The avant-garde values of risk taking, process, and novelty are also John Ashbery's stylistic values, and his array of experimental techniques – mixed tones and dictions, grammatical and syntactic inconsistencies, referential instability, mixed metaphors, discontinuous forms – belongs to the repertoire of avant-garde verse. What makes for the difference – and the real novelty – of Ashbery's poetry is that he registers the changing cultural function of such techniques and increasingly acknowledges, after the early sixties, that experimental techniques and values are in fact consistent with the values of the larger cultural economy. And he turns his lateness to oppositional models of avant-garde writing to his advantage by calling such models into question even as he deploys them.