Tapestry
It is difficult to seperate the tapestry
from the room or loom which takes precedence over it.
For it must always be frontal yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of "history"
in the making, because there is no way out of the punishment
it proposes: sight blinded by sunlight.
The seeing taken in with what is seen
in an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner,
registers over the impact of itself
receiving phenomena, and in so doing
draws an outline, or a blueprint,
of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because
we are eager, all the same, to be wound in it:
This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway,
the citizens hold sweet commerce with one another
and pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will,
and words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream
upended in a puddle somewhere
as though "dead" were just another adjective.
John Ashbery
[and Something Beautiful for the New Year]
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Friday, August 26, 2005
Ashbery - Not So Far Away
From "The Instruction Manual - How To Read John Ashbery" by Meghan O'Rourke:
Ashbery's second radical move was to change the way the poet saw himself in relation to contemporary society. Though particular poems don't have specific subjects, he may write more about America—and with a more persuasive ambivalence—than any of his peers. "You spoke from the margin," he says in Where Shall I Wander, a common enough artistic sentiment; but where Ashbery differs from Baudelaire or Eliot is that, like Whitman and Emerson, he (often) sees himself as fundamentally more like his fellow-man than unlike. In this, he marries two previously unmarried literary traditions—continental avant-gardism and Romanticism. Perhaps it's this hybrid impulse—his reluctance to identify too strongly with any single tradition—that motivates his bringing together all different kinds of dictions and styles in a single poem, from slapstick to the didactic, from the earnest to the skeptical, while privileging none.
Ashbery's second radical move was to change the way the poet saw himself in relation to contemporary society. Though particular poems don't have specific subjects, he may write more about America—and with a more persuasive ambivalence—than any of his peers. "You spoke from the margin," he says in Where Shall I Wander, a common enough artistic sentiment; but where Ashbery differs from Baudelaire or Eliot is that, like Whitman and Emerson, he (often) sees himself as fundamentally more like his fellow-man than unlike. In this, he marries two previously unmarried literary traditions—continental avant-gardism and Romanticism. Perhaps it's this hybrid impulse—his reluctance to identify too strongly with any single tradition—that motivates his bringing together all different kinds of dictions and styles in a single poem, from slapstick to the didactic, from the earnest to the skeptical, while privileging none.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Happy Birthday, John Ashbery!
BORN on JULY 28, 1927 - Listen (RealAudio)
Poem: "This Room," by John Ashbery from Your Name Here (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
This Room
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
Poem: "This Room," by John Ashbery from Your Name Here (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
This Room
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Ashbery's Teaching Advice
My advice to younger poets is to read as much poetry of the 20th and 21st century as possible. In writing workshops I assign books of poems, but there’s never time enough to do that and attend to thestudents' poetry, which is all they’re interested in. They never take my advice. I was once telling somebody that if you don’t read what’s been written, you may end up sounding like some poet you’ve never read. This has happened. I had a student once who reminded me quite a bit of Hart Crane. He had never heard of him, of course. I suggested that he read him. Some time later, he turned in another poem that reminded me of Crane. I asked him if he’d taken my advice, and he said, ‘No, but I’m going to.’ [laughs] I just don’t think young poets today read enough poetry. They’re more into expressing themselves and their personal dramas. Sometimes the workshops turn into group therapy. I think sometimes the students are even communicating with other people in the class that they may have designs on. [laughs] I try to get them to be more objective, and I sort of propel them into the further reaches of consciousness by using assignments designed to derail their first instincts. My old favorite is the sestina. You’re interrupted at every line. What you want to say is derailed. Somehow, at the end, the students write the poem they were going to write anyway, but it turns out more satisfying because their attention was deflected from themselves for a little while. Sometimes I ask them to translate a poem from a language that I assume they don’t know, which is practically any foreign language, it turns out. Something like Finnish. I even tried Egyptian hieroglyphics once, but then I was getting a lot of eyes and fish. Sometimes I use pictures, like Max Ernst’s collages.
Friday, July 08, 2005
excerpt from Other Traditions by John Ashbery
To this question, "Who is a major, who is a minor poet?" [Auden] replies, One is sometimes tempted to think it nothing but a matter of academic fashion: a poet is major if, in the curriculum of the average college English department, there is a course devoted solely to the study of his work, and a minor if there is not." He continues:
One cannot say that a major poet writes better poems than a minor; on the contrary, the chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor. Nor, equally obviously, is is a matter of the pleasure the poet gives an individual reader: I cannot enjoy one poem by Shelley and am delighted by every line of William Barnes, but I know perfectly well that Shelley is a major poet, and Barnes a minor one. To qualify as a major, a poet, it seems to me, must satisfy about three and a half of the following conditions.
1. He must write a lot.
2. His poems must show a wide range of subject matter and treatment.
3. He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style.
4. In the case of all poets, we distinguish between their juvenilia and their mature work but, in the case of the major poet, the process of maturing continues until he dies so that, if confronted by two poems of his of equal merit but written at different times, the reader can immediately say which was written first. In the case of a minor poet, on the other hand, however excellent the two poems may be, the reader cannot settle the chronology on the basis of the poems themselves.
One cannot say that a major poet writes better poems than a minor; on the contrary, the chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor. Nor, equally obviously, is is a matter of the pleasure the poet gives an individual reader: I cannot enjoy one poem by Shelley and am delighted by every line of William Barnes, but I know perfectly well that Shelley is a major poet, and Barnes a minor one. To qualify as a major, a poet, it seems to me, must satisfy about three and a half of the following conditions.
1. He must write a lot.
2. His poems must show a wide range of subject matter and treatment.
3. He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style.
4. In the case of all poets, we distinguish between their juvenilia and their mature work but, in the case of the major poet, the process of maturing continues until he dies so that, if confronted by two poems of his of equal merit but written at different times, the reader can immediately say which was written first. In the case of a minor poet, on the other hand, however excellent the two poems may be, the reader cannot settle the chronology on the basis of the poems themselves.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Ashbery said...
Ashbery said, "I think my poems mean what they say...There is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing."
Raw Material
Where do poems come from? Enquiring minds often ask questions like this of John Ashbery, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet who spoke at the Salomon Center in November as part of the President's Lecture Series. The answer often comes as a surprise. "I was eating sushi the other day," Ashbery said in introducing his poem "Snow." "The wrapper had a short line, then a longer one, then a short one - and so on, with a long sloppy line at the end. I decided to write a poem that looked like that."
