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John Ashbery brings about a wide variety of critical responses including ones contrary to each other. This is due to the difficulty of his works, which arises from his characteristic doubleness: his poetry mostly consists of normal sentences and familiar expressions while involved in uncertainty. His readers are induced to expect a coherent meaning, but this expectation is only to be frustrated. This doubleness is designed for his critique of the habitual way of experience looking for consistency and closure in spite of its irreducibility to a coherent interpretative frame. That is to say, Ashbery’s poetry parodies the habit of experience by imitating the style of the coherent discourse and at the same time mocking it with his actually incoherent discourse. This parody of coherency relies on his elaborated operation of discourse, which leads to uncertainty. He uses certain devices of disjuctiveness for creating uncertainty that can be described as “self-erasure” or “extravagance of connection that leads one nowhere.” As “‘They only dream of America’” and “Decoy” show, his poems make the reader have the impression of a coherent discourse with familiar expressions often typical to specific story genres or excerpted from well-known documents, etc. But the reader’s supposition of a consistent topic or theme cannot be confirmed because of the uncertainty resulted from the disjuctiveness intertwined with those familiar expressions. Ashbery’s poetry puts our way of experiencing discourse into question by foregrounding the convention of discourse itself through his strategy of parody.