The Best American Poetry

JA & Paul Auster remembered in "The Forward"

By Daniel Witkin

How Poets And Novelists Are Mourning John Ashbery

September 6, 2017

John Ashbery was among the very greatest poets of the postwar era, one of the most imaginative and accurate chroniclers of what he called “the experience of experience.”

But he might have blanched to hear himself spoken of in such portentous, non-poetic terms. Following Ashbery’s passing on September 3, his friends and acolytes offered reminiscences that shed light on the person behind some of our era’s most challenging and enchanting verse.

David Lehman, a poet and the editor of The Best American Poetry series, included in his remembrance for The American Scholar a mention of sharing an office with Ashbery in the 1970s. He noted that “It was also fun to observe as things JA said in interviews entered the general discourse. For example, ‘Often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears.’ And: ‘I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.’”

Reflecting on him in the Times, poet Rae Armantrout reflected on how Ashbery’s down-to-earth humor manifested within his poems. “He is one poet who can somehow be simultaneously elegiac and playful, even goofy,” she wrote. “If you could find the impossible space where Franz Kafka overlapped with the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, John would be sitting there happily, grinning like the Cheshire cat.”

In a piece for The New Yorker, poet and novelist Ben Lerner imagined Ashbery inserting some jokes into his tribute in an august periodical, like Tom Sawyer spying on his pomp and ceremony of his own funeral. “I’m dizzied by my luck at having overlapped with John Ashbery, one of the good things about being born when I was,” Lerner wrote.

"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.

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).

Remembering JA the Day After He Died

<<<
Writing about him in the Times, poet Rae Armantrout reflected on how Ashbery’s down-to-earth humor manifested within his poems. “He is one poet who can somehow be simultaneously elegiac and playful, even goofy,” she wrote. “If you could find the impossible space where Franz Kafka overlapped with the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, John would be sitting there happily, grinning like the Cheshire cat.”
>>>

Click here for more of Daniel Witkin's piece, "How Poets And Novelists Are Mourning John Ashbery" (from The Forward, September 3, 2017)..

See also "Remembering JA," which David Lehman wrote for The American Scholar. https://theamericanscholar.org/remembering-ja/#.XSqz15NKiM9

On 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).

 

"Fragment for John Ashbery" [by Jim Cummins]

I wake, and a fragment, a wisp,
entices, then disappears into the forest
of an earlier time, and I am left
in a clearing where the sun is stale,
or the moon is not a pretty wafer,
and the day long ago when colors
were sounds, and sounds a masterpiece
of color and form, recedes again
into dream forests, crosshatchings.

You lifted the dish with melted cheese
for the soufflé you never touched,
being three martinis to the good already
at a lunch that comes clear again
in the forest, briefly — radiant eyes trapped
in the woods of your three companions,
who just want to laugh and love you
too young to have these dreams yet.
You say again, in this memory-forest,
"I hope you won't tell R—," then lift
the enormous ladle, using it like a spoon,
and that is your lunch, three martinis
and a bowl of lukewarm melted cheese.

Your eyes sparkle like a four-year-old's,
who sees something he wants, and takes it.
And I love you for this gesture, though
I'm old enough to see the forest I will enter
soon, the one you will be leaving, knowing
so much more than I of its bewilderment.
The gesture — willful, cold as it is warm —
admits the friendship of us three, even
as it stands beyond, untouched, looked at
by those who love you, who aren't privy yet
to the nightmare of too many fragments,
pieces of dreams left ragged on branches,
when the muse abducts you, carries you,
through word-forests, forests of words.

– James Cummins

Remembering John Ashbery: "As I recall, John mostly listened and I mostly babbled" [by Jane Hammond]

Midwife to Gargoyles (c) Jane Hammond (click for a full-sized image)

 
My story starts with Robinson Crusoe and ends with a martini. Like Raymond Roussel, I’ll try to write between the two. In 1989 I had my first NYC one-person show at Exit Art which featured 18 paintings—a big show.  My good friend Trevor Winkfield brought John Ashbery to the show and reported back to me that John was enthusiastic about the paintings. Without this favor from Trevor, the whole story never gets off the ground.

I needed a catalogue essay for a show in Sweden and John agreed to write it.  To date, it is still something I treasure—as John compared me to Robinson Crusoe—seeing in him another person with diverse goals, restricted means and imaginative aptitudes applied toward that differential.  John sent Ragnar Stromberg –his Swedish translator to my Gothenburg opening.  The whole thing felt felicitous and easy and real.

