At the Expense of Energy: John Ashbery’s “The Skaters” and the Postwar Poetics of Entropy

Abstract John Ashbery’s long poem “The Skaters” can be understood as an exploration of entropy, a multivalent concept that originated in nineteenth-century thermodynamics and had recently gained widespread cultural currency when Ashbery wrote the poem, first in the emergent postwar discourse of information theory and then in its application to a wide array of social and artistic phenomena. This article positions Ashbery’s poem as a reflection of the postwar period, when energy and information overlapped, with entropy linking the two. The poem’s thematics of entropy becomes a structural metaphor for the poem itself as its production of meaning becomes subjected to steady decay; in the entropic poetics prominently on display in “The Skaters,” unassimilable excess and semantic drift are precisely the point as the poem itself becomes an exercise in entropy, a nonproductive form of transfer that privileges waste, scattering, and dissipation over coherence.