In this New Yorker podcast, David Lehman joins New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young to read and discuss John Ashbery’s poem “Worsening Situation” and his own poem “Stages on Life’s Way"
To prep for the interview, David (pictured left in this 1997 photo by Jack Mitchell) wrote "On John Ashbery's 'Worsening Situation'":
On John Ashbery’s “Worsening Situation”
Like a collage, I wrote, the bruised words
Shampoo the hair of the dog. Or like
The simile eclipsing the thing it is likened to,
Which remains unnamed. The feast is
Near enough to watch but too far to reach
By foot. To up the ante, we get an echo
Of Keats's last poem or a quote from Rimbaud.
The key repetition occurs here. We feel
We have been riding the A train since 1965.
Rides, ceremonies, rites. What's the point?
Yet it bothers me, everything I haven't disclosed
Fully. I still read spy novels and get crank
Phone calls. I'm like the guy whose wife
You see on TV wondering how to get
My collars clean. Tell her I'm somewhere
Else -- Paris, Texas, for instance..
-- David Lehman [November 2017; in American Poetry Review, May/June 2018]
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