Monday, June 27, 2005
Derrida's Ashbery
"[Mills-Courts] culminating chapter posits Ashbery as Derrida's closest cousin among postmodernist poets mainly because his poetry expresses the epitaphic way in which she feels language works. Throughout the book she argues that language, and specifically poetry, resembles a gravestone marking the presence of its absent author and the absence of its author's presence. It is a dead representation haunted by the presence of a dead but somehow living person, one who once intended meanings though they are now obscure (not unfathomable or nonexistent, as some deconstructionists would maintain). In short, poetic language is Derridean as well as Heideggerean. Ashbery bridges these contraries,
Mills-Courts believes, like no other contemporary poet. He is radically skeptical of language's power to present or incarnate the spirit of the authorial logos, but still he believes--and this is why Mills-Courts celebrates him—in "Poetry as performance, as an epitaphic endeavor that displays both the absence and the presence of an intending ‘I,' poetry that does not delude itself into believing that it has captured self-presence in a privileged moment, [but still exerts] . . . hope against all odds." For Mills-Courts Ashbery is heroic and exemplary because he deconstructs the sacred tenets of the logocentric tradition, yet he never bottoms-out in nihilistic despair. His poetry keeps questioning and questing, tracing an elegant, quixotic path toward self-representation that never completely arrives. It resists the death of all conclusive representations and resolutions, all its temporary domiciles along the romantic way, in order to generate the desire for new ones which, in turn, must be deemed tentative and dismantled in order to keep the ongoing quest going on."
Sunday, June 26, 2005
One Doesn't Know Anything
"What I would like readers to think about beyond the concept of free association is the fact that, during my interview with Ashbery, he insisted “But one doesn't know anything! That's the problem.” It is this extremely welcome and humble take on knowledge – “one doesn't know anything” – that I think is crucial for appreciating Ashbery's poetry. To be a poet who admits that he doesn't know anything is to admit doubt and to reject the cliché of the poet as impassioned, prophetic figure. At the same time, it is also an imperative to search for knowledge – and such a search can take place using the vehicle of free-association. Not knowing anything impels the knowledge-hungry Ashbery to absorb and express some of the energy that is constantly swirling about us, even if such expression is always bound to lead to more questions and exploration."
The Illusion of Inclusion
In 1958 John Ashbery sailed for Paris to gather materials for a thesis he intended to write about Raymond Roussel, who at the time was an all-but-forgotten French poet, playwright and novelist. Ashbery discovered Roussel in 1951, when his friend Kenneth Koch shared with him a souvenir from a yearlong sojourn in France. It was a faded copy of Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique (1928), a poem comprising four cantos, each written in a single sentence that expands to an epic length through a system of nested parentheses. Not one of the cantos contains a single impression of Africa, which helps account for why, several years before taking his own life in 1933, Roussel had been called "the Proust of dreams." It was in part by immersing himself in those dreams that Ashbery learned to manufacture exotic realities in a matter-of-fact way. Ashbery's poem "The Instruction Manual," for instance, written in the mid-1950s, could very well have been titled "Nouvelles Impressions de Métal." The speaker of the poem is at his job and must write an instruction manual about the uses of a new metal; instead, he blithely conjures up a vivid and precise travelogue about Guadalajara, a place he has never visited.
For more click here.
For more click here.
A Different Kind of Lyric
"Poetic language, for both Derrida and Ashbery, would arguably be able to saturate space.... To drench or saturate inscribes excess or the possibility of overflowing and invokes a libidinal energy no longer centered upon the self. This saturation and porousness begin a reconsideration of the lyric."
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Friday, June 24, 2005
The Red Easel by John Ashbery
The Red Easel
Say doc, those swags are of the wrong period
though in harmony with the whole. You shouldn't take it too hard.
Everybody likes it when the casual drift
becomes more insistent, setting in order the house
while writing finis to its three-decker novel. Only when the plaint
of hens pierces dusk like a screen door
does the omnipresent turn top-heavy. Oh, really?
I thought they had names for guys like you
and places to take them to. That's true, but
let's not be hasty, shall we, and pronounce your example
a fraud before all the returns are in? These are,
it turns out, passionate and involving, as well as here to stay.
From "Where Shall I Wander"
Say doc, those swags are of the wrong period
though in harmony with the whole. You shouldn't take it too hard.
Everybody likes it when the casual drift
becomes more insistent, setting in order the house
while writing finis to its three-decker novel. Only when the plaint
of hens pierces dusk like a screen door
does the omnipresent turn top-heavy. Oh, really?
I thought they had names for guys like you
and places to take them to. That's true, but
let's not be hasty, shall we, and pronounce your example
a fraud before all the returns are in? These are,
it turns out, passionate and involving, as well as here to stay.
From "Where Shall I Wander"
O Fortuna
Where Shall I Wander
New Poems
by John Ashbery
O Fortuna
Good luck! Best wishes! The best of luck!
The very best! Godspeed! God bless you!
Peace be with you!
May your shadow never be less!
We can see through to the other side,
you see. It's your problem, we know,
but I can't help feeling a little envious.
What if darkness became unhinged right now?
Boomingly, swimmingly one remounts the current.
Here is where the shade was, the suggestion of flowers,
and peace, in another place.
Our competition is like tools of a certain order.
No one would have found them useful at first.
It wasn't until a real emergency arose, that someone
had the sense to recognize for what it was.
All hell didn't break loose, it was like a rising psalm
materializing like snow on an unseen mountain.
All that was underfoot was good, but lost.
Harper Collins
New Poems
by John Ashbery
O Fortuna
Good luck! Best wishes! The best of luck!
The very best! Godspeed! God bless you!
Peace be with you!
May your shadow never be less!
We can see through to the other side,
you see. It's your problem, we know,
but I can't help feeling a little envious.
What if darkness became unhinged right now?
Boomingly, swimmingly one remounts the current.
Here is where the shade was, the suggestion of flowers,
and peace, in another place.
Our competition is like tools of a certain order.
No one would have found them useful at first.
It wasn't until a real emergency arose, that someone
had the sense to recognize for what it was.
All hell didn't break loose, it was like a rising psalm
materializing like snow on an unseen mountain.
All that was underfoot was good, but lost.
