Karin Roffman, author of The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life, a book I warmly recommend, was asked to name the "ten best Ashbery poems," and she has made such a list, making it clear that she crafted it for its pedagogic value mainly: these are the ten poems that she believes would best suit a newcomer to his work. Publishers Weekly published Roffman's list and provided links to the specific poems. The task Karin undertook fascinates me. It is not only impossible but also very difficult, as I have reason to know from the experience of editing The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006) in which I represented Ashbery with fourteen poems, arranged chronologically. Here is how Roffman handled that scary "best" request. Three of Roffman's annotated picks follow below. For her comments on the remaining seven -- "But What is the Reader to Make of This? (1984), ""Syringa" (1977), "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975), "The New Spirit" (1970), "Breezeway" (2015), and "Some Trees" (1955) -- click here. Two poems on Karin's list are in The Oxford Book ("Soonest Mended," "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror") and three others ("Wakefulness," "They Knew What They Wanted," and "Breezeway") appeared in the 1998, 2009, and 2014 editions of The Best American Poetry -- DL
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John Ashbery, who turns 90 next month, published Commotion of the Birds, his 28th volume of poetry, last October. Choosing the 10 “best” volumes from this vast and remarkable oeuvre would be a challenge. Choosing the 10 “best” poems seems well-nigh impossible.
Recently, however, a student asked me: “Which John Ashbery poem would you read first?” Her question offered an approach to this assignment that I particularly liked. So I have decided to pick 10 Ashbery poems that I suggest reading early and often.
I have not ordered the poems chronologically; instead, I’ve arranged them loosely following the arc of a day. In writing the biography of Ashbery’s early life, I constantly returned to these poems for they remind me of how the poet is drawn to familiar moments when we sleep, dream, eat, think, feel bored, see movies, fear death, and fall in love. Taken together, these 10 poems create the experience of a life—from the mundane to the profound—a reading path that I hope will send you back to his poems for more.
1. “Wakefulness” (Wakefulness, 1998)
This poem begins at the end of a dream, in that moment when one is awake but still partially in the dream. As a young poet, Ashbery found this sensation conducive to writing and kept paper and a pen by his bed. (He wrote “The Painter” in this state.) As the speaker awakens, “[L]ittle by little the idea of the true way returned to me.” The statement sounds like a restoration of consciousness, but, in fact, the speaker is tunneling deeper into his dream-like mood because its sense of unreality sharpens his perception. In this altered state, he has a vision: “A gavotte of dust-motes / came to replace my seeing.” These musical, dancing dust specks are beautiful, and we can suddenly imagine this indoor sight to be as sublimely lovely and inspiring as Wordsworth’s golden daffodils.
2. “Adam Snow” (April Galleons, 1987) [Library of America Volume I, page 819]
Ashbery grew up in upstate New York near Lake Ontario, in an area full of dramatic shifts in weather and a lot of snow, which he observed closely in a diary he kept for four years in high school. I choose this poem less for its climate references than for its clear expression of an idea Ashbery first conveyed quite simply in these daily diary entries, the notion that the ordinary and the extraordinary exist side-by-side in our mind. “Adam Snow” shifts between these states of thinking, and it also demonstrates how we constantly move between them without even noticing: “That you may be running through thistles one moment / And across a sheet of thin ice the next and not be aware / of any difference, only that you have been granted an extension.”
3. “They Knew What They Wanted” (Planisphere, 2008)
The poem is a cento, a form made up entirely of quotations. This one consists exclusively of movie titles that begin with “They,” a list both absurd and surprisingly coherent. Ashbery wrote the poem a decade ago during a period when he was indulging in Turner Classic Movies and busy making collages, something he had started doing for fun in college. These whimsical pieces look like visual poems; this cento is also a kind of poetic collage with so many different movie references stuck together. A movie buff from an early age (“The Lonedale Operator” recounts his very first movie-going experience as a kindergartner), Ashbery’s delight in film titles, character names, witty dialogue and even minor plot points has infiltrated his poetry since he was eight.
-- Karin Roffman
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