As Hollander notes in The Gazer's Spirit, in John Ashbery's long and complex poem. "...it may be observed the Francesco Parmigianino's celebrated anamorphic self-portrait becomes, as the object of elaborately digressive meditation, a skewed representation of a skewed representation. This itself comprises, in its intense mimetic function, another sort of figurative mirror in which the self-portrait of the artist generates an image of the poet at work, and thereby of anyone at the rest of life. It starts out with a casual ecphrasis (the opening sentence seems syntactically to start with the poem's-and the picture's-title), but concentrates on the hand in the foreground." (85)

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face,
which swims Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose. It is what is
Sequestered . . .

Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror
John Ashbery

Hollander also notes that "The ever-problematic gaze of the subject in self-portraiture is compounded here by the matter of the distortion, and by that of the mirroring of viewer's gaze as well. the poem moves ...in and out of attention to the painting, anecdotes about its composition, citrations of commentaries on it...and multifaceted relfections on art's own reflectiveness of itself and what is around it, on time and chance and intention.....The poem not only reads the painting, but reads the readings that it itself gives to it, and develops (an)...extended fiction which encloses, and comes to terms with 'This otherness,the/"Not-being-us"' which seems at bottom, 'all there is to lookat/In the mirror.'" (87)

And As Helen Vendler notes in herNew York Review of Books review , "There are two chief resons why poets love the stimulus to description offered by a work of art. First, description is par exellence a means of multiplying words. Any verbal description is potentially unlimited, and the more slender the point d'appui on which the fantasy-construct of words is raised, the more magnificent and self-sustaining (as in Ashbery's "Self Portrait") is the effect created.

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