专题: 约翰阿什伯利

王敖

类别

Dates of Birth/Death: 1927-
Gender: Male
Literary Periods: American Confessional Period, 1960-; Postwar Period, 1945-; Twentieth Century, 1900-1999
Literary Movements: Lesbian/Gay Writing, 1885-; New York School; Postmodernism 1963-
Nationality: American/North American


传略

Ashbery, John
from: Literature Online biography
Adapted from data developed by the H. W. Wilson Company, Inc.
Copyright © Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 1996-2000 and H. W. Wilson Company, Inc.





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ASHBERY, JOHN (1927 --). John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He is the author of nineteen books of poetry, including Girls on the Run: A Poem (Carcanet, 1999); Wakefulness (1998); Can You Hear, Bird (1995); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); Hotel Lautr閍mont (1992); Flow Chart (1991); April Galleons (1987); A Wave (1984), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also written Reported Sightings (1989), a book of art criticism; a collection of plays, and a novel, A Nest of Ninnies (1969), with James Schuyler. Ashbery was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Po閟ie (Brussels), and has also received the Bollingen Prize, the English Speaking Union Prize, the Feltrinelli Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants, the MLA Common Wealth Award in Literature, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Frank O\'Hara Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He divides his time between New York City and Hudson, New York. Ashbery was the first of two sons of Helen (Lawrence) Ashbery, who had been a biology teacher before her marriage, and Chester Frederick Ashbery, a fruit farmer at Sodus near Lake Ontario. A solitary child, especially after the death of his younger brother at the age of nine, John Ashbery divided his time among Sodus, where he spent his summers working in the orchards until he was twenty; Rochester, where his grandfather, Henry Lawrence, was chairman of the University of Rochester\'s physics department; and Pultneyville, the town to which his grandfather retired. \'He was a very cultured sort of Victorian gentleman who knew Latin and read all the classics,\' Ashbery told Anna Quindlen in a New York Post interview (February 7, 1976). \'I resemble him and I took after him.\'

The boy\'s intellectual precocity was recognized early. Scoring highest in a current events contest, he won an anthology of poetry that led him to the discovery that rhyme is not essential to verse. Before he was sixteen he was a winner of a contest in Rochester that made him one of \'The Quiz Kids,\' the popular radio program of the 1940\'s that starred gifted children. A Sodus neighbor furthered his education by providing him with a scholarship to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for his last two years of high school. He then entered Harvard College, where, as a freshman, he was encouraged by Theodore Spencer, the literary critic and teacher, and was named class poet. When a junior, Ashbery joined the editorial board of the university\'s undergraduate literary magazine, the Harvard Advocate, a position that led to close friendships with two of the future \'New York\' poets, Kenneth Koch and Frank O\'Hara. Although he had been writing poems since the age of eight, Ashbery at first wanted to be a painter and at eighteen his interests concentrated on music. Nevertheless, his B.A. degree from Harvard College in 1949 was in English, and his honors thesis concerned W. H. Auden, whose influence was evident in the poems he began publishing in the late 1940\'s.

After graduating from Harvard, Ashbery attended Columbia University, where he studied contemporary literature. He obtained his M.A. degree in English, in 1951, after submitting a thesis on Henry Green, the contemporary British novelist whose impersonal, witty, almost plotless fiction perhaps later served as a model for Ashbery\'s only novel, A Nest of Ninnies (Dutton, 1969). The result of a collaboration with the poet James Schuyler, the comedy was described by the New Yorker (May 24, 1969) as \'the saga of a suburban social circle whose deeds consist mainly of eating, traveling, and idle conversation.\' The work supports one critic\'s statement in the Nation (December 12, 1966) that Ashbery is among that group of artists \'who never quite seem fully serious about their plainly serious art.\'

Characteristically, Ashbery\'s novel revealed nothing of his personal life. In a period notable for its confessional poets, few poets are less confessional than John Ashbery. It was therefore an unusual surrender of privacy when he reviewed his past life for poet-critic Richard Kostelanetz in a long New York Times article (May 23, 1976). \'In the early 50\'s,\' Ashbery said, \'I went through a period of intense depression and doubt. I couldn\'t write for a couple of years.\' Although not an \'intensely political person,\' he went on, his personal \'nadir\' coincided with America\'s descent into the slough of McCarthyism and the Korean War.

For five years, from 1951 to 1955, Ashbery worked as a copywriter for Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill, confining his poetry writing to weekends. In 1952 he shared the YMHA Discovery Prize with two other young poets, and in 1953 had his first volume published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, in New York City. Entitled Turandot and Other Poems, the book received little critical attention until 1956, when all but two of its poems were published in Some Trees, Ashbery\'s first full-length collection. Turandot and Other Poems signalled Ashbery\'s early and continued interest in poetic drama. The work that gave the book its title was a little play in three scenes plus a sestina which, according to Richard Howard\'s essay on Ashbery in Alone With America (1969), suggests the \'embarrassment of riches\' so often encountered in the poet\'s work.