Harper Collins
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Where Shall I Wander
Ashbery's latest book, Where Shall We Wander, was published this year. The Guardian's timely article appears here:
Parallel lines
A farmer's son, John Ashbery learned about poetry from an encyclopedia and progressed to student magazines. Part of an avant-garde New York scene in the 50s, he left the city for Paris where he worked as an art critic. His early work was barely reviewed, but his originality and range soon won him admirers and he went on to win major prizes. His latest book is published this month
Nicholas Wroe
Saturday April 23, 2005
The Guardian
Pulitzer poetry prize winner John Ashbery
In 1976 John Ashbery made a remarkable breakthrough to mainstream audiences. His collection of poems Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won three prestigious awards, beginning with the inaugural American National Book Critics Circle Award. As someone whose work had until then been routinely described as deliberately obscure, he was an unexpected winner. "It was a great surprise," he recalls. "Then it became common knowledge, months before the official announcement, that I was going to win the Pulitzer poetry prize as well." Between them came the National Book Award, which he did not believe he could win "because I was going to win the Pulitzer. I went to the National Book Award presentation ceremony anyway, and when my name was read out [as winner] I was caught in probably the only spontaneous photograph of me that exists. But it obviously made people think I was someone to be reckoned with."
The final section of the book's title poem is representative and if the sounds, textures and images conjured can be alluring, it remains challenging and radical stuff:
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.
But with his triple crown of awards Ashbery was transported from the avant-garde to the front rank of American literary life, a position he has continued to occupy for three decades. Supporters include the critic Harold Bloom, who recently identified Ashbery's As We Know (1979) as the book of poetry published in the past 25 years that has meant most to him: "He is our major poet since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955".
In some sense it is a familiar career trajectory. The critic and poet Mark Ford has written about Ashbery and his circle and says he "did have a very slow start, but he was always conscious of how avant-garde work and avant-garde writers are often neglected early on". Bloom's advocacy was important, in Ford's view, as was the supportive group Ashbery had around him. "It's true that until he was into his 40s he didn't have much of a profile, but the people who are now known as the New York School were an important coterie who always believed in him."
The New York School, comprising Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, came together as friends in the 1940s. "For a long time we were our own, very small audience," Ashbery says. "And we had no idea that we were the New York School. The idea that people might be reading us and thinking about us in that way would have seemed very far-fetched."
He admits they had a shared artistic outlook in that they were all dissatisfied with the then poetry establishment, had a leaning towards French and other European writers and set out to be more experimental than the academic poetry of the 40s and 50s. "And we all somehow ended up in New York when the arts were in a state of high ferment and were very exciting. People like Pollock and de Kooning were changing their worlds. We knew John Cage. We wanted to approximate something similar in poetry but it seemed unlikely there would ever be an audience for what we were doing."
Ashbery's 25th volume of poetry, Where Shall I Wander, is published in the UK by Carcanet this month. The doyenne of American critics, Helen Vendler, was dismissive of his early work - "wilful flashiness" - but has subsequently come to value him more. She says the new book "is rich in grimly funny images of the dance of approaching death".
"What is to be gained by writing this way?", Vendler asks of a section of his poem "Broken Tulips":
Another's narrative supplants the crawling
stock-market quotes: Like all good things
life tends to go on too long, and when we smile
in mute annoyance, pauses for a moment.
Rains bathe the rainbow,
and the shape of night is an empty cylinder,
focused at us, urging its noncompliance
closer along the way we chose to go.
"In answer, we need only imagine the poem done conventionally," she continues. "A first-person narrator evokes his erotic anxiety, his sense of spring, his feeling of taedium vitae, his foreboding of a failure of spring, and his fear of death. These topics are so worn one can hardly think of writing about them - and yet what else stirs feeling in our hearts? 'Make it new' - Pound's old command - is still as talismanic as ever."
But as Vendler has moved towards Ashbery, others have turned away. Alan Jenkins, deputy editor and former poetry editor of the TLS, where many of Ashbery's poems are first seen, says "Some Trees (1956) is one of my favourite poetry books. But for me he has become a bit samey. There are still some pleasures to be had, but I don't find the same sense of excitement. In those earlier books he developed a new voice and incorporated perhaps not very exciting aspects of American life that hadn't got into American poetry much before that. He suggested the weirdness and surreal oddness of American suburbia."
Professor M Wynn Thomas of the University of Wales, Swansea, identifies some factors that combined in Ashbery's dramatic elevation in the mid-70s. Apart from Bloom's advocacy, which provided academic credibility, Robert Lowell's death in 1977 prompted a search for the new great American poet and Ashbery's work was susceptible to a succession of critical theories. "Take postmodernism. Is his work a libertarian, democratic, catholic approach to the world that its champions claim? Or is it, as others say, the corrupt aesthetic of capitalist consumerism? You could argue that it is both." Thomas teaches Ashbery to undergraduates, and says their response is mixed: "Some are bemused but there are always one or two who are passionate about him and students are generally attracted to his omnivorous aesthetic. There are references to advertising which are then mixed with references to Dante and he doesn't prepare you for the shifts in tone and register and the bringing together of words from different vocabularies."
As an aesthete Ashbery is a paradoxical figure in that he seems willing to incorporate virtually everything. For many years he was an art critic and, as one friend puts it, "what he doesn't know about movies you could write on a postage stamp". He also has an extensive knowledge of music beyond the standard repertory. Leon Botstein is president of Bard College, 100 miles north of New York City, where Ashbery has taught since 1990. Botstein is also a conductor and says: "I have done lots of rare opera but it was John who put me onto Chausson's Le Roi Arthus which I went on to record. His taste and discernment is extraordinary and the breadth of interests is absolutely remarkable."
If the range of his references has left some readers baffled, and frustrated by the lack of clearly discernable meanings, Ashbery has stated that "a poem that communicates something that's already known to a reader is not really communicating anything to him, and in fact shows a lack of respect". Vendler has suggested that for Ashbery, "a change of mood is the chief principle of form... every poem is unique, recording a unique interval of consciousness", while in a review of David Herd's study John Ashbery and American Poetry (2000), Robert Potts said that the book offered "not a reading of Ashbery but a way of reading Ashbery, and a critical language more appropriate to Ashbery's peculiarities than pre-packaged approaches, which merely make Ashbery reflect their own concerns".