Some years later I woke up one day with an idea.  As background to this let me say, I had made paintings using a lexicon of found imagery for a number of years and all the paintings had numerical titles—there wasn’t a single word attached to these paintings. I had long loved John’s poems and one of the things I admired is the bricolage of found lapidary language set into the matrix of the poem but still retaining a strong scent of its foundness, of it coming from somewhere else—cooking, television ads, the cartoons, women’s magazines, etc. And I might have seen a poem of John’s in the New Yorker that read like a list of titles—or I might be making that up.

No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar (c) Jane Hammond (click for a full-sized image)

Anyhow, this is all pre-Email so I screwed up my courage and I called John. I reminded him that I have had only numerical identifiers for my paintings, that I used found imagery from a great variety of sources and I suggested the idea of “found titles” for my paintings.  That is, found to me.  I suggested that he write a set of painting titles and I, afterwards, would then make the paintings for those titles.  I gave him no further information, hints, instructions or thoughts about what I was looking for with these titles.  In fact, I had no agenda, I wanted to be surprised.

As I recall, John mostly listened and I mostly babbled.  At a certain point I said “well, why don’t you think about it and call me back if you are interested.”  I felt a little embarrassed that I had even presumed that this great poet would want to spend any time creating something for me.

A week later the phone rang and it was John saying a bit mischievously, “I have your titles.  I’m faxing them now.”  I will never forget hanging over the fax machine, reading upside down and seeing forty-four titles spill forth:  Confessions of a Fop, The Hagiography of this Moment, Midwife to Gargoyles, The Soapstone Factory, No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar, Bread and Butter Machine, Prevents Furring, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, Sea of Troubles.

I was not excited, I was nervous, but I allayed my fear by thinking “Well, if I can’t do this no one but John and me will know I even tried.”  I looked at the list for days and then one day when I was taking a walk an idea for the first painting, “Sore Models,” came into my head. When I finished it another idea came.  I never had an agenda for which title I would do next or even which ones I preferred, I would just kind of look at the list from time to time like a musician would play scales and then boom a song would pop into my head.  Some of the titles I left until last I now like the most.

In the end I made a painting for all of the 44 titles he created for me and I made several paintings for some titles, so that there are 64 large oil paintings in the Jane Hammond/John Ashbery Collaboration dating from 1993-2002.

In 1997 I invited John to come and see an exhibition of the Hammond/ Ashbery paintings at my gallery in Soho.  The gallery stayed open late for us and the dealer, eager to meet John, waltzed up and said “I have a nice bottle of white on ice for you.”  Actually, said John rolling his eyes in that Warner Bros way of his and speaking with great emphasis on the third word, “Can you freeze my martini?” Whereupon he pulled a pint glass jar full of clear liquid out of the pocket of his chinos.

Prevents Furring (c) Jane Hammond (click for a full-sized image)

Jane Hammond works in print, paint, photography, and sculpture to create a wide array of art that is often based on dreams and literature. Her work has been exhibited in New York City and in galleries and museums around the world. She lives in New York City. Read her 2002 interview with David Lehman here. Find The Complete John Ashbery Collaboration (1993-2001) by Jane Hammond here.

from the archive; first posted September 2017

Welcome to Ashberyland!

Welcome to Ashberyland!

a digital theme park of exclamatory pedagogy

where YOU get to read the poems

and judge them and pick out the ones

you like the most 

while the ghost

of Ashbery lingers on a cloud

looking down on us

benevolently -- DL

John Ashbery's Visit with High School Students [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest Author Note: Scholar and poet Andrew McCarron has kindly shared with us this transcript of a delightful Q&A session between the late great John Ashbery [pictured left] and Andrew's high school students at Trinity School in Manhattan.  It blows my mind to think of John walking into one's high school…  Special thanks to the Flow Chart Foundation for providing the tape and permission to share this with you. Here's to chap-stick! -- Justin Jamail]

Despite the difficulty of his work, I have consistently taught the poetry of John Ashbery in my English classes at Trinity School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  My students have ranged from fourteen to eighteen, and pretty much without exception, the students have loved the challenge.  Ashbery’s playfulness, his roving sense of wonder, and the childlike way his poems try making sense of an incomprehensible universe of surprise, contradiction, and changeability, captivate their imaginations.  Whereas I started out teaching his short poems (e.g., Some Trees, The History of My Life, and This Room), I’ve since moved on to teaching longer works like Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, A Wave, and the book-length Girls on the Run.  Many years ago, on May 8, 2003, I invited my old Bard College professor, John Ashbery, to a ninth grade English class I was teaching during my first year at Trinity.  John had come from the dentist’s office where he’d been given a shot of Novocain.  He was dressed in a white blazer and a blue tie for the occasion and was bemused by the interest of the teenagers.

Here’s a partial transcript of the Q&A, recorded by my colleague and friend Bill Zavatsky, who was also present:      

Student: How do you get inspired?

