Douglas Crase on John Ashbery [on JA's Birthday]

from "Driving by the Lake with John Ashbery" by Douglas Crase
left: Larry Rivers's portrait of John Ashbery and "Pyrography"(circa 1976)

https://lithub.com/driving-by-the-lake-with-john-ashbery/

<<<
John never insisted on being the sole poet you were allowed to admire. Not long after he sent Three Poems he embarked on a mission clearly designed to improve my library. Freely Espousing arrived, by James Schuyler, followed by the recently published Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. To these he soon added Hebdomeros, Hesiod, and Raymond Queneau. If you hadn’t majored in literature, as I hadn’t, John’s erudition was thrilling and his eagerness to share it, a revelation.

Gradually I discovered he did not know everything. He was rather a snob about classic American literature—he once admitted this—which must qualify as a blind spot when you think of it, since the man who could write “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” was enthralled by American comics, old movies, and popular culture. But when I ventured to say how cool it was that he actually grew up by blue Ontario’s shore he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I had to explain that this was the title of the grand poem in which Walt Whitman summons the poets of the American future; so his being born and raised on that very shore made it seem Whitman had John in mind. At this he didn’t sneer, but said nothing. Years later he took to reading Whitman and claimed that perhaps he’d been influenced after all.

But Whitman or no, there are numerous lakes and shorelines to be found in John’s poems, and a persuasive list of examples to demonstrate how Rochester and its environs once lent their climate to his work. His poem “The Chateau Hardware” is in effect a greeting card from the place that formed him. Anyone who has lived beneath the gray skies of Rochester can acknowledge the truth of the opening line, “It was always November there.” I loved this poem the moment I read it, a feeling that was intensified when John pointed out from the car the location on Monroe Avenue of the mundane hardware store that provided the allusive title. In the rush of time, both the store and its sign—Chateau Hardware—were gone. >>>

<<< . . .a copy of Three Poems arrived in the mail. Reading it, I must have held my breath from the first sentence to the last. If poetry should be as well written as prose then here was proof that the secret was to write it as if it were prose. Here was language in the shape of a quest, language that had detached utility from the great quests of the 1960s and employed it as a means to continue in the wake of their defeat. It was a way to go on without hope, but without losing the feeling of hope. >>>

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Comments

[Stewart Johnson]

Did he really say James Merrill was the "Faberge of the poetry world"?

[Dave Read]

The poetry of menstruation?

With USC poised to award its highest academic degree to someone* whose research concerns "menstruation in contemporary poetry," I feel confident in my judgment that USC is ignorant of poetry's ancient role in human history, or even in American history.

If my judgment is wrong, however, and that storied institution does know the value of poetry, then, sadly, the judgment must be replaced by the prognosis that institutional madness has set in there. Maybe it's just too hot and sunny in southern California?

Does the fact that the doctoral candidate limits the field of research to contemporary poetry imply that the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, et alia is unimportant, or does it tell us that the poetry of those genuises utterly ignores ordinary bodily functions?

Perhaps it will it be this brand new professor's mission to create a space for the discussion of menstruation in verse? Please, someone tell me how to put dibs on the Ph. D. set aside for priapism in colonial poetry?

How did we arrive to such an anti-intellectual place where equity is valued over equality, where diversity and inclusion are valued over the ancient colorblindness of Lady Liberty, where we ignore the Civil Rights struggle whose goal was integration, not the segregation into silos of personal identification that dominate pop culture and campus life today.

A quarter millenium later, only the poetry of Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence remain. The faulty logic and the historical inaccuracies employed by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson have long since been exposed, to zero practical effect, wherever political theory is discussed.

But, it wouldn't matter even if William Shkespeare and Francis Bacon had been there to produce rebuttals to America's foundational literature. Once its poetry had leaked from the rational into the emotional part of their minds, American colonists were crazy enough to think they'd be able to defeat, with farm implements and hunting rifles, the most awful weapon of mass destruction history had ever seen - the British Empire.

*Rachel Neve-Midbar

Dave Read
ReadsPoems.com

[jim c]

Whaaaaa--???!!!

Thanks, Doug. Lovely reminiscence.