14. Quarantine III: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
b'In our on-going inquiry into the nature of the Great Pause, this third QUARANTINE session trains itself on John Ashbery\\u2019s much ballyhooed poem \\u201cSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,\\u201d 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 \\u201csequestered,\\u201d Walt Whitman, Jonathan Swift, W.B. Yeats, \\u201cThe Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,\\u201d the word \\u201cspeculum,\\u201d Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham and, once more with feeling, The Tetragammaton.'