Ashbery and his partner of more than 30 years, David Kermani (who is also his bibliographer) oscillate between a home in Hudson, near Bard, and a Manhattan apartment. Their Hudson house was built for a 19th-century coke merchant and its careful restoration, its art, furniture and stained glass windows have been the subject of newspaper and magazine features. Kermani, speaking to a local paper a few years ago, said the house is "filled with all of the objects and collections that are, I don't want to say part of the work, but are reflected in the work. It's all the same sensibility."
Ashbery appears to have had a highly developed and sophisticated taste since childhood. He remembers reading a feature in Life Magazine about a major Dada and Surrealism show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936 when he was only nine. "It was tremendously exciting and although I probably didn't say I wanted to be a surrealist when I grew up, it did take me in that direction. I started taking painting classes and looked at books about surrealism."
He was born in July 1927 on a farm in Rochester, upstate New York. His father, Chester, grew fruit and his mother, Helen, taught biology. His brother, Richard, three years younger than him, died aged nine of leukaemia in 1939. Ashbery says his parents were not particularity literary and his early exposure to poetry came via a 1912 edition of a children's encyclopedia which included anthology pieces from minor Victorian poets. "They were the sort of thing a child would recite to his parents in the parlour," he explains. "I always had a soft spot for them while acknowledging what they were."
The most important intellectual influence on his young life - everyone knew he was a bright child and he won a wartime radio show called Quiz Kids - was his grandfather, Henry Lawrence, a professor of physics at Rochester University with whom Ashbery lived for some time. "I was the first grandchild and he sort of took me over and gave me books. He could read Greek and had sets of Victorian novels and poetry. He was a very cultivated Victorian gentleman who had been born during the Civil War and was completely self-made. When he was a kid he had walked to school without shoes."
Ashbery attended the local primary school but then became a boarder at the exclusive Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He was told he had won a scholarship but learned later that his fees had been paid by a wealthy neighbour whose sons attended the school. While at Deerfield a friend, unbeknownst to Ashbery, sent some of his poems to Poetry, a prestigious magazine, under a pseudonym. When they printed two of them Ashbery was caused some unexpected anxiety as he had sent the same poems to the magazine and worried they might think the was a plagiarist.
While his interests weren't exactly frowned upon - "no one really paid much attention to them at home or at school" - he has spoken about how his brother was more likely to have grown up to be the son his parents wanted. "He was interested in sports and life on the farm, and he would probably have taken it over from my father. He would probably have been straight, and married and had children, and not been the disappointment that I undoubtedly was to my parents."
Ashbery says he became aware of his sexuality when very young. "I also had crushes on girls, but that just didn't seem to happen for me. Then just before I went to college my mother discovered I was gay from finding some letters I had written to a friend. She was obviously extremely upset but she somehow blocked it out and it was never referred to again."
In 1945 he went to Harvard to read English. Robert Hunter, now retired from teaching English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, roomed with him in their first year. "I came from a very small town in South Dakota and John was the most brilliant person I'd ever met. He was also very funny and while we were serious about literature we also spent a lot of time at the movies or drinking beer. In terms of taste he was always at least one step ahead of me, but even in this he was good fun. I remember going to see the Martha Graham dance troupe with John and we ended up getting the giggles."
Ashbery published poetry in the Harvard Advocate and eventually joined the editorial board along with Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly and Donald Hall. Hall says: "the most important thing about John, and his relationship with the other poets around Harvard, was that almost without exception we looked upon him as the best of us. Such generosities were uncommon." Hall also remembers the other editors once chiding Ashbery for not publishing in the magazine for a while and coercing him into going back to his room to get a poem. He emerged half an hour later with a poem which was published. A couple of weeks later Hall asked Ashbery whether he had gone back to his room to write it. Ashbery said he had. "Fifty years later I happened to see John in New York and I repeated that story to him and his comment was, 'I took longer then'."
Ashbery, who wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Auden, says he knew early on that he wouldn't be able to make a living from poetry and so he took an MA at Columbia, writing a thesis on Henry Green, intending to go into teaching. "But I realised I didn't want to be a professor. I wanted to write poetry and so I got a very menial job in publishing in New York where basically I was a typist." He worked at the Oxford University Press and then McGraw-Hill from 1951-55 during which time he had plays put on off-Broadway and wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies , with James Schuyler which was published in 1969.
His first collection of poetry, Turandot and Other Poems (1953) was printed in an edition of only 300 copies. "I suppose it was some kind of breakthrough," he says, "but it wasn't until a few years later with my second collection Some Trees (1956) that I felt I might have a larger audience. But they only printed 800 copies of that and it took 10 years to sell out."
Some Trees, which Ashbery says was influenced by the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, won a competition judged by Auden for inclusion in the Yale young poets series and Auden wrote a foreword. Ashbery says in terms of short-term career development the Auden link was of limited value. "The few people who followed poetry would know about it, but it wasn't like winning an Oscar." Many years later he learned that Auden hadn't wanted to award a prize but was told he wouldn't get paid for judging unless he did. "In his foreword he didn't really talk about the poetry itself and while he was my favourite poet and I find a lot of things in my work that derive from him, I do understand that he might not have been able to like my work."
By the time Some Trees was actually published Ashbery was in France on a Fulbright scholarship and remained there, on and off, for the next 10 years. He acknowledges that the move to Paris was a self-consciously romantic literary adventure but says also that in the mid- 50s "I was dying to get out of America which was at the height of the McCarthy era and the Korean War which I might have been drafted to but wasn't. I was also in a dead end job."
After a year in France Ashbery returned to take some graduate classes in French at New York University before "hoodwinking" his parents that he had more academic work to do in Paris on a thesis about the experimental writer Raymond Roussel. He returned to Paris in 1958, soon abandoned formal academic life and "just stayed on as best I could" for the next seven years. His primary income came from art criticism for the Herald Tribune and specialist art journals.
"I wrote two reviews a week. They were short and only paid five dollars but with that and a little bit of translating I barely made a living." He now says it is "depressing that I used all that energy when I could have been writing things I really wanted to write. But I feel quite proud of quite a lot of those pieces, despite the fact that I wouldn't have written any of them unless I had to somehow cobble together a living."
He says his journalistic productivity didn't affect his ability to write poetry. "I never spent that much time writing poetry. Even now I don't and I could if I wanted to. And being in Paris and writing about art was very stimulating in its own way. I always liked the idea of being a foreigner and indeed in America I have often felt like a foreigner." Ashbery lived for a time with the French writer Pierre Martory who he says "had an enormous influence on my life. It was very comforting that the things that irritated me about France he also found irritating."
