UC Santa Cruz

“A Blessing in Disguise” is a study of Contemplative Criticism that explores affinities between the difficult histories of mysticism and alternative spirituality in the academy, the forms and functions of the poetry formerly known as “Lyric,” and the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance, with the purpose of suggesting applications for insights about these relationships directly to the university classroom by means of what bell hooks, in the spirit of Buddhist activist Thich Nhat Hahn, called “engaged pedagogy.”Although grounded in conventional Literary Studies, the project draws from an emergent field in the History of Religion called Contemplative Studies in order to demonstrate the inherently spiritual, even “mystical,” operation of the poems of John Ashbery (1927—2017), concentrating on a selection of poetic works from the first half of his seven-decade career. A series of sustained close readings show the inextricability of Ashbery’s “countercultural” religious-historical context from a full appreciation of his poetics. This appreciation requires a reappraisal of the new alternative spiritual movement labeled “the New Age,” a California-cored cultural phenomenon that has generally been avoided in academic criticism, for reasons that are thoroughly investigated.Following the radical call of Contemplative Studies, which require both first-person subjective discourse and critical adherent discourse to honor and understand the liberatory possibilities of spiritual experience, the book suggests that a “Contemplative Critical” approach to literary criticism, one that acknowledges religiosity especially in its postmodern, “postsecular” forms, would not only revitalize the study of poetics and democratize the uses of poetic theory, but also provide methods and materials—starting with Ashbery—for teachers looking to connect more vitally with students in the university classroom, thereby empowering our students (and ourselves) to cultivate “ways out” from deep within.