The Best American Poetry

"Dear John Ashbery" [by Nicole Santalucia]

Dear John Ashbery

It doesn’t seem to matter if we are a hundred pages ahead or two hundred behind. Everything compared to a sack of melons is sour, which has something to do with aging. But it’s different for dinosaurs. In the manner of a T-Rex with big boobs and popcorn textured ceilings and early retirement… Maybe it’s a hoax. When breasts are blurry it basically means that women are not allowed to see. Thank god birds and humans sleep at the same time or we’d always be awake and hungry. I am not a forger, but I am in denial about my mouth. Everything that grows in the garden and the birds and jangles that fall out of mannerist paintings and poetry biz; I’d rather have a slow mouth with room for all this stuff than a mouth that runs. The same goes for social commentary and those imitations of football and beer. They are positioned near the center like the sun and in the end they are found in books. Bones made of zeros don’t rise to the surface. It all translates to something thinner than air. But in this translation the rocks have a future full of garbage and our necks grow an inch each year. How else are women going to reach the fruit when their fists stand in for stars and moons on nights like this? I’m almost certain that you know what it means to have a steady stream of light. You’ve anticipated future positions that used to be various shades of pink, but now there are fewer sources of light and everyone is shaped like smoke. You got me if I can tell which is which. It could be a nude woman painting another nude woman or an assemblage of fruit and visual trickery.

Ed. note: Click here for the Diode page where you will find this and a second in a series of "Dear John Ashbery" poems written collaboratively by Nicole Santalucia and Dante Di Stefano.

Five Years On: The Day JA Died

[Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery – (Photographer Unknown, circa 1965)]

“….exquisite mind cartoons that could be heard with eyes closed, the voice perfectly ordinary with the slight edge of extravagant conversational camp, a mind artifice not unnatural to hypnagogic revery, deceptive, till you hear the chasm landscapes and awkward universes created and contradicted in vast gas-deposit shocking trivial universal mind.”
--- Allen Ginsberg – from an introduction to a reading by John Ashbery, at Naropa Institute, 1975.

Hear Ashbery’s reading (along with W.S.Merwin) on that occasion here

John Ashbery’s passing last weekend continues to send shockwaves.

A selection of sites – From the writers at The New Yorker –  Larissa MacFarquhar‘s aptly-titled, “The Gentleness of John Ashbery“,  Alex Ross “Driving Country Roads With John Ashbery“,  Paul Muldoon, “John Ashbery Changed The Rules of American Poetry, Ben Lerner‘s “John Ashbery’s Whisper Out of Time”,  and Dan Chiasson, “Postscript”

Rae Armantrout, and David Orr, in The New York Times, Tania Ketenjian in The Guardian,  (see also Mark Ford in The Guardian), Matthew Zapruder  in the San Francisco Chronicle

David Lehman at Best American Poetry has made available a space for an on-going series of remembrances – see also the recollections there of Archie Rand,  John Emil Vincent, Terence Winch, and (on his own blog) Michael Lally 

Andrew Epstein and his Locus Solus – The New York School of Poets, specializing in this field, is a must-go-to resource

For the rest of this September 2017 post, click here
The Allen Ginsberg Project's, September 8, 2017 Friday Weekly Round-Up -332 - https://allenginsberg.org/2017/09/f-332/

On John Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) [by Geoffrey Young]

It’s four a.m. on Labor Day 2017 and a voice on the BBC radio says as I lay in bed awake that John Ashbery died yesterday in Hudson, NY.  He turned ninety a month ago. A dreaded moment had finally come.  John’s career was  long and exemplary.  We’ll be pondering his works and admiring his diction for years to come.  As the darkness faded, I got dressed, made a cup of tea, fed the cats, and decided to drive over to Hudson to leave a scarlet dahlia on his front porch, along with a note for his mate, David Kermani.

No one was on the road, but a few golfers in South Egremont were just teeing up.  Nightmarish news dominated the radio.  Flooding in Houston, sabre-rattling in North Korea, the Sox losing to the Yankees. 

When I got to the house, there was a lone blue car parked in front, with New York state plates.  I walked up on the front porch of the large stone house, and found a place to the right of the front door for the old milk bottle filled with water and the one dahlia, and for the envelope with a note to David.  I stood back, and took a photograph of it.  Tiny, sitting there on the portal step, near the brown of the strong old doors, the flower was alone.  Perhaps David was as well, asleep upstairs? 

John, the times I was in his company, had always been friendly.  Sometimes it was after or before one of his readings, other times it was at a gallery or restaurant with friends.  He liked to throw back the first martini in two sips, or one, then smile a funny smile.  Asked once where his poetry came from, he answered, “Well, it’s just like television, there’s always something on.”  In 1987, invited to select the best poems found in magazines that year, John picked one of mine.  It was even in prose. Another time, at Bard College where he taught, I asked him what percentage of the time he starts a poem with a dream fragment, and he got nervous, didn’t answer, and said something to put me off the trail.

Decades ago, in Berkeley, John had agreed to do an afternoon reading at the studio of Helene Aylon.  Prior to the reading there were drinks, and John’s glass I noticed was straight Scotch.  When Robert Duncan and Michael Palmer and other poets came into the space in the middle of the afternoon, a half-drunk Ashbery, greeting Duncan, tried to put his tongue in Robert’s ear!  Eventually, we all got seated on rugs on the floor, and John read a poem or two, slurring badly.  A woman he knew was sitting next to him, and after those first few poems he handed the woman his book, and asked her to read the poems, then he lay his head down on the woman’s lap.  As she struggled to read, smiling some and stumbling some, John reached up and felt for a nipple! 

A “New Your School” occasion, I wrote to Bill Berkson in Bolinas the next day.  Bill had been in the audience that Berkeley afternoon, had witnessed the nuttiness.

Bad boy John liked to debauch from time to time, usually when David Kermani was out of town for a few days.  John would invite a friend to join him in Hudson for an extended drinking session.  Michael Gizzi, an hour away in Lenox, Mass, might get a call from John at any hour, asking if he’d be so kind as to buy some booze for the revelers, and to bring it over to Hudson.  Already drunk, Ashbery couldn’t risk going out shopping, or driving.   And Michael, no doubt fresh that very evening from an AA meeting, would say yes, though I’m sure he felt the twisted pang of the enabler.  When Michael got there with the Scotch and vodka and gin, John and his friend would still be in their pajamas, but very happy to see Michael.