He was living in Paris in 1962 when his third volume of poetry, The Tennis Court Oath, was published. It received very lit tle review coverage and "no favourable ones at all". Mark Ford says that while Some Trees was poised between an avant-garde taking apart of poetry and an allegiance to the likes of Auden, the cut-up and collage techniques in The Tennis Court Oath were just about taking apart. "It was with Rivers and Mountains (1966) he began putting back together the poetry and ever since, even though he has experimented with things like prose poems ( Three Poems, 1972), the twin columns of Litany (1979) and the very very long poem of Flow Chart (1991), they have all essentially been different ways of approaching a relatively settled, while continually evolving, style."
Rivers and Mountains was published the same year as Ashbery came home to look after his mother following the death of his father. The America he returned to was radically different to the country he had left. "It was a shock leaving Paris and Pierre, and I was extremely unhappy for a time. But I did realise something had happened in the world and the old values that I had felt were so oppressive had been somehow turned upside down and that was something I could enjoy."
He says there was also an entirely new audience for poetry. "The Beats and the hippie revolution prepared the way. I don't really like beat poetry very much but there was a general housecleaning in literature and poetry and they played their part. When I left America poetry readings were just for people like Auden. When I came back there was something on virtually every night in New York." Rivers and Mountains was shortlisted for the National Book Award and Ashbery admits to a sense of vindication. "I was glad I had hung on and not abandoned poetry. And being in this new America had a liberating effect that enabled me to go beyond the unsatisfactory experiments that made up most of the Tennis Court Oath . "
As time went on he became an increasingly public figure and lent his weight to causes such as the anti-Vietnam war movement. "I went on the huge Central Park demonstration against the war when we marched to the UN, although me and my friends did stop off at a hotel bar to have a few margaritas on the way. But I don't put things like that in my poetry because I don't feel it is efficient. I think marching is an efficient thing to do while writing poetry [about it] would be too often preaching to the choir. I don't write about my personal life either. It's not because I don't like it or am embarrassed. I just think most people have the same type of experiences; we're sort of unhappy when we are children, we fall in love and we get disillusioned when we are a little older. There is a general pattern."
Alan Jenkins says Ashbery's work was a bracing reaction to the autobiographical and confessional work of the "big American poets like Lowell in the 50s and 60s. Instead here was this kind of hum of American life. If you don't tune into it, it can be someone writing down sentences in no particular order about nothing and that can be very irritating. But if you hear it, it can be very captivating and seductive. I'm not sure that all of it becomes poetry, but when it does it is mysterious and extremely appealing."
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) was Ashbery's eighth volume of verse and at the time of publication he had given up art criticism and was teaching a poetry course at Brooklyn College. "Those prizes were very welcome. I think I was probably going to get fired from Brooklyn College as New York City was retrenching but instead I was given tenure." He went on to lecture at Harvard for a year before moving to Bard where he has been since 1990.
He has continued regularly to produce new work - apparently publishing only about a third of what he writes, with the rest going straight into his papers at Harvard - and says the poetry world operates in a parallel universe to the general public, who rarely think about poetry. "There is a thriving scene of magazines and internet sites. In the early days I got hardly any positive reviews apart from one that was written by Frank O'Hara, and he was my friend. Almost nobody liked my second book and I did wonder whether I should take up some other form of work. But I thought that I enjoyed doing them at least and I decided to do what I wanted to do."
He says while he still has sympathy for and is attracted to avant-garde art, "I've also always enjoyed more traditional art and poetry. I think there was a false division between abstract art and figurative art for instance. To like one and not the other was always ridiculous. As Schoenberg said sometime in the 1930s, 'there is still a lot of music to be written in the key of C major' and a lot of contemporary composers seem to be trying to write a new kind of music which also can sound traditional. This is kind of what I'd like to do myself. I'd like to write like Tennyson but make it new."
He says when he won the prizes it changed people's perceptions of his work: "They started to think that if they couldn't understand it there was something wrong with them. Then I think some people became a bit resentful and started saying that it's not their fault it was mine. But people without any background in literature began to read my work and I got letters saying they liked it. It was very gratifying. Despite what everyone said, I always thought that there was something simple and penetrable in my poetry screaming to be let out."
John Lawrence Ashbery
Born: Rochester, NY July 28 1927.
Education: Deerfield Academy, Mass; Harvard; Columbia; New York University.
Partner: David Kermani.
Career: 1951-54 Oxford University Press; '54-55 McGraw-Hill; '60-85 art critic; '74-90 Professor of English, Brooklyn College; '89-90 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard; 1990- Charles P Stevenson Professor, Bard College, NY.
Some poetry collections: 1953 Turandot and Other Poems; '56 Some Trees; '62 The Tennis Court Oath; '66 Rivers and Mountains; '75 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; '79 Houseboat Days; '84 A Wave; '85 Selected Poems; '91Flow Chart; '92 Hotel Lautréamont; '94 And the Stars Were Shining; '98 Wakefulness; '99 Girls on the Run; 2002 Chinese Whispers; '05 Where Shall We Wander.
Where Shall I Wander is published by Carcanet.
Parallel lines
A farmer's son, John Ashbery learned about poetry from an encyclopedia and progressed to student magazines. Part of an avant-garde New York scene in the 50s, he left the city for Paris where he worked as an art critic. His early work was barely reviewed, but his originality and range soon won him admirers and he went on to win major prizes. His latest book is published this month
Nicholas Wroe
Saturday April 23, 2005
The Guardian
Pulitzer poetry prize winner John Ashbery
In 1976 John Ashbery made a remarkable breakthrough to mainstream audiences. His collection of poems Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won three prestigious awards, beginning with the inaugural American National Book Critics Circle Award. As someone whose work had until then been routinely described as deliberately obscure, he was an unexpected winner. "It was a great surprise," he recalls. "Then it became common knowledge, months before the official announcement, that I was going to win the Pulitzer poetry prize as well." Between them came the National Book Award, which he did not believe he could win "because I was going to win the Pulitzer. I went to the National Book Award presentation ceremony anyway, and when my name was read out [as winner] I was caught in probably the only spontaneous photograph of me that exists. But it obviously made people think I was someone to be reckoned with."
The final section of the book's title poem is representative and if the sounds, textures and images conjured can be alluring, it remains challenging and radical stuff:
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.