In an odd coincidence, W. H. Auden, Ashbery\'s honors thesis subject, was sole judge in the 1955 selection of Some Trees as winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition. Auden\'s non-committal introduction to the Yale University Press edition in 1956 associated Ashbery with those modern poets who discovered that in dreams and daydreams \'the imaginative life of the human individual stubbornly continues to live by the old magical notions.\' Although reviewers of Some Trees acknowledged Ashbery\'s virtues, they were variously put off by his apparent impenetrability. Chiding him for manufacturing \'calculated oddities,\' Donald Hall in the Saturday Review (June 16, 1956) nevertheless praised the poet\'s \'fine ear and an honest eccentricity of diction which, used properly, excites the attention and speaks with an oblique precision.\' Like Wallace Stevens, whose influence James Dickey and others discerned in Some Trees, Ashbery began with poetry that was, as Kostelanetz described it, \'rather exquisite in surface, intricate in form, baffling in statement, indefinite in perspective, and disconnected as a reading experience.\' At first Ashbery worked deliberately towards a poetry as singular as the serial music of John Cage or the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Yet Some Trees also showed him to be aware of conventions and complicated literary forms, striving towards a goal that Richard Howard says has persisted throughout his poetry--to locate an elusive order of existence just beyond reach.

Almost six years separated Some Trees from the next major volume of Ashbery\'s poems, The Tennis Court Oath (1962). Meanwhile, in 1955 he won a Fulbright fellowship to France, to translate and edit an anthology of contemporary French poetry. He was based for the first year at the University of Montpellier, but later transferred to Paris when his Fulbright was renewed for a second year. Ashbery taught American studies at Rennes and published three substantial articles on Raymond Roussel, the idiosyncratic modern French novelist and dramatist whose innovations in fiction and writing methods have been widely influential, and whose interest in the power of linguistic or lexical association to generate description and narrative has been central to Ashbery\'s poetic method. In 1957 he began to contribute art criticism to Art News magazine, which also served as a forum for Frank O\'Hara, Barbara Guest, and other \'New York\' poets. That same year he returned to the United States to work briefly towards a doctorate at New York University. In 1958 he again went to Paris, where he was to remain for ten years.

On the staff of Art News and as a writer for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, for which he began writing art criticism in 1960, Ashbery found an outlet for his long-standing interest in contemporary painting. \'American painting,\' he has said, \'seemed the most exciting art around. American poetry was very traditional at that time, and there was no modern poetry in the sense that there was modern painting. So one got one\'s inspiration from watching the experiments\' in the other arts. By using words abstractly, as painters used paint, he hoped to \'give meaning free play and the fullest possible range.\' Some critics have encountered in Ashbery\'s poetry a painter\'s visual sense, as if he were executing still lives in language, and many of his titles, like \'The Painter\' and \'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,\' refer directly to the art world. While living in France, Ashbery wrote for the New Republic and Art International, and was published in the influential French journal, Tel Quel. He edited Locus Solus magazine from 1960 to 1962 and Art and Literature from 1963 to 1966. A selection of Ashbery\'s art criticism has been published under the title of Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987.

In the 1960\'s Ashbery published two major volumes of poetry: The Tennis Court Oath (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1962) and Rivers and Mountains (Holt, 1966). Assessing them for Commentary (October 1975), John Romano saw in them \'the freest possible imagination; detached, nervelessly hallucinating in lurid colors...their obscurity perhaps insuperable.\' Most critics, however, shared the opinion of Steven Koch, whose review of Rivers and Mountains in Nation (December 12, 1966) hailed that volume as a vindicating recovery from the \'progressively disintegrating poetic\' of The Tennis Court Oath, in which the influence of collage and action painting seemed to culminate in such seemingly undecipherable poems as \'Leaving the Atocha Station\' and \'Europe.\' The Tennis Court Oath has remained problematic for many of Ashbery\'s critics: Harold Bloom called it \'a fearful disaster\'. Yet in its capacity to thwart readerly expectation it continues to exert fascination. In 1966 Rivers and Mountains became a nominee for the National Book Award.

The decade 1956-66 saw a steady rise in Ashbery\'s reputation, one by-product of which he himself witnessed when, after long neglect, he returned briefly from France in 1963 and gave a reading at the Living Theatre in New York City to a packed house. In the fall of 1965 he settled in New York City, where he became executive editor of Art News. By then his association, as their foremost representative, with the \'New York Poets\' was taken for granted. In 1969 John Bernard Meyers, the director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, edited an anthology, The Poets of the New York School (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press), in which he pointed out the influences of Surrealism and abstract art on such of its members as Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O\'Hara, and James Schuyler, all of whom were involved in art, poetry, fiction, drama, and publishing.