At a luncheon in Boston once, John told the story of the time David had a psychotic breakdown in the Hudson house, and that John had had to call a hospital to have someone come solve the problem.  Two big guys arrived from a hospital, suppressed David, got him into a straight-jacket, and were about to haul him away, when John, struck by the good looks of one of the men--a handsome black man about thirty--started flirting with the man.  Suddenly, John didn’t want them to take David away!

The best reading I ever heard John give was after the publication of Planisphere in 2006.  Held at St Marks Church on the Bouwerie, in the sanctuary, the room was filled with fans and friends and ex-students and peers, and John, more animated than normal, read poems from the new book.  I turned to Eileen Myles, seated next to me, and said, as the warm applause died down at the end, “He’s still bonkers!”  And Eileen said, “No kidding!”

But the best thing I ever heard John say aloud, was the opening sentence of his introduction at the Dia Center for the Arts in Soho when he introduced James Schuyler.  Much anticipated (because Jimmy was known not to read), the reading was in winter, it was dark and cold on the street, but the line to get in went around the block.  Darragh Park and Jimmy arrived by cab and were ushered in.  Eventually we all trickled in, and found seats.  I sat with Ron Silliman, who just happened to be in town that night.   And John’s opening line, as he introduced the evening’s poet, was “I can’t remember a time that Jimmy Schuyler wasn’t my friend.”

The Ashbery Amusement Park Initiated on His Birthday

 Where else but in Asbury Park, New Jersey, would we find the prototypical Ashbery Amusement Park? The "Haight-Ashbury" ride has been compared to a cyclone with a mentally challenging multi-level polyphonous  vocabulary, for richer or poorer, for better or verse, bringing candles to the cathedral of esthetic bliss, indifferent to political debate. The soundrack consists of Buxtehude, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Prokofiev, and hard-to-spell types like Penderecki and Schnittke. There's also a library, a collage gallery, and a Firesign Theater.

I interviewed John Ashbery more than once. Sometimes it was for a newspaper or magazine. Later, when I hosted “poetry forums” at the New School, at which the visitor would read for thirty minutes and then take questions from the moderator for an equal amount of time, John appeared in our series maybe half a dozen times. 

In a public setting, he was a fun interview  but not an easy one. He could, keeping a straight face, make me and the audience laugh. "Jack Benny was my role model," he confided. John was shy, guarded, even sometimes suspicious, and I would endeavor to reorient the conversation after one of his spontaneous witticisms brought us to a cul de sac. Sometimes he delivered a brilliant line in the most off-the-cuff manner. Always cordial, John was happiest when the ordeal was over and we could repair to Cafe Loup for martinis.  

Nicole Santalucia and Dante Distefano are working on a book of "Dear John" letters they are writing. I offered to introduce such a book with a list of questions to ask JA now that he can no longer dodge them. Here's what I came up with:

Ask JA

Ask JA about rejections.

Ask JA whether anyone still calls him JA.

Ask JA whether anyone still calls him “Ashes” (Deerfield).

Ask JA whether he feels an affinity with others who have the initials JA, such as Joan Allen, who played Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone’s movie, and John Anderson, who ran for president in 1980, or John Adams who writes operas, and Jane Austen, who wrote great novels, and Joan of Arc, who saved France.

Ask JA for his frank opinion of Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I know I’m not supposed to like but I like it anyway.

Ask JA whether he feels an affinity with other Leos born on July 28 such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Marcel Duchamp, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Ask JA whether he, a southpaw, admires other lefthanders such as Sandy Koufax and Whitey Ford.

Ask JA about 1938 when he was eleven. Ask him if life then seemed “more real,” for the satisfaction of hearing him say “stop asking me all those biographer questions.”

Tell JA about the copyeditor of The Last Avant-Garde who said Ashbery is a homophobe.

Ask JA what if anything he remembers about “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” which we watched on TV in 1976.

Tell JA about the student who said “the more I understand John Ashbery, the less I understand his poetry.”

Ask JA if “understanding” is the booby prize.

Ask JA whether he can smoke in heaven and does he still favor unfiltered Gitanes?

Tell JA about Ashberyland, the amusement park in southern California, and the comic-strip character named Ashbery.

Dear John, I always enjoyed giving you good news and the latest po-biz gossip during a late morning phone call.

Tell JA that Nicole and Dante are writing him “Dear John” letters.

Dear JA, They love you, and isn’t it wonderful?

Ask JA about the game of word association in which each of us has to respond to “fear,” “near,” “queer,” “mere,” and “rear,” each a typo for “John.”

Dear JA, Is the secret of “The Skaters” that you were homesick for your boyhood, boring though it was at the time, full of snow and the loneliness of your diary?  

Ask JA about the train ride to Chicago.

Dear JA, If you meet Nicole and Dante on Tuesday, Delmore Schwartz will come along for the ride.

Dear JA, did Norman Mailer’s ghost visit your rooms at Dunster House in your junior year at Harvard?

Dear John, What’s your opinion of “dear John” letters? As a genre, I mean?

Ask JA how he knew that Eurydice would have disappeared even if Orpheus didn’t turn around.

Ask JA why he likes Freud’s titles – “The Problem of Anxiety,” “Civilization and Its Discontents” – though you know he will dodge the question.

Ask JA if life is but a dream.

Ask JA whether his favorite stock is still Tootsie Roll, as he told me it was in 1988 or ’89 but has since denied it.

Ask JA what he really thinks.

-- David Lehman

Boum! More Birthday Wishes for John Ashbery (On July 28)

"And I will know each trembling of a leaf": John Ashbery's Translations from the French [by David Lehman]

Just as the sheer quantity of John Ashbery's literary criticism surprised even the poet's fans (see his Selected Prose, 2007), so too the poet's translations from the French: they fill two volumes, one devoted to prose, the other to verse. Farrar Straus and Giroux will publish in April. Edited meticulously by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie, the books are rich in the enthusiasms of a maverick sensibility who did more than anyone else to put certain important French ecrivains -- Raymond Roussel, for instance -- on the map.