Ashbery: I used to wait around for inspiration when I was your ages, but realized I wouldn’t get very much written if I had to wait.  So, as the years have gone by, I’ve trained myself to get along without inspiration and it seems to work just as well.

Student: Did you enjoy an active imagination as a child?

Ashbery: Yes, I used to invent cities and people as imaginary citizens.  I would do this on the beach where I grew up, on Lake Ontario, where I’d build sandcastles or houses.  I used to make large maps on big sheets of cardboard and put on all the names of the cities and towns.  I remember one country where the capital city was Murielsville because of a little girl I had a crush on in grade school.  The population was something like 8,957,000.  She had the most population of any of the cities.

Student: When did you realize you wanted to pursue the life of a poet?

Ashbery: Well, I still don’t want to pursue the life of a poet.  I started writing poetry when I was in high school actually.  It happened when I first discovered modern poetry in an anthology of Louis Untermeyer.  Up until then I thought I wanted to be a painter.  I became gradually more interested in poetry and it was easier to do than paint.  I didn’t have much talent then, surely, as a poet, but I ended up not having any talent as a painter, I think.

Student: What poets inspired you the most when you were younger

Ashbery: Actually the first modern poet in that anthology.  It was all strange to me as it probably is for anyone who encounters modern poetry, asking “What is this?”  “It doesn’t make any sense!”  But then I began to like that.  Some of the poets I liked actually made a lot of sense but I was still too inexperienced to realize this.  My favorite one was W.H. Auden, who you wouldn’t think today would give readers that much difficulty; partly because his later poetry was much more uncomplicated and straightforward.  But he hadn’t written his later poetry yet.  His earlier poetry is rather obscure and puzzling.  I became very attracted by his way of using different tones and styles, like vernacular of various kinds, and prosy journalism, and all of these mashed together in the same poem.          

Student: What inspired your poem “Some Trees”?

Ashbery: The poem “Some Trees” was inspired by falling in love and also by reading the poetry of Marianne Moore, which I was reading a lot of at the time.  I think that there’s an influence in that poem of Marianne Moore’s, certainly the half-rhymes that she used a lot. 

Student: Do you write with the intention of getting at a deeper meaning?

Ashbery: Deeper than what?  I write with the intention of expressing a meaning that I couldn’t put into words until I’ve done so by writing it in the poem.  

Student: Do your poems just come to you or do you sit down thinking I’m going to write a poem now?

Ashbery: Yeah I guess I sit down thinking, or hoping, “I’m going to write a poem now.”*

Student: Do you disagree with the critical interpretations of your poems?

Ashbery: Yes, always, including the favorable ones.     

Student: Do you understand your own work?

Ashbery: No—but as I said, that’s why I write it, hoping that I’ll be able to understand it eventually.*

Student: Does other art inspire your poems?

Ashbery: Certainly painting and music, especially music.  I listen to music when I’m writing.  I think if I had known how to do it I probably would have written music instead of poetry.  What’s interesting is that it’s a linear experience in time as is a poem.  You have to stay with it until the end to know what it’s all about, whereas a painting you can look at and say, “O yeah, I got that.”  The time that is built into the experience for me is very much something that the poetry is about, too.  It’s the universal subject.  My poetry often reflects my past, childhood, and so forth.  The temporal quality of poetry is why I switched from painting to writing poetry.  But I look at a lot of art, too.  I worked as an art critic for a long time and had to force myself to really look at something so I’d remember when I sat down to write about it what I had seen.  That was a very valuable experience.  One thing that’s the hardest to do is give your attention to anything.  By painfully forcing myself I learned a valuable lesson.              

Student: If you could bring five items to a deserted island what would you bring?

Ashbery: Sunblock, chap-stick, the works of Proust, antidepressants, and flares.   

Student: If you weren’t a famous poet what other work could you imagine yourself doing?

Ashbery: I can’t imagine myself doing any work.  I don’t think poetry counts.  I would like to have been able to do other things, like writing music, as I just mentioned, or writing novels, which people would then actually read.  But it’s very difficult to write a novel, whereas it’s easy to write poetry, provided that you’re a poet.  I’m always amazed at performative art, like a violinist who plays an incredible concerto.  Of course, it’s easy for him because that’s what he does.  It wouldn’t be easy for me.

Student: Do poets have a responsibility to be political?

Ashbery: I think people have a responsibility to be political.  I don’t think that poets have a responsibility to write political poetry, because I think any poetry is political in the sense that it makes you reflect on life, and feel glad you’re alive if it’s a good poem, and it makes you want to act in various capacities from love or militant philosophy and experience different forms of your life.  I don’t like political poetry because I invariably agree with the message in it and don’t have to be reminded of it.  