But with his triple crown of awards Ashbery was transported from the avant-garde to the front rank of American literary life, a position he has continued to occupy for three decades. Supporters include the critic Harold Bloom, who recently identified Ashbery's As We Know (1979) as the book of poetry published in the past 25 years that has meant most to him: "He is our major poet since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955".
In some sense it is a familiar career trajectory. The critic and poet Mark Ford has written about Ashbery and his circle and says he "did have a very slow start, but he was always conscious of how avant-garde work and avant-garde writers are often neglected early on". Bloom's advocacy was important, in Ford's view, as was the supportive group Ashbery had around him. "It's true that until he was into his 40s he didn't have much of a profile, but the people who are now known as the New York School were an important coterie who always believed in him."
The New York School, comprising Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, came together as friends in the 1940s. "For a long time we were our own, very small audience," Ashbery says. "And we had no idea that we were the New York School. The idea that people might be reading us and thinking about us in that way would have seemed very far-fetched."
He admits they had a shared artistic outlook in that they were all dissatisfied with the then poetry establishment, had a leaning towards French and other European writers and set out to be more experimental than the academic poetry of the 40s and 50s. "And we all somehow ended up in New York when the arts were in a state of high ferment and were very exciting. People like Pollock and de Kooning were changing their worlds. We knew John Cage. We wanted to approximate something similar in poetry but it seemed unlikely there would ever be an audience for what we were doing."
Ashbery's 25th volume of poetry, Where Shall I Wander, is published in the UK by Carcanet this month. The doyenne of American critics, Helen Vendler, was dismissive of his early work - "wilful flashiness" - but has subsequently come to value him more. She says the new book "is rich in grimly funny images of the dance of approaching death".
"What is to be gained by writing this way?", Vendler asks of a section of his poem "Broken Tulips":
Another's narrative supplants the crawling
stock-market quotes: Like all good things
life tends to go on too long, and when we smile
in mute annoyance, pauses for a moment.
Rains bathe the rainbow,
and the shape of night is an empty cylinder,
focused at us, urging its noncompliance
closer along the way we chose to go.
"In answer, we need only imagine the poem done conventionally," she continues. "A first-person narrator evokes his erotic anxiety, his sense of spring, his feeling of taedium vitae, his foreboding of a failure of spring, and his fear of death. These topics are so worn one can hardly think of writing about them - and yet what else stirs feeling in our hearts? 'Make it new' - Pound's old command - is still as talismanic as ever."
But as Vendler has moved towards Ashbery, others have turned away. Alan Jenkins, deputy editor and former poetry editor of the TLS, where many of Ashbery's poems are first seen, says "Some Trees (1956) is one of my favourite poetry books. But for me he has become a bit samey. There are still some pleasures to be had, but I don't find the same sense of excitement. In those earlier books he developed a new voice and incorporated perhaps not very exciting aspects of American life that hadn't got into American poetry much before that. He suggested the weirdness and surreal oddness of American suburbia."
Professor M Wynn Thomas of the University of Wales, Swansea, identifies some factors that combined in Ashbery's dramatic elevation in the mid-70s. Apart from Bloom's advocacy, which provided academic credibility, Robert Lowell's death in 1977 prompted a search for the new great American poet and Ashbery's work was susceptible to a succession of critical theories. "Take postmodernism. Is his work a libertarian, democratic, catholic approach to the world that its champions claim? Or is it, as others say, the corrupt aesthetic of capitalist consumerism? You could argue that it is both." Thomas teaches Ashbery to undergraduates, and says their response is mixed: "Some are bemused but there are always one or two who are passionate about him and students are generally attracted to his omnivorous aesthetic. There are references to advertising which are then mixed with references to Dante and he doesn't prepare you for the shifts in tone and register and the bringing together of words from different vocabularies."
As an aesthete Ashbery is a paradoxical figure in that he seems willing to incorporate virtually everything. For many years he was an art critic and, as one friend puts it, "what he doesn't know about movies you could write on a postage stamp". He also has an extensive knowledge of music beyond the standard repertory. Leon Botstein is president of Bard College, 100 miles north of New York City, where Ashbery has taught since 1990. Botstein is also a conductor and says: "I have done lots of rare opera but it was John who put me onto Chausson's Le Roi Arthus which I went on to record. His taste and discernment is extraordinary and the breadth of interests is absolutely remarkable."
If the range of his references has left some readers baffled, and frustrated by the lack of clearly discernable meanings, Ashbery has stated that "a poem that communicates something that's already known to a reader is not really communicating anything to him, and in fact shows a lack of respect". Vendler has suggested that for Ashbery, "a change of mood is the chief principle of form... every poem is unique, recording a unique interval of consciousness", while in a review of David Herd's study John Ashbery and American Poetry (2000), Robert Potts said that the book offered "not a reading of Ashbery but a way of reading Ashbery, and a critical language more appropriate to Ashbery's peculiarities than pre-packaged approaches, which merely make Ashbery reflect their own concerns".
Ashbery and his partner of more than 30 years, David Kermani (who is also his bibliographer) oscillate between a home in Hudson, near Bard, and a Manhattan apartment. Their Hudson house was built for a 19th-century coke merchant and its careful restoration, its art, furniture and stained glass windows have been the subject of newspaper and magazine features. Kermani, speaking to a local paper a few years ago, said the house is "filled with all of the objects and collections that are, I don't want to say part of the work, but are reflected in the work. It's all the same sensibility."
Ashbery appears to have had a highly developed and sophisticated taste since childhood. He remembers reading a feature in Life Magazine about a major Dada and Surrealism show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936 when he was only nine. "It was tremendously exciting and although I probably didn't say I wanted to be a surrealist when I grew up, it did take me in that direction. I started taking painting classes and looked at books about surrealism."
He was born in July 1927 on a farm in Rochester, upstate New York. His father, Chester, grew fruit and his mother, Helen, taught biology. His brother, Richard, three years younger than him, died aged nine of leukaemia in 1939. Ashbery says his parents were not particularity literary and his early exposure to poetry came via a 1912 edition of a children's encyclopedia which included anthology pieces from minor Victorian poets. "They were the sort of thing a child would recite to his parents in the parlour," he explains. "I always had a soft spot for them while acknowledging what they were."
The most important intellectual influence on his young life - everyone knew he was a bright child and he won a wartime radio show called Quiz Kids - was his grandfather, Henry Lawrence, a professor of physics at Rochester University with whom Ashbery lived for some time. "I was the first grandchild and he sort of took me over and gave me books. He could read Greek and had sets of Victorian novels and poetry. He was a very cultivated Victorian gentleman who had been born during the Civil War and was completely self-made. When he was a kid he had walked to school without shoes."
Ashbery attended the local primary school but then became a boarder at the exclusive Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He was told he had won a scholarship but learned later that his fees had been paid by a wealthy neighbour whose sons attended the school. While at Deerfield a friend, unbeknownst to Ashbery, sent some of his poems to Poetry, a prestigious magazine, under a pseudonym. When they printed two of them Ashbery was caused some unexpected anxiety as he had sent the same poems to the magazine and worried they might think the was a plagiarist.
While his interests weren't exactly frowned upon - "no one really paid much attention to them at home or at school" - he has spoken about how his brother was more likely to have grown up to be the son his parents wanted. "He was interested in sports and life on the farm, and he would probably have taken it over from my father. He would probably have been straight, and married and had children, and not been the disappointment that I undoubtedly was to my parents."
Ashbery says he became aware of his sexuality when very young. "I also had crushes on girls, but that just didn't seem to happen for me. Then just before I went to college my mother discovered I was gay from finding some letters I had written to a friend. She was obviously extremely upset but she somehow blocked it out and it was never referred to again."
In 1945 he went to Harvard to read English. Robert Hunter, now retired from teaching English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, roomed with him in their first year. "I came from a very small town in South Dakota and John was the most brilliant person I'd ever met. He was also very funny and while we were serious about literature we also spent a lot of time at the movies or drinking beer. In terms of taste he was always at least one step ahead of me, but even in this he was good fun. I remember going to see the Martha Graham dance troupe with John and we ended up getting the giggles."
Ashbery published poetry in the Harvard Advocate and eventually joined the editorial board along with Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly and Donald Hall. Hall says: "the most important thing about John, and his relationship with the other poets around Harvard, was that almost without exception we looked upon him as the best of us. Such generosities were uncommon." Hall also remembers the other editors once chiding Ashbery for not publishing in the magazine for a while and coercing him into going back to his room to get a poem. He emerged half an hour later with a poem which was published. A couple of weeks later Hall asked Ashbery whether he had gone back to his room to write it. Ashbery said he had. "Fifty years later I happened to see John in New York and I repeated that story to him and his comment was, 'I took longer then'."
Ashbery, who wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Auden, says he knew early on that he wouldn't be able to make a living from poetry and so he took an MA at Columbia, writing a thesis on Henry Green, intending to go into teaching. "But I realised I didn't want to be a professor. I wanted to write poetry and so I got a very menial job in publishing in New York where basically I was a typist." He worked at the Oxford University Press and then McGraw-Hill from 1951-55 during which time he had plays put on off-Broadway and wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies , with James Schuyler which was published in 1969.
His first collection of poetry, Turandot and Other Poems (1953) was printed in an edition of only 300 copies. "I suppose it was some kind of breakthrough," he says, "but it wasn't until a few years later with my second collection Some Trees (1956) that I felt I might have a larger audience. But they only printed 800 copies of that and it took 10 years to sell out."
Some Trees, which Ashbery says was influenced by the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, won a competition judged by Auden for inclusion in the Yale young poets series and Auden wrote a foreword. Ashbery says in terms of short-term career development the Auden link was of limited value. "The few people who followed poetry would know about it, but it wasn't like winning an Oscar." Many years later he learned that Auden hadn't wanted to award a prize but was told he wouldn't get paid for judging unless he did. "In his foreword he didn't really talk about the poetry itself and while he was my favourite poet and I find a lot of things in my work that derive from him, I do understand that he might not have been able to like my work."
By the time Some Trees was actually published Ashbery was in France on a Fulbright scholarship and remained there, on and off, for the next 10 years. He acknowledges that the move to Paris was a self-consciously romantic literary adventure but says also that in the mid- 50s "I was dying to get out of America which was at the height of the McCarthy era and the Korean War which I might have been drafted to but wasn't. I was also in a dead end job."
After a year in France Ashbery returned to take some graduate classes in French at New York University before "hoodwinking" his parents that he had more academic work to do in Paris on a thesis about the experimental writer Raymond Roussel. He returned to Paris in 1958, soon abandoned formal academic life and "just stayed on as best I could" for the next seven years. His primary income came from art criticism for the Herald Tribune and specialist art journals.
"I wrote two reviews a week. They were short and only paid five dollars but with that and a little bit of translating I barely made a living." He now says it is "depressing that I used all that energy when I could have been writing things I really wanted to write. But I feel quite proud of quite a lot of those pieces, despite the fact that I wouldn't have written any of them unless I had to somehow cobble together a living."
He says his journalistic productivity didn't affect his ability to write poetry. "I never spent that much time writing poetry. Even now I don't and I could if I wanted to. And being in Paris and writing about art was very stimulating in its own way. I always liked the idea of being a foreigner and indeed in America I have often felt like a foreigner." Ashbery lived for a time with the French writer Pierre Martory who he says "had an enormous influence on my life. It was very comforting that the things that irritated me about France he also found irritating."
He was living in Paris in 1962 when his third volume of poetry, The Tennis Court Oath, was published. It received very lit tle review coverage and "no favourable ones at all". Mark Ford says that while Some Trees was poised between an avant-garde taking apart of poetry and an allegiance to the likes of Auden, the cut-up and collage techniques in The Tennis Court Oath were just about taking apart. "It was with Rivers and Mountains (1966) he began putting back together the poetry and ever since, even though he has experimented with things like prose poems ( Three Poems, 1972), the twin columns of Litany (1979) and the very very long poem of Flow Chart (1991), they have all essentially been different ways of approaching a relatively settled, while continually evolving, style."
Rivers and Mountains was published the same year as Ashbery came home to look after his mother following the death of his father. The America he returned to was radically different to the country he had left. "It was a shock leaving Paris and Pierre, and I was extremely unhappy for a time. But I did realise something had happened in the world and the old values that I had felt were so oppressive had been somehow turned upside down and that was something I could enjoy."
He says there was also an entirely new audience for poetry. "The Beats and the hippie revolution prepared the way. I don't really like beat poetry very much but there was a general housecleaning in literature and poetry and they played their part. When I left America poetry readings were just for people like Auden. When I came back there was something on virtually every night in New York." Rivers and Mountains was shortlisted for the National Book Award and Ashbery admits to a sense of vindication. "I was glad I had hung on and not abandoned poetry. And being in this new America had a liberating effect that enabled me to go beyond the unsatisfactory experiments that made up most of the Tennis Court Oath . "
As time went on he became an increasingly public figure and lent his weight to causes such as the anti-Vietnam war movement. "I went on the huge Central Park demonstration against the war when we marched to the UN, although me and my friends did stop off at a hotel bar to have a few margaritas on the way. But I don't put things like that in my poetry because I don't feel it is efficient. I think marching is an efficient thing to do while writing poetry [about it] would be too often preaching to the choir. I don't write about my personal life either. It's not because I don't like it or am embarrassed. I just think most people have the same type of experiences; we're sort of unhappy when we are children, we fall in love and we get disillusioned when we are a little older. There is a general pattern."
Alan Jenkins says Ashbery's work was a bracing reaction to the autobiographical and confessional work of the "big American poets like Lowell in the 50s and 60s. Instead here was this kind of hum of American life. If you don't tune into it, it can be someone writing down sentences in no particular order about nothing and that can be very irritating. But if you hear it, it can be very captivating and seductive. I'm not sure that all of it becomes poetry, but when it does it is mysterious and extremely appealing."
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) was Ashbery's eighth volume of verse and at the time of publication he had given up art criticism and was teaching a poetry course at Brooklyn College. "Those prizes were very welcome. I think I was probably going to get fired from Brooklyn College as New York City was retrenching but instead I was given tenure." He went on to lecture at Harvard for a year before moving to Bard where he has been since 1990.
He has continued regularly to produce new work - apparently publishing only about a third of what he writes, with the rest going straight into his papers at Harvard - and says the poetry world operates in a parallel universe to the general public, who rarely think about poetry. "There is a thriving scene of magazines and internet sites. In the early days I got hardly any positive reviews apart from one that was written by Frank O'Hara, and he was my friend. Almost nobody liked my second book and I did wonder whether I should take up some other form of work. But I thought that I enjoyed doing them at least and I decided to do what I wanted to do."
He says while he still has sympathy for and is attracted to avant-garde art, "I've also always enjoyed more traditional art and poetry. I think there was a false division between abstract art and figurative art for instance. To like one and not the other was always ridiculous. As Schoenberg said sometime in the 1930s, 'there is still a lot of music to be written in the key of C major' and a lot of contemporary composers seem to be trying to write a new kind of music which also can sound traditional. This is kind of what I'd like to do myself. I'd like to write like Tennyson but make it new."
He says when he won the prizes it changed people's perceptions of his work: "They started to think that if they couldn't understand it there was something wrong with them. Then I think some people became a bit resentful and started saying that it's not their fault it was mine. But people without any background in literature began to read my work and I got letters saying they liked it. It was very gratifying. Despite what everyone said, I always thought that there was something simple and penetrable in my poetry screaming to be let out."
John Lawrence Ashbery
Born: Rochester, NY July 28 1927.
Education: Deerfield Academy, Mass; Harvard; Columbia; New York University.
Partner: David Kermani.
Career: 1951-54 Oxford University Press; '54-55 McGraw-Hill; '60-85 art critic; '74-90 Professor of English, Brooklyn College; '89-90 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard; 1990- Charles P Stevenson Professor, Bard College, NY.
Some poetry collections: 1953 Turandot and Other Poems; '56 Some Trees; '62 The Tennis Court Oath; '66 Rivers and Mountains; '75 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; '79 Houseboat Days; '84 A Wave; '85 Selected Poems; '91Flow Chart; '92 Hotel Lautréamont; '94 And the Stars Were Shining; '98 Wakefulness; '99 Girls on the Run; 2002 Chinese Whispers; '05 Where Shall We Wander.
Where Shall I Wander is published by Carcanet.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
First Day of Summer
From The Last Avant-Garde: "On one occasion Ashbery summed up their [Ashbery’s and Kenneth Koch’s] differing approaches to poetic closure. You 'put a simile in the last line as a sort of sculptor’s last loving pat,' Ashbery observed…, 'whereas I try to erect a smokescreen near the end of my poems so I can withdraw unperceived—I never like to be around for the last line.'"
Summer by John Ashbery
There is that sound like the wind
Forgetting in the branches that means something
Nobody can translate. And there is the sobering “later on,”
When you consider what a thing meant, and put it down.
For the time being the shadow is ample
And hardly seen, divided among the twigs of a tree,
The trees of a forest, just as life is divided up
Between you and me, and among all the others out there.
And the thinning-out phase follows
The period of reflection. And suddenly, to be dying
Is not a little or mean or cheap thing,
Only wearying, the heat unbearable,
And also the little mindless constructions put upon
Our fantasies of what we did: summer, the ball of pine needles,
The loose fates serving our acts, with token smiles,
Carrying out their instructions too accurately—
Too late to cancel them now—and winter, the twitter
Of cold stars at the pane, that describes with broad gestures
That state of being that is not so big after all.
Summer involves going down as a steep flight of steps
To a narrow ledge over the water. Is this it, then,
This iron comfort, these reasonable taboos,
Or did you mean it when you stopped? And the face
Resembles yours, the one reflected in the water.
Summer by John Ashbery
There is that sound like the wind
Forgetting in the branches that means something
Nobody can translate. And there is the sobering “later on,”
When you consider what a thing meant, and put it down.
For the time being the shadow is ample
And hardly seen, divided among the twigs of a tree,
The trees of a forest, just as life is divided up
Between you and me, and among all the others out there.
And the thinning-out phase follows
The period of reflection. And suddenly, to be dying
Is not a little or mean or cheap thing,
Only wearying, the heat unbearable,
And also the little mindless constructions put upon
Our fantasies of what we did: summer, the ball of pine needles,
The loose fates serving our acts, with token smiles,
Carrying out their instructions too accurately—
Too late to cancel them now—and winter, the twitter
Of cold stars at the pane, that describes with broad gestures
That state of being that is not so big after all.
Summer involves going down as a steep flight of steps
To a narrow ledge over the water. Is this it, then,
This iron comfort, these reasonable taboos,
Or did you mean it when you stopped? And the face
Resembles yours, the one reflected in the water.
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