Ashbery spent ten formative years in France, mostly in Paris, having won a Fulbright in 1955. The critics, always quick to categorize, relegated him to a category as flexible as it is ill-defined: surrealism. And if there were a literary house of lords, surely he would be dubbed Sir Realist and be seated in the front row of the opposition party. He did in fact translate important works by Paul Eluard and Andre Breton, including such of their collaborations  as  "Le Jugement original," one of the highlights of the brilliant "collaborations" issue of Locus Solus #2, which Kenneth Koch put together. "The Original Judgment" is like William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," only more so: "Let the dreams you have forgotten equal the value of what you do not know." "Adjust your gait to that of the storms." "Never wait for yourself." "You have nothing to do before dying.'

But Ashbery was always less interested in surrealism proper, if that is not an oxymoron, than in "hybrid" poets who deviated from the dads of dogma. I love his translations of Max Jacob's prose poems and believe that Le Cornet a des (The Dice-Cup) would garner deserved accolades if presented as a separate volume as Ashbery's versions of Rimbaud's Illuminations were a couple of seasons back.

Ashbery has a special feeling for Pierre Reverdy [left], whose poems were in Frank O'Hara's pocket on the day he spent his lunch hour walking elegiacally in midtown with Jackson Pollock's recent death on his brain ("A Step Away from Them"). Reverdy's poems have since found their way into a lot of other pockets, perhaps because in his leaps and enigmas he seems so pure an example of the French poetic sensibility that recommended itself so strongly to midcentury Americans eager to stray as far from the Eliotic throne room as they could. Ashbery's versions of Reverdy's prose poems (such as "Heavier," "From Another Shore") and verse ("Surprise," "That Memory") make the ideal introduction to this unusually compelling poet. Reverdy's lines seem able to detach themselves from the whole. Or rather the whole of a Reverdy poem consists of lines that arrive from different points of origin and coalesce as mysteriously as a drop of water:

The stars came out of the water
A ship passed flying low
              A bird
The line at the horizon from which the current was coming
The waves laughed as they died
Everything continues
No one knows where time will stop
              Or night

I have barely touched upon the treasures in the poetry volume of Ashbery's Collected French Translations and I have not even mentioned the highlights of the accompanying book of prose.

The introductory essay by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie, with invaluable information, biographical as well as bibliographical, appears in The Massachusetts Review (Winter 2013) with an admirable Ashbery collage ("Corona" from 2011) on the cover and with his translations of poems by Pascalle Monnier and Yves Bonnefoy.

from the archive; first posted February 24, 2014. Photo credit (Ashbery pic): Star Black

Pollock, De Kooning, The "Irascibles" (and, as a farcical footnote, Body Art) [by David Lehman]

There was a strong element of doubt as well as risk in the Abstract Expressionist enterprise, and this is bound up with the quasi-religious impulse that one often feels in a Pollock or a Rothko. Among the most audacious things about Abstract Expressionism was that these artists did not shrink from the challenge of the philosophers who had declared god dead. If it was to be expected of art that it provide the religious imagery for a godless age, the painters were ready to oblige with their abstract affirmations of a personal order and a personal spiritual journey.

John Ashbery explained the religious parallel in a lecture he gave at Yale in the late 1960s. "A painter like Pollock for instance was gambling everything on the fact that he was the greatest painter in America, for if he wasn't, he was nothing, and the drips would turn out to be random splashes from the brush of a careless housepainter. It must have often occurred to Pollock that there was just a possibility that he wasn't an artist at all, that he had spent his life `toiling up the wrong road to art,' as Flaubert said of Zola. But this very real possibility is paradoxically just what makes the tremendous excitement in his work. It is a gamble against terrific odds. Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing. We would all believe in God if we knew He existed, but would this be much fun?"^[i]

Abstract art turned out to be a particularly effective religion-substitute. The artists had emptied their canvases of conventional religious imagery and renounced nature, the model, the human form divine. Yet their work seemed to express a spiritual aspiration in a pure form, divorced from all empirical contigencies. The Romantic poets in the early nineteenth century -- as M. H. Abrams explains in his magisterial study Natural Supernaturalism (1971) -- had translated theological ideas into secular ones, trading in the supernatural for the natural world. In Paradise Lost John Milton had situated the great Christian epic in the biblical Garden of Eden; in The Prelude William Wordsworth substituted the myth of the individual self -- "the growth of a poet's mind," his own in particular, in its encounters with the natural world. Milton had delineated the expulsion from paradise, and now Wordsworth meant to pick up where Milton had left off; he would narrate the life of the blessed babe who has been expelled from the Eden of childhood and is forever haunted by faint but persistent memories of it. There was an inevitable melancholy in the transition from a epic system promising a redemptive afterlife to one in which the best that could be hoped for was a pensive hour on a couch recollecting a host of golden daffodils. Since nothing could bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower, we were wise to find strength in the primal sympathy and faith that remained behind.

Where the Romantic poets cast a religious allegory into natural terms, the Abstract Expressionists went one step further in the secularization process -- they repudiated nature itself (that is, nature considered as external to the self). They translated the sublime natural imagery of romantic landscape painting into purely abstract forces and forms. Yet these raw exhibitions of primal energy make the viewer feel as loftily intimidated as if by a raging waterfall or thunderous sunset. As Robert Rosenblum analyzed it, a Clyfford Still abstract turns the viewer into "a visitor touring the Grand Canyon," a Rothko turns the viewer into "a monk before the sea," while a Pollock captures "superhuman turbulence more literally" than does Turner's Snowstorm. Rosenblum went so far as it argue that "a quartet of the largest canvases by Newman, Still, Rothko, and Pollock might well be interpreted as a post-World-War-II myth of Genesis."^[i] In an important sense, the Abstract Expressionists completed the Romantic revolution. There would still be a sublime, and it would still have a religious dimension, but its value would be derived not from theology but from art itself.

