In the 1950s Ashbery adopted to his poetry techniques used by such abstract painters as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. In the poem 'The Painter' (1956) he wrote: "Sitting between the sea and the buildings / He enjoyed painting the sea's portrait. / But just as children imagine a prayer / Is merely silence, he expected his subject / To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush, / Plaster its own portrait on the canvas." He also was interested in the music of John Cage and Anton Webern and the writings of the French surrealist Raymond Roussel. Ashbery formed with his friends Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch the nucleus of a group of artists known as the "New York school" of poets. It lasted into the early 1970s - Ashbery himself has doubted that there ever was a shool. His uncompromising avant-gardism was first greeted with puzzlement - critics and readers considered his poetry obscure and difficult. Some critics have said that his poems are like abstract paintings in words. Ashbery himself has said, that he aims "to record a kind of generalized transcript of what's really going on in our minds all day long." He has also denied that there are allegorical - "In think my poems mean what they say, and whatever might be implicit within a particular passage, but there is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing." (from Writers at Work, ed. by Geroge Plimpton, 1986)
