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The American poet John Ashbery, who turns 90 this month, is often figured as the epitome of cosmopolitan sophistication – as a refined but radical innovator whose open-ended lyrics and narrative-free long poems refract and dramatize the anxieties of postmodernity. Doyen of the avant-garde Ashbery may have become, and yet, as Karin Roffman demonstrates in this illuminating account of his early life, the originality of his poetic idiom owes as much to his provincial rural upbringing, and to the compound of guilt and nostalgia that was its legacy, as it does to his embrace of the experimental in New York and Paris.
Ashbery’s parents, Chester and Helen, ran a fruit farm about a mile south of Lake Ontario, where winters are long and snowy. Chet, as his father was known, could be ill tempered. “He used to wallop me a great deal,” Ashbery recalled in an interview, “so I felt always as though I were living on the edge of a live volcano.” I’ve often wondered if the evasiveness of Ashbery’s poetry, its habit of tiptoeing or sliding around a crisis in states ranging from mild apprehension to ominous foreboding, reflects the simmering domestic tensions of these early years.
Young Ashbery escaped whenever he could to the reassuring home of his maternal grandparents, Henry and Addie Lawrence, who were more interested in artistic and intellectual matters. Indeed, since there was no kindergarten in Sodus, the small town nearest to the Ashbery homestead, he spent much of the first seven years of his life living in Rochester with Addie and Henry, who was a professor of physics at the university. It was there he developed a taste for reading, poring over The Child’s Book of Poetry in his grandparents’ well-stocked library, as well as Things to Make and Things to Do, a volume affectionately parodied in his first great long poem, “The Skaters”.
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