That a religious subtext could be found in Abstract Expressionist paintings was not an unmixed blessing. It is asking much of art -- perhaps too much -- to expect it to fulfill all the spiritual exigencies that religion used to address. The magnitude of the task may overwhelm the artist, particularly the artist who went from living the life of jeopardy and failure to the sudden hyperbolic acclaim of critics and other people in the know. The fatalities among the Abstract Expressionists – several of whom committed suicide (Gorky, Rothko), while others perished in car crashes (Pollock, David Smith) -- speak to the danger of elevating art-for-art's-sake into a brand of atheistic theology ripe for the nuclear age. Still, the myth of the avant-garde had given the artist not only something to believe in but something to gamble on. And it had also validated a new social role: the alienated rebel or outcast living in a converted warehouse loft in lower Manhattan. Years before Marlon Brando and James Dean glamorized the image of the rebel in his blue jeans and leather jacket, the New York painters lived that rebellion. They were lifelong underdogs. They drank too much. But unlike the misunderstood adolescent personified by Dean, they were rebels with a cause. The New York Herald Tribune called them "the Irascibles," because of their implacable and articulate opposition to the artistic establishment. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art planned a national exhibition of contemporary American painting in 1950, the painters fired off an angry letter announcing their intention to boycott it.^[ii] Acting as the self-appointed spokesmen for “advanced art,” Pollock, de Kooning, and company charged that the Met's directors -- one of whom was on record calling the abstract artists “flat-chested” pelicans “strutting upon the intellectual wastelands” -- were “notoriously hostile to advanced art.”^[iii] Back then, few observers on either side of the Atlantic would have predicted that the same institutions that had shunned the Irascibles would someday fall all over themselves to woo them. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted its centennial exhibition to the New York School in 1970, it was the ultimate confirmation that the infidels had been converted. "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," which was curated by the late Henry Geldzahler, was a great triumph not only for Abstract Expressionism but for the Met and for Geldzahler personally, who had had to overcome resistance from the Museum's trustees.^[iv]

Besides an unsympathetic museum establishment, the abstract painters had gone up against a public weaned on sentiment and ease when what they had to offer was difficulty and rigor. Abstract art seemed to fly in the face of good old American horse-sense. The standard response to a reproduction of a Pollock was, "Why, my five-year-old could do that." Or, “It looks like inedible spagheti.”

To this day, the works of the Abstract Expressionists retain their power to disturb if one measure of that power is the still-widespread impulse to mock them. In the movie An Unmarried Woman (1978), Alan Bates playing a famous New York painter tells Jill Clayburgh that when he was six his mother threw a pickled herring at his father. It missed its target and splattered against the wall. “At that moment I became an Abstract Expressionist,” Bates says, to which Clayburgh replies that his work does resemble pickled herring. That occurs in a movie sympathetic to the myth of the Abstract Expressionism. There are less friendly ways of responding. A prizewinning biography of Jackson Pollock maintains that his “drip” paintings originated in the haunting boyhood memory of standing on a flat rock beside his father urinating. Pollock is supposed to have said to himself, “When I grow up, am I ever going to do that!”^[v] Others have tried to put that reductive psychonalaytic theory into practice. At a show at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles in 1995, a painter by the name of Keith Boadwee presented fifty pieces of so-called body art that he had produced by giving himself enemas of egg tempura paints and then squatting over canvases. Boadwee had the Abstract Expressionists in mind. ”I wanted to prove that I can make just as good a painting as they can, with my butthole,” he said.^[vi]

^{-- 1995}

Pictures: reproductions of paintings by Adolph Gottlieb ("Blast"), Franz Kline with one of his black and white compositions, Jackson Pollock ("Blue Poles"), Joan Mitchell among her canvases, a late Rothko, and Willem de Kooning with "Woman (Geen)."

[i]. John Ashbery, "The Invisible Avant-Garde," in Reported Sightings by John Ashbery, ed. David Bergman (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 390-391.

[i]. Robert Rosenblum, "The Abstract Sublime," in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross (New York: Harry Abrams, 1990), pp. 273-278.

[ii]. In an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the artists announced their intention to boycott the exhibition because its jury was hostile to "advanced art," even though "for roughly a hundred years, only advanced art has made any consequential contribution to civilization." The open letter appears in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross (New York: Abrams), pp. 226-227.

[iii]. "Flat-chested pelicans": Life, January 15, 1951. "Notoriously hostile to advanced art": Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross (New York: Abrams), p. 226.

[iv]. From Geldzahler's obituary in the New York Times: "His intense involvement in the 1960's art scene irritated some trustees, but ultimately focused considerable attention on the Met, especially when the huge centennial exhibition, widely referred to as `Henry's show,' became the talk of the town." Paul Goldberger, "Henry Geldzahler, 59, Critic, Public Official and Contemporary Art's Champion, Is Dead," New York Times, August 17, 1994.

[v]. See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Life (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), for an alaborate version of this theory.

[vi]. Above the paintings in the gallery were TV monitors showing videotapes of Boadwee in action, including his squatting nude over canvases. Buzz, August 1995; Art in America, October 1995.

Click here for Lehman's essay on Mark Tansey's "The Triumph of the New York School"

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/mark-tanseys-triumph-of-the-new-york-school.html

What if "to Ashbery" were an infinitive?

<<<
Ashbery says he just reread an essay by Auden in which the poet called the Oxford English Dictionary "his most treasured reading" and praised the language as large, yet lenient, noting how Shakespeare would invent new words simply by turning a verb into a noun or an adjective into a verb.

Ashbery is a longtime breaker of rules, but he has so far honored the boundaries of his own name. Ashbery remains just Ashbery, a proper noun, the last name of one of the world's most admired poets. But why not pretend that the poet is an adjective, Ashbery-like, or a verb, "to Ashbery." The poet even offers a definition.

"To confuse the hell out of people," he says.
>>>

from Hillel Italie's Associated Press piece: "John Ashbery --- Movie Fan and Canonical Poet"
AP National Writer
Tuesday, November 4, 2008

<<< Ashbery spent an hour making up variations. "To Ashbery or not to Ashbery" came first, then "To Haight-Ashbury or not to hate Ashbery," then "To Ashbury him, not to praise him." He told me about the line in one of his poems -- "mountain ash mindlessly dropping its berries" -- as his own attempt to make hay while the sun shone. He chuckled like Popeye.

There is a comic book character named "Ashbery," a teenage girl, I believe.

There is also precedent for distinguishing between John Ashbery and "John Ashbery" especially by scholars who understand the gratuitousness of the gesture but -- as with Saint Joseph in the Yeats poem -- like the way their fingers smell. 

DL >>>
-- from the archives [originally posted November 10, 2008]

John Ashbery's Typewriter

John Ashbery's typewriter -- a wonderful title for a poem, methinks -- has turned up at Harvard. As the Harvard Gazette reports:

<<<
John Ashbery [pictured left with Jane Freilicher] dove head-first into poetry after arriving at Harvard in 1945. His biographer Karin Roffman described him as “a constant presence” in the Woodberry Poetry Room (formerly at Widener Library until 1949), where he would discover the works of W. H. Auden, the eventual subject of his thesis.

As a student, Ashbery attended readings of the works of W.H. Auden, Morris Gray, and Marianne Moore, discovered local bookshops, and befriended fellow poets, including Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and V.R. Lang. “The great modernist poets were the poets he was imbibing,” Roffman said in an interview with the Gazette. “He was really thinking about the given canon that he was getting in classes at Harvard and then the personal canon he was making for himself.”

The experiences were formative for Ashbery, who died in 2017 at the age of 90, and Harvard has become the center of study on the celebrated poet. The University acquired his papers over a period of years and his reading library — donated by his husband, David Kermani — in 2018. Last month Ashbery’s typewriter, also a gift from Kermani, was installed in the Woodberry Poetry Room at Lamont Library, which will host an event, “Lunch Poems: Adventures with John Ashbery’s Typewriter,” featuring Roffman and Ashbery’s former assistant and editor Emily Skillings, on Wednesday, Nov. 17.

Much of Ashbery’s poetry throughout his career, was written on typewriters, but his love affair with the machines started after graduation. The budding poet didn’t have access to one during his studies likely due to the expense — he even got his thesis typed by someone else who did have one.

Class portrait and information on John Ashbery from the freshmen register during his days at Harvard. "A Sermon: Amos 8:11-14" by John Ashbery.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo
>>>

For more: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/11/john-ashberys-typewriter-installed-at-harvard/

Martin Stannard on John Ashbery's Unfinished Works

review by Martin Stannard

PARALLEL MOVEMENT OF THE HANDS – Five Unfinished Longer Works, John Ashbery (Emily Skillings, Editor) 265pp. pub. Carcanet (UK) Ecco (USA)

These days the John Ashbery phenomenon, somewhat thanks to the internet, is even more of a phenomenon than it might otherwise have been. As if an Ashbery academic/critical industry keeping lots of sometimes probably quite dull people in university positions were not enough, thanks to today’s technology one is able, among other things, to take a virtual tour of his house in Hudson, which is kind of fun, and might give you some ideas for interior décor. I often think back to the mid-1980s when I wrote my Masters dissertation on the New York School poets and their relationship to English poetry, and there was just one book of critical essays about Ashbery to which I could refer, which was one more than there was on either Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch or James Schuyler. These days, with Google and all the rest, I don’t know where one would even begin with the background research.

But enough of that, except that this posthumous publication of five “unfinished” long-form works adds to what is already a huge body of work, and as such probably needs to justify its existence beyond simply giving us some Ashbery we haven’t seen before. We already have a lot of Ashbery poems. One might be excused for raising an eyebrow at the publication of something unfinished that dates back to the early 1990s (30 years!) even if the editor (Emily Skillings, Ashbery’s assistant from 2010 until his death in 2017) goes to great pains to point out that all the pieces presented here were “stored and kept just several yards from where Ashbery wrote poetry and correspondence” and “Though these projects hadn’t been prepared for publication . . . they also hadn’t been sent to the archives or put into storage. They may have been suspended – paused on their way to inclusion in a book – but they hadn’t been abandoned.” The cynic may ask, How come this stuff, which is so old, was never finished? Perhaps deep down the poet felt it wasn’t quite up to scratch but for some reason was unwilling or unable to let it go? But the editor has that one covered too, by stressing how important the notion of art as “unfinished” is in Ashbery’s life and career. That’s fair enough, but there’s “unfinished” and then there’s “30 years unfinished”. It has to be said that Skillings deals further with the cynic’s concerns, saying that “In the absence of any explicit instructions from Ashbery regarding these poems, and after consulting with many friends of the estate, I arrived at the conclusion that these projects . . . deserved to be seen”. Given that those “many friends” included David Kermani, Ashbery’s husband, and others who were very close to the poet, we should probably usher the cynic from the room, even if we can still hear some mumbling.

Click here for the rest of Martin Stannard's piece.
https://www.littermagazine.com/2021/09/review-parallel-movement-of-hands-by.html

Homage to Jane Freilicher (1924-2014) [by John Ashbery]

Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1952. Photo: Walter Silver.

I’M WRITING THIS in a room that contains a number of pictures, mostly by women, as it happens. One is by Jane Freilicher, a still life in pastel that brings together a half-dozen miscellaneous objects, including a few roses that are having the floral equivalent of a bad hair day, a reddish-brown pamphlet that was probably an address book sent to customers by the phone company (remember those?) and a copy of Art News, flopping over the edge of the table, confronting the viewer, in the time-honored tradition of trompe-l'oeil perspective, but also subtly spoofing it. Jane gave the pastel to me once, perhaps to commemorate my becoming an editor at Art News in 1965 and moving back to New York after ten years in France.

Jane was in fact the first person I met in New York. When I arrived in June, 1949, fresh out of Harvard, my friend Kenneth Koch had said I could stay at his apartment while he was away; I had only to pick up the keys from Jane, who lived above him in a small walk-up building overlooking the Third Avenue El at Sixteenth street (one of Kenneth's favorite diversions was to don a rubber ape mask and gaze out the window at trains as they passed by). I rang the bell and Jane came down and invited me up to her place for a coffee. I didn't know much about contemporary art at the time, and had never heard of the exciting teacher Hans Hofmann, whom Jane and other painters I would soon meet had studied with. It turned out that Hofmann, an abstract expressionist, didn't try to impose his own ideas about art on his students, but somehow encouraged them to be more like themselves. I did notice a few small paintings of Jane's in her living room. They seem, in retrospect, funny, discreet, comforting—all things I associate with her.

• 

  Jane Freilicher, Untitled (Still Life with Copy of ARTnews), c.1963, pastel on paper, 23 x 18”.

• 

  Jane Freilicher, Portrait of John Ashbery, c.1968, oil on canvas, 20 x 18”.

On my desk is the announcement of her last show in September, 2014, a color lithograph still life called Roses and Chrysanthemums, 2014. It is more straightforwardly realistic than the Art News pastel, yet there are “mysteries of construction,” in Marianne Moore's phrase. For instance, one rose is so meticulously, magic-realistically rendered that it seems to belong to another picture, indeed to another century. But its “lovely companions,” more summarily sketched in, don't seem to notice or mind particularly. Each has a different agenda. Democracy rules.

That's what I love about her work—the democratic vistas. Her pictures seem to have come into being all by themselves—almost. The painter sort of showed them how to do it and then returned to her other work—fixing lunch, maybe, opening the mail, and coming back to check on the picture and make sure it hasn't gone off the rails. The resulting creations look unfinished and incredibly strong. I made this, each of them seems to say. The artist? Yeah, she helped a little, maybe even a lot. Okay, so it was her idea all along.

John Ashbery is a poet based in New York.

Jane Freilicher, Roses and Chrysanthemums, 2014, color lithograph, 27 x 34”.

From Artforum International (January 19, 2015).

from the archive; first posted August 23, 2019

Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1952. Photo: Walter Silver.

I’M WRITING THIS in a room that contains a number of pictures, mostly by women, as it happens. One is by Jane Freilicher, a still life in pastel that brings together a half-dozen miscellaneous objects, including a few roses that are having the floral equivalent of a bad hair day, a reddish-brown pamphlet that was probably an address book sent to customers by the phone company (remember those?) and a copy of Art News, flopping over the edge of the table, confronting the viewer, in the time-honored tradition of trompe-l'oeil perspective, but also subtly spoofing it. Jane gave the pastel to me once, perhaps to commemorate my becoming an editor at Art News in 1965 and moving back to New York after ten years in France.

Jane was in fact the first person I met in New York. When I arrived in June, 1949, fresh out of Harvard, my friend Kenneth Koch had said I could stay at his apartment while he was away; I had only to pick up the keys from Jane, who lived above him in a small walk-up building overlooking the Third Avenue El at Sixteenth street (one of Kenneth's favorite diversions was to don a rubber ape mask and gaze out the window at trains as they passed by). I rang the bell and Jane came down and invited me up to her place for a coffee. I didn't know much about contemporary art at the time, and had never heard of the exciting teacher Hans Hofmann, whom Jane and other painters I would soon meet had studied with. It turned out that Hofmann, an abstract expressionist, didn't try to impose his own ideas about art on his students, but somehow encouraged them to be more like themselves. I did notice a few small paintings of Jane's in her living room. They seem, in retrospect, funny, discreet, comforting—all things I associate with her.

• 

  Jane Freilicher, Untitled (Still Life with Copy of ARTnews), c.1963, pastel on paper, 23 x 18”.

• 

  Jane Freilicher, Portrait of John Ashbery, c.1968, oil on canvas, 20 x 18”.

On my desk is the announcement of her last show in September, 2014, a color lithograph still life called Roses and Chrysanthemums, 2014. It is more straightforwardly realistic than the Art News pastel, yet there are “mysteries of construction,” in Marianne Moore's phrase. For instance, one rose is so meticulously, magic-realistically rendered that it seems to belong to another picture, indeed to another century. But its “lovely companions,” more summarily sketched in, don't seem to notice or mind particularly. Each has a different agenda. Democracy rules.

That's what I love about her work—the democratic vistas. Her pictures seem to have come into being all by themselves—almost. The painter sort of showed them how to do it and then returned to her other work—fixing lunch, maybe, opening the mail, and coming back to check on the picture and make sure it hasn't gone off the rails. The resulting creations look unfinished and incredibly strong. I made this, each of them seems to say. The artist? Yeah, she helped a little, maybe even a lot. Okay, so it was her idea all along.

John Ashbery is a poet based in New York.

Jane Freilicher, Roses and Chrysanthemums, 2014, color lithograph, 27 x 34”.

From Artforum International (January 19, 2015).

from the archive; first posted August 23, 2019

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan": A Contest

As we head into Labor Day weekend, we announce a new contest:

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" 

 

With this as your title, write a maximum of 14 lines (verse) or 140 words (prose).

 

Post your entry in the comments field.

 

Entries will be judged on the criteria of excellence, lucidity, wit, and brevity. Prizes, including a copy of The Best American Poetry 2021, will be given to the best and to the briefest coherent piece of writing. 

 

Judge: Jim Cummins (pictured left with a poet friend, circa 2009; photo credit Stacey Lehman/ One Fifth)

 

Contest end date Sept 30

 

Previous BAP contests were judged by Mark Strand, Paul Violi, and Mark Bibbins.

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest1winner.html
http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest2winner.html

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest3winner.html

See the winners for 2007 and 2009.

 

To see the entries, check the comments field below -- and click here for a couple of others:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/when-charles-bukowski-met-bob-dylan-terence-winch.html  

Good luck!

Street Musicians [by birthday boy John Ashbery]

One died, and the soul was wrenched out   
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets   
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on   
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows   
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever   
Called, through increasingly suburban airs   
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:   
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels   
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached   
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows   
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself   
In November, with the spaces among the days   
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.   
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left   
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared   
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

John Ashbery, “Street Musicians” from Houseboat Days. 
Copyright © 1987, 1979 by John Ashbery.

Astrological fact: Ashbery, a  July Leo with Virgo rising, and a lot of Virgo in his chart, outraged the astrological community by ending his poem “The Skaters” with these lines:

The constellations are rising
In perfect order:
Taurus, Leo, Gemini

From John Ashbery as Icon by Jonathan Walker:  <<< “By placing Leo ahead of Gemini, as if the world went from May to August and then back to June, Ashbery either (a) deliberately  subverted the natural “order,” (b) questioned the concept of “perfection” when related to the heavens (or any force outside of human agency),  or (c) exhibited an aloof indifference to fact, thus showing that (a) ignorance of esoteric matters is not a liability, or (2) one was entitled to disregard the Vietnam War as a subject even if good citizenship requires that one “brush the teeth” and all that. >>

Asked to comment, Ashbery recommended the Kirby cocktail at Trestle on Tenth, on 10th Ave and 24th St. The recipe consisted of “gin (Plymouth, I think), sweet vermouth (I think), cucumber juice (I think) made from kirby cucumbers, which are now in season--they're the small, pickle-like ones, Cynar aperitif (it's an Italian brand, made from artichokes), and orange bitters, which proved very difficult to find.  Maybe you could have one at the bar there to (a) see if you like it, and (b) coax the recipe out of the bartender (though they didn't seem very secretive about it).”

Ashbery on Paris (and Ellsworth Kelly)

from Ellsworth Kelly, Plant Drawings (Matthew Marks Gallery, 1992), Essay by John Ashbery. Unpaginated. About the life of an American expatriate in Paris:

          "I suspect that in this burgeoning period of his art the limiting force was Paris itself, that dome of intuitive appreciation of one's own powers of observation, a specific place and time where `some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, -- for that moment only,' in Pater's famous formulation, and where, as Gertrude Stein said, Americans can discover what it means to be American. One can never predict what form the generating impulse will take: in my case (my own years in Paris came just after Kelly's) I found my poetry being more `influenced' by the sight of the Paris phenomenon of clear water flowing in the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was learning to read at the time."

The Great(est) Game [by John Emil Vincent]

In today's New York Times, a place I know we all rush for the latest and "greatest" in poetry criticism, David Orr asks, in "The Great(ness) Game,  basically, what will happen when THE generation of GREAT poets is gone. 

       Orr begins with noting that John Ashbery is the first living poet to have a volume in the Library of America.  And this leads Orr to ponder: "What will we do when Ashbery and his generation are gone? Because for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness."

       Hit the 7-elevens! Stock up on greatness before the twister hits!

       First off, “Great,” is a sloppy term, something to which Orr’s pile-up of potential definitions and questions, mostly rhetorical questions, gestures. To give him some credit, the definition of “great” is his topic; but notice the plague of single words meat hooked in quotation marks (“greatness,” “great,” “boring,” “good,” “major,” “serious,” &c.)—and THEN notice when Orr increasingly decides meat hooks aren’t necessary.  Words whose meaning he begins by suggesting are up for grabs, are by the end of the essay, grabbed. The start of the essay is addicted to quotation marks on terms, while the end, I’m not sure if he thought this was subtle, features few. For a piece dealing with definition he plays faster and looser with the indefinite and definite than any writer I’ve ever read. Defining “great,” he opines, is an “increasingly blurry business.” [these quotation marks are mine—from now on I will bold the words he himself puts in quotation marks.]  However “increasing blurry,” the term “great” is at the beginning of the essay more often then not held in quotation marks, and, by the end, great stands naked, proud, and apparently self-evidently in focus. 

          1. “The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business.”

             Orr blames this on postmodernism’s questioning of “Truth, Beauty, [and] Justice.” But simple sense might tell us that as history progresses, we have fewer and fewer filters (years, critics, just plain old historic contingency) through which poetry must pass to get to us eager readers. Contemporary poetry is precisely that, contemporary, these poems haven’t been around long enough to have dependable gauges of “greatness” even were we to wish to make such questionable judgments. And there is the adventure! There is the delight, the pleasure, the challenge for the contemporary reader. I do not for one read a poem to decide, “Is this great?” I read it to see if it invents, if it makes me run out and read it to all my overly-patient friends, if I can’t stop running through lines of it as I fall asleep, if it gives me insight into big or little questions I’ve been puzzling over. Or if it shapes in language something that has been floating in the often addled ether of my thinking. Or if a new device makes me see language and its possibility in an unexpected way.

John Ashbery's "Therefore"

Consider the weight of the word therefore in "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and here, in "Uptick," from his 2009 book Planisphere:

We were sitting there, and   
I made a joke about how   
it doesn’t dovetail: time,   
one minute running out   
faster than the one in front   
it catches up to.   
That way, I said,   
there can be no waste.   
Waste is virtually eliminated.   

To come back for a few hours to   
the present subject, a painting,   
looking like it was seen,   
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,   
but it has to pay attention   
to what’s up ahead: a vision.   
Therefore poetry dissolves in   
brilliant moisture and reads us   
to us.   
A faint notion. Too many words,   
but precious.

-- John Ashbery

Courtesy of the Flow Chart Foundation and a tip of the fedora to Jeffrey Lependorf, executive director. Click here to visit the foundation's website and check out the invaluable "Ashbery Resource Center" and ingenious "Ashbery's Created Spaces." -- DL

Kent Johnson on Ashbery, BAP, and Poetry Re-education Camps

From “Because of Poetry” / by  John Bradley

A sort of review in Sulfur of the irrepressible Kent Johnson’s defiant new book of poems:
Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House (Shearsman Books, $18.00) 

<<
“Say, isn’t that John Ashbery?” I asked.  “Over there, speaking with some young poet who’s trying to look like a young John Ashbery?” I told him, though I sounded just like the Kent Johnson in the “Matterhorn” poem who tells Fred Seidel that he sees John Ashbery.  “That’s ridiculous.  Everyone knows Ashbery is dead,” said Kent.  “And besides, why would the Poetry Institute put John Ashbery in a poetry re-education camp.  They love his poetry.”

More and more confused, I turned again to a poem to help me right my balance.   “’Could someone tell me why I’ve never been / selected for the yearly Best American Poetry?’” I read from “Could Someone Tell Me Why.”  Is it a crime, I wondered, to write such a thing in a poem?  I must have said this aloud, as Kent told me that he would be released from the re-education camp as soon as he wrote a poem that was chosen for Best American Poetry.  I wasn’t sure if he was joking or serious, and I nervously laughed.  “But that means you’ll be here forever!” I said, to cheer him up.  I could hear John Ashbery laughing nearby.
>>>

For the rest of the piece, click here.

Happy Birthday, John Ashbery (with a collage and a poem from the maestro, 1927-2017)

Wet Casements

    When Edward Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. 
It was not raining much.
                       KAKFA, Wedding Preparations in the Country
	
	The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
	In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
	Their own eyes.  A digest of their correct impressions of
	Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
	Ghostly transparent face.  You in falbalas
	Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,
	The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
	Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)
	Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,
	Never pierced through into timeless energy of a present
	Which would have its own opinions on these matters,
	Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
	That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
	Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
	Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
	For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
	And out of it.  I want that information very much today,

	Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.
	I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
	Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
	Of dancing on a bridge.  I shall at last see my complete face
	Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

	I shall keep to myself.
	I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.

The poem is from Houseboat Days (1977). 

On Poetry Hoaxes [by Rebecca Warner]

<<<
"One of the two poems below is by a highly respected contemporary poet," wrote John Ashbery on an exam for MFA students at Brooklyn College. "The other is a hoax originally published to spoof the obscurity of much modern poetry. Which do you think is which?" The "real" poem turned out to be one of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns; the other, written under the name Ern Malley, was designed to ridicule Hill's modernist predecessors and the editors who published them. "Can obscurity ever benefit poetry?" Ashbery asked his students. "Do you think it possible that the intellectual spoof might turn out to be more valid as poetry than the 'serious' poem, and if so, why?"1

Poetry hoaxes raise a number of questions that test our notions of literary value, authenticity, and authorial intention. The Ern Malley poem on Ashbery's exam emerged from a long history of such hoaxes. In the early 1760s Scottish poet James MacPherson published Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, which he claimed was a translation of an ancient Gaelic manuscript by "Ossian," a legendary third century bard. Several critics, including Samuel Johnson, contested its authenticity and accused MacPherson of fakery. It remains unclear whether the poems were authored exclusively by MacPherson or derived from a combination of sources. A few years later, Thomas Chatterton of Bristol sent to Horace Walpole poems he'd been composing since the age of 12, in the voice of a 15th century monk named Thomas Rowley. Walpole was initially impressed but returned the poems once he discovered they were fake. In despair, Chatterton committed suicide at the age of 17 by swallowing arsenic. Like MacPherson, whose poems were intensely popular despite their spurious attribution, Chatterton appealed to the Romantic sensibilities of the time. Keats admired Chatterton, as did Wordsworth, who eulogized him as "The marvellous boy, / The sleepless soul that perished in his pride."2
>>>

For more of Rebecca Warner's essay, "Imp of Verbal Darkness": Poetry Hoaxes & the Postmodern Politic," click here.

https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_chronicle_view/2398/imp_of_verbal_darkness_poetry_hoaxes_the_postmodern_politic

John Ashbery explains "These Lacustrine Cities" on Bruce Kawin's Radio Show (1966)

 Jeff Hipsher has posted this excellent interview that Bruce Kawin conducted with John Ashbery in 1966. At the time Bruce hosted a half-hour radio show, "Literary Workshop," on WKCR, Columbia's radio station. (He was editor-in-chief of Columbia Review in my freshman year.) The interview begins with JA reading "These Lacustrine Cities," the opening poem in Rivers and Mountains, his 1965 collection. Far less reticent than in later years, JA -- then still in his 30s -- responds at length to questions and says he believes that all poetry must communicate and that he hopes his poems do. The line between "incomprehensible" and "obscure" must be drawn, he says. He patiently explains "These Lacustrine Cities" line by line. The pronouns in his poems, he says, "can never be trusted to refer to any single person for any length of time" and illustrates with examples. The conversation with Kawin is meant to disprove that poetry is "incomprehensible."

 

After doing his best to illuminate "These Lacustrine Cities," John is asked to read the poem a second time, and he does. Then he reads the title poem of River and Mountains, "Civilization and Its Discontents," "The Ecclesiast," and others from the recently published volume, which had been nominated for the National Book Award. The show lasts about 27 minutes. -- DL

 

https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Ashbery/Ashbery-John_Complete-Reading_Interview-Bruce-Kawin_WKCR_5-5-66.mp3

 

Painting by Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery (Argyle Socks), 1952.

Robert Hass on John Ashbery (1998)

This is from Robert Hass's "poet's choice" column in The Washington Post, October 11, 1998:

<<<
One of the new fall books is John Ashbery's Wakefulness. There is also a new and very readable book about Ashbery and some of the poets associated with him, like Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, poets who went from Harvard to Manhattan after World War II and began to write during the bright years of abstract expressionist painting. The book is called The Last Avant-garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, and the author, David Lehman, writes to be understood. It's a lively book about art and poetry at a formative moment in the development of postwar American culture. And it might help those who find Ashbery, often regarded as the most original poet of this half-century, difficult, hard to understand. He can be maddening. The typical sound of his poems is that of a man mumbling to himself, so he disconcerts our idea of music. His expressions -- like "we may never realize about our lives" -- sometimes have the vagueness of the way we actually speak to ourselves, and the poems seem not so much to develop an idea as to veer all over the place the way our untended thought processes do. This is his style, and it takes some getting used to. The stance is of someone who never quite gets used to anything in the way that part of all of us never does. He seems strange, and it's only after a while that you sense his aim, to be profoundly ordinary, which is opposite from the aim of most poets. That is his strangeness. Well, not all of his strangeness. Like Wallace Stevens, whom he resembles in certain ways, a poet of the mind's unhinged dailiness, a philosophical comedian, he is also a contriver of metaphors you can't quite get your head around. In this poem, for example, what does he mean by "the friend who came at midnight and wanted to replace us with a song"? Ashbery has many imitators among the young. Every time I print one of their poems, I get a number of outraged letters from my always interesting readers that say in effect, "You think that's poetry? No wonder no one reads it." My response, I guess, is always something like this: You do not have to like it. That's why at any one moment there are different kinds of art. But if you are going to read a writer or look at a painter, what you owe them is looking long enough to see what they're doing. And, especially if at first you don't like what they're doing, the moment when you actually get it -- which always comes as an intuition, a slipping into the other's skin, rather than as a clear thought -- you've learned something. Try this one. I think it's a rather amazing poem. It begins where Ashbery often begins. Mumbling to himself, thinking against the grain. A valedictory speaker seems to be droning on. The restless auditor is starting to have fantasies of the pointlessness of life, of how it ends in some surreal and stupid way. The vague form this thought takes is of "a man with a dog" who "comes to shoot us." The listener, though, discovers he has his own set of formulas: "everything has its own reward," for example, which he records with a not entirely, or not only, self-mocking irony. Then we come to the friend. But I don't want to explain the poem to death. That's what the "valedictorian" in all of us wants to do.
>>>

For Hass's comment on Ashbery's poem "The Friend at Midnight" (in which the "valedictorian" utters bromides), click here.

"The Friend at Midnight" is a great title -- whether or not you connect it to the parable in Luke (11:5-13).