I remember (vividly) John saying the words: “And the devil doesn’t give a shit about who you are / or if your name has an umlaut to it,” reading at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1990. I was a junior at Williams and trundled over to Troy with a couple friends to hear him. I’d fallen in love with Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror already but this yet unpublished material from Flow Chart had an instant and supreme magnetism for me. However, I was so intimidated by John Ashbery, he was so magical, that when I got a chance to talk with him after the reading I started talking stupidly about “my theory” of his poetry, blitheringly, and I ended thrusting my copy of Self-Portrait into his hands with the words “would you sign my book?” This moment would hound me. It would humble me. It is an angel I wrestled with and was blessed by.
I remember (vividly) John introducing Jim Tate as his favorite poet in 2006 at John Ashbery Day in New York at the New School. Hearing them read one after another was not just a treat but a rip in poetry space/time. Seeing this event changed my life and lead to a year’s work writing my book on John’s later books. Which I hesitate to call work.
I recall the smell and the delivery (with Michael Snediker) of a mushroom lasagne to Dara Wier when Jim Tate was sick. We sat in her living room with a duraflame log on the fire and talked. I’d seen Dara around but Dara in person is smiting, and I was smitten. Dara a bit later introduced us to John and David when he was reading with Bernadette Mayer in Spencertown, NY. John thought Michael’s preppy twin Dan was really, really cute. He would mention what a pleasure it was to meet me, my boyfriend, …and my boyfriend’s brother… in a sweet letter.
Michael and I went to Hudson for lunch with David and John and I remember so many beautiful rugs and watching the news together. And sweet David being nervous to have the brick workers hear us all being loudly queeny together. I remember stopping to pick up a giant stack of newspapers for John at what seemed to me an old-fashioned news shop near even possibly more old-fashioned train tracks. Seemed as if the shop might also sell buttons. During this visit I fell in love with the décor in John and David’s house, things like a big sign for “Drink Whizz cola” (or something) and a picture stuck to the fridge that seemed to show one local high school basketball player grabbing another local basketball players balls.
I vividly recall working triage on John and David’s Hudson house attic in 2007 with Adam Fitzgerald; we were trying to figure out how to save what was gradually decaying to bee and bat shit. When I met Adam, he was very stagey and said, “O! are you the person who wrote the essay ‘John Ashbery and You’ in Raritan?” as if I were famous. We sat in the kitchen with Eugene Richie and David and talked about meatloaf and other stuff.
When I requested poems from John for the 2008 Queer Issue of The Massachusetts Review I was editing, he wrote back “As for being in your Queer issue of The Massachusetts Review, I have a problem with the Queer label and with labels in general (including New York School!). On the other hand, in these days of extreme anti-gay prejudice it does seem important to identify oneself as such. So I’ll certainly give some thought to your request…” He let me use a poem and two accompanying Joe Brainard illustrations from The Vermont Notebook. (Joe invented the “I remember…” form that I’m at least trying to be disciplined enough to use.) I had asked John specifically for “The Fairies’ Song” but he replied he didn’t like that poem—a favorite of mine-- very much. The poem he gave me started: “America is a fun country. Still, there are aspects of it which I would prefer not to think about.” Its second page carries on juxtaposed to a delightfully frontal male nude: “Nevertheless, there are a lot of people here who are sincerely in love with life and think they are on to something, and they may well be right. Even the dogs seem to know about it—you can tell by the way they stick their noses out of the car windows sometimes to whiff the air as it goes by.”
When I was in library school, 2010, I did a preservation survey of David and John’s house. There were wonders there, but I never came across any object or letter or painting (though I feel like I might glow with all the wonders I witnessed and handled) that outdid their kindness or the glint in John’s eye. I remember that at this time, again I was sitting in the kitchen, there was a chair lift on the back winding stair going from the kitchen to the upstairs where John and David spent most of their time. I have the fondest memory of John slowly, slowly rising up the stairs waving goodbye like the royalty he was.
John Emil Vincent is the author of John Ashbery and You: His Later Books and Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry .
I cannot decide what I like best, or what is most moving, in this essay: your description of the great Poet and his significance, or the way your writing style is so observant of both detail and nuance. Reading this, I came to the realization (and this is very late in my life; I am always a day late and a dollar short) that Queer people (I dislike the adjective, and prefer Homosexual---it is not, after all, a pejorative word by nature) are different: different in being able to perceive significances and nuances in a way that seems to escape the mundane and far too narrow perceptionabilities upon which "straight" people rely. And therein is a great paradox: straight people often have the most skewed (or not straight) perceptions, while queer people often have the most precisely accurate perceptions of the same reality. Thank you for helping me to recognize this.
Posted by: j-called | August 03, 2023 at 04:04 PM