In our on-going inquiry into the nature of the Great Pause, this third QUARANTINE session trains itself on John Ashbery’s much ballyhooed poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” an ekphrasis composition taking its frame and flame from the painting of the same name by Italian Renaissance artist Francesco Parmigianino (1503-1540). Without wandering too far from the work, we cite and sometimes linger on Raymond Roussel, Lisa Jarnot, Charles North, Kenneth Koch, the soul and its shapes, the appearance of “sequestered,” Walt Whitman, Jonathan Swift, W.B. Yeats, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” the word “speculum,” Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham and, once more with feeling, The Tetragammaton.