"JA on the G Train" [by Thomas Moody]

We have gone to great pains translating the universe
into a forgettable vernacular. Life speaks to us
in the New International Version
so that the day lacks a certain cadence, the night
any discernible yearning. A grocery list
of mysteries is written down each morning.
Idols fall like old argyle socks.
And then, one rain sodden rush-hour,
I see him nailed to the back wall of the last carriage,
like twilight at midday, the faint
apparition of a miracle, easy to miss
but for those who catch it they cannot turn away
a Messiah of befuddlement, beautiful
amongst the mass of pleasant and amenable
ugliness. We are given a parable without meaning
anything more than its intention
to offer us the sensation of understanding
what will always remain beyond our grasp.

Something magnificent and indeterminable. Not an answer
but a much more interesting way to phrase the question
no one else would think to ask.

Meditations on John Ashbery, 1929-2017 [by Vincent Katz]

Juan Martín del Potro is playing Rafael Nadal in the Semifinal at the U.S. Open, and suddenly I am thinking how John Ashbery could, had he been watching, turn all this — the court, the colors, the fans, the ball persons, the players and their ultimate struggle — into poetry, and that thought inspires me to want to write poetry.

John’s poetry was, and is, always so inspiring. From Some Trees to The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring, Three Poems, and Vermont Notebook — each book was a reinvention of what poetry can be, and what John could be as a person. He felt unlimited, and that was truly exciting, as exciting as his unpredictable word choices and combinations of language-types. It’s funny, in a way that makes total sense chronologically, that what these reinventions most remind of are the exciting swerves of some of my favorite rock and roll musicians — David Bowie primarily, but also the Beatles of the late 1960s, Lou Reed as well. John seemed to tap into the sense of the artist as, ultimately, a performer. He had a vast knowledge of music, of many varied aspects of culture, and he seemed to desire and be able to perform different versions of himself, different selves.

After Vermont Notebook, with the publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John became the iconic international figure he has remained.

As he put it, in “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat:

                                            …But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

Thank you, John, for making it so clear that poetry can be so exciting.

-- from the archive; originally posted September 12, 2017]

Juan Martín del Potro is playing Rafael Nadal in the Semifinal at the U.S. Open, and suddenly I am thinking how John Ashbery could, had he been watching, turn all this — the court, the colors, the fans, the ball persons, the players and their ultimate struggle — into poetry, and that thought inspires me to want to write poetry.

John’s poetry was, and is, always so inspiring. From Some Trees to The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring, Three Poems, and Vermont Notebook — each book was a reinvention of what poetry can be, and what John could be as a person. He felt unlimited, and that was truly exciting, as exciting as his unpredictable word choices and combinations of language-types. It’s funny, in a way that makes total sense chronologically, that what these reinventions most remind of are the exciting swerves of some of my favorite rock and roll musicians — David Bowie primarily, but also the Beatles of the late 1960s, Lou Reed as well. John seemed to tap into the sense of the artist as, ultimately, a performer. He had a vast knowledge of music, of many varied aspects of culture, and he seemed to desire and be able to perform different versions of himself, different selves.

After Vermont Notebook, with the publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John became the iconic international figure he has remained.

As he put it, in “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat:

                                            …But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

Thank you, John, for making it so clear that poetry can be so exciting.

-- from the archive; originally posted September 12, 2017]

Fairfield Porter's Portrait of JA (1952)

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

IM John Ashbery, July 28, 1927 -- September 3, 2017

Ashbery Collages at Tibor de Nagy, September 5 -- October 14, 2018

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The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Oh, What Fun! an exhibition of John Ashbery's collages made from 2015 until his death in September 2017. This will be Ashbery’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and his first at the gallery’s Rivington Street location.

Oh, What Fun! consists of group of works inspired, as with his previous collages, by Ashbery’s long held fascinations, many since childhood, with cartoons, movies and other forms of popular culture.  Much of the imagery and source material is culled from his personal trove of collections, such as board games, French puzzle plates, old postcards, and other treasured knick-knacks that fill his homes in Manhattan and Hudson, New York.  Ashbery became interested at a young age by surrealism, particularly the collage novels of Max Ernst and the work of Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell. A more direct and collaborative influence was his friend Joe Brainard, at times making collages side-by-side with him in Brainard’s house in Vermont and sharing found materials for future collages.  Although Ashbery started making collages as an undergraduate at Harvard with one appearing on the cover of the Harvard Advocate in 1948 (a collaboration with Fred Amory), and he first publicly exhibited a single collage in a group exhibition at the Drawing Center in 1977, it has only been in the last decade that his collages have become more widely known.

​Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 15 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: [email protected]

#TBT: At the Institute Cervantes with John Ashbery, David Kermani, David Lehman and Mónica de la Torre, 2004

at the Institute Cervantes in New York City, 2004: