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As an English professor and New York poet, John Ashbery was not only my greatest artistic influence but also a friend. So it shocked me when the late, great poet reached out to me from his New Yorker obituary in what felt like a bop on the head. In Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorkerelegy “The Gentleness of John Ashbery,” based on several of her past interviews with him, my idol called me out.
Discussing ludicrous interpretations of his poetry, Ashbery told MacFarquhar: “There was this one guy, Stephen Paul Miller, who wrote an essay on ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ in which he said it was based entirely on Watergate. I said to him, It has nothing to do with Watergate, and more importantly, it was written before Watergate happened. But this made absolutely no difference to him.”
My relationship with Ashbery started in 1974, when I was 22 and heard him reading his poetry on a record at the Donnell Library in Manhattan. Reading at a Poetry Project event, Ashbery seemed aloof. However, recognizing him soon afterward on a Soho street, I instinctively blurted out, “You’re the new Walt Whitman!” He smiled and said thanks.
I ran into him again later, on the crowded self-service elevator up to a party, when he joked, “Third floor, ladies’ underwear, everyone out.”
“I’m a poet too,” I told him. And he invited me to come to his Brooklyn College poetry workshop.
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For more of Stephen Paul Miller's piece, please go here It's a very good and charming article, which appears in Publishers Weekly
For what it's worth, it was I who sent JA the magazine containing Stephen's nutty but enjoyable essay to the effect that "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was allegorically about Nixon's last days in the White House. -- DL
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