Or In My Throat - Analysis

A poem that starts by mistranslating itself

The poem’s central move is to present art as a thing that never lands the same way twice. What is comforting to the maker can be accusatory to the reader: To the poet it’s a basement quilt, something patched, private, meant to warm; to some reader it’s a latticework of regrets, a grid that frames the past like a trap. Ashbery begins with this mismatch so the whole poem can live inside it: the same object becomes either shelter or confession depending on who looks, and the speaker can’t control which it becomes.

The funny street seen through regrets

That latticework is not abstract for long; it becomes a window onto a specific scene: the funny street, ends of cars, the dust. The humor of that street is thin and edged with neglect; it’s a view made of partials, the ends not the whole, the residue not the thing itself. Then comes the poem’s quietly devastating admission of omission: The thing we always forget to put in. Whatever it is—tenderness, context, the one detail that would make the picture humane—the speaker treats forgetting as a habit, almost a shared cultural reflex. The poem’s regret isn’t just about what happened; it’s about what never makes it into the telling.

Two ends of the same place, and grief as a position

The middle of the poem turns that mismatch into a psychological condition. The two ends were the same, yet the speaker says the man is stuck because he is in one / Looking at the other. The grief doesn’t come from difference but from a cruel sameness split by perspective: being here and seeing there, with no bridge. From that positional grief comes a narrowing of attention: There was no way to appreciate how polite / People were. Even ordinary decency can’t register when the mind is trapped watching itself from the wrong side of the room.

The dream reverses into starlit waste

When the dream, reversed becomes a swift nightmare, the poem’s imagery freezes into a kind of cosmic chill: starlight on frozen puddles in a Dread waste. Starlight should be beautiful; puddles should be minor. Put together, they become brittle and merciless, as if even beauty has turned into a surface you can’t step through. The poem’s tension sharpens here: the speaker wants comfort (quilts, politeness, dreams), but what arrives is an impersonal radiance that makes the world feel abandoned.

Letters from one of them, and the pressure to be fine

Then the poem swerves into social noise: Yet you always hear / How they are coming along. The vague they and the rumor of progress feel like a forced optimism that travels by habit rather than truth. Someone always has a letter, and it asks to be remembered, a phrase that sounds polite but also desperate—proof of life, proof of belonging, proof that the person hasn’t fallen off the map. The ending and all dismisses that whole ritual with a flick of the wrist, as if the speaker can’t bear either the sentimentality or the obligation to pretend it helps.

That’s why I quit: the claim of clean poetry, and the collapse of it

The hinge arrives bluntly: That’s why I quit and chose poetry. The speaker sells writing as hygiene and control—It’s clean, it’s relaxing—in contrast to some messy, squirting reality that ruins certainty: it squirt[s] juice over Something you were certain of. But the poem cannot keep that promise. The moment the speaker insists on cleanliness, the mind slides into an uncanny dissociation: now your own face / Is a stranger. Poetry, supposedly relaxing, is also the very place where the self becomes unrecognizable.

The insult that’s also self-recognition

The final jab—Hey, stupid!—lands like a joke with teeth. It’s comic, but it’s also a kind of emergency brake: a way to interrupt the spiraling unreality with aggression. The contradiction is the poem’s last truth: the speaker wants art to be a clean alternative to the world’s mess, yet the poem itself ends by showing how quickly language can turn on its speaker, reducing the whole complicated argument to a shouted humiliation.

A question the ending refuses to answer

If poetry is chosen because it doesn’t squirt juice over certainty, why does it end by making the self’s face feel like a stranger? The poem seems to suggest that the desire for clean consolation is itself part of the problem—another thing we always forget to put in: that any honest account, even a poem, will smear what we thought we knew.