, With wafer-thin pedestrians who know where they are going. The blind comes down slowly, the slats are slowly tilted up. Why must it always end this way? A dais with woman reading, with the ruckus of her hair And all that is unsaid about her pulling us back to her, with her Into the silence that night alone can’t explain. Silence of the library, of the telephone with its pad, But we didn’t have to reinvent these either: They had gone away into the plot of a story, The “art” part—knowing what important details to leave out And the way character is developed. Things too real To be of much concern, hence artificial, yet now all over the page, The indoors with the outside becoming part of you As you find you had never left off laughing at death, The background, dark vine at the edge of the porch.
from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)
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