Of Ashbery\'s The Double Dream of Spring (Dutton, 1970) John Hollander wrote in Harper\'s (April 1970): \'This magnificent book by one of America\'s finest poets is an emergence into the light of a new clarity and beauty, as if from a longish, winding tunnel.\' Not all reviewers agreed that Ashbery had arrived at clarity. John W. Hughes, for example, complained in the Saturday Review (August 8, 1970) that Ashbery, \'the Doris Day of modernist poetry,\' was still playing \'nasty Symbolist-Imagist tricks on his audience while maintaining a facade of earnest innocuousness.\' In general, however, critics agreed with Karl Malkoff, who observed in his Crowell\'s Handbook of Contemporary Poetry (1973): \'There is more abstraction, more discursive statements than a reader can take hold of.\' Ashbery had not become an \'easy\' poet, he added, but in leaning \'more and more to quasi-meditative poems,\' he had made his work more accessible.

Three Poems (Viking, 1972), which Ashbery has called his favorite book, appears on the page as expository prose. The poet has explained that he wrote in prose because his impulse was not to repeat himself. Ashbery\'s \'marvelous ravel of stunning sentences,\' as one reviewer described it, seems to have been created by a principle of inclusion rather than the earlier one of elision. Richard Howard in Poetry (August 8, 1970) has interpreted the three poems as a sequential trilogy: the first, \'The New Spirit,\' about fifty pages long, \'is said by the poet to record a spiritual awakening to earthly things\'; the second, \'The System,\' about the same length, is \'a love story with cosmological overtones\'; the third, \'The Recital,\' is \'a much briefer embroidery on the poet\'s relation to his victories in love and spiritual awakening.\'

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975) won the National Book Critics Circle prize, the National Book Award for poetry, and the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. One of its passages indicated that Ashbery was conscious of its obscurities:


I know that I braid too much my own
Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.
They are private and always will be.
Where then are the private turns of event
Destined to boom later like golden chimes
Released over a city from a highest tower?
According to Richard Howard, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror contains precisely those \'private turns of events.\' They create, he went on, \'among the finest things American poetry has to show, and certainly the finest things Ashbery has yet shown.\' Although a few reviewers still found Ashbery\'s work impersonal, unshapely, or incoherent, most agreed that Self-Portrait encompassed the qualities that Kostelanetz inventoried in his article: \'an extraordinary feeling for language tone and rhythm, a powerful memory for his experience of art, an imagination that is more auditory than visual, an apparently limitless capacity for astonishingly fresh verbal combinations.\'

Throughout his career Ashbery has continued the interest in poetic drama that was prefigured by Turandot. In 1952 his one-act play The Heroes was produced off-Broadway by the Living Theatre and again, in 1953, by the Artists\' Theater. Eventually published by Grove Press in Artists\' Theater (1960), the play is an incongruous mix of the ancient and modern and deals with Trojan War heroes in an unspecified setting. When he reviewed the second production of The Heroes for Commonweal (June 26, 1953), Richard Hayes called it \'a winner all the way.\' \'A brilliant little charade on classical themes,\' Hayes wrote, \'it bristles throughout with the echoes of mythology, holding all in the allusive net of mocking and irreverent sensibility, cultivated without pedantry, witty but never vulgar.\' Another of Ashbery\'s plays, The Compromise, in three acts, was produced in 1955 with the subtitle Queen of the Caribou by the Poets Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was published in The Hasty Papers (1960). In 1964 Ashbery published a one-act drama, The Philosopher, in Art and Literature magazine.

Among contemporary poets, John Ashbery is at once the most consistent and the most various. He writes to music. \'I\'ve always felt myself to be a rather frustrated composer who was trying to do with words what musicians are able to do with notes. The importance of meaning that\'s beyond expression in words is what I\'ve always been attracted to.\' As his output has steadily increased, and especially with recent books such as Flow Chart, Hotel Lautr閍mont and Wakefulness, his stature has been increasingly widely recognised. He continues to draw his poetic material from sources of all kinds: \'Come On, Dear,\' the title of one poem in Wakefulness was an overheard remark from an old lady to her dog in a New York Street; and he frequently draws on and incorporates printed material of all kinds. In Statutes of Liberty: the New York School of Poets (Macmillan, 1993), Geoff Ward identifies Ashbery\'s \'indefatigable appetite for play\' as the aspect of his work that most irritated \'critics of a moral bent\', and warns against the distortions of reading involved in the kind of approach Harold Bloom brings to his work. Marjorie Perloff (in an essay in Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, Cornell University Press, 1980) reminds us of the prime importance of dream as a way of knowing in Ashbery\'s work, and points out the importance of Gertrude Stein\'s influence, of whose writing in Tender Buttons Ashbery remarked that \'the poem is a hymn to possibility\'. One early introduction to Ashbery\'s work is David Shapiro\'s John Ashbery: an introduction to the poetry (Columbia University Press, 1979), and the early writings are fully described in John Ashbery: a comprehensive bibliography including his art criticism, and with selected notes from unpublished materials by David K. Kermani (New York: Garland, 1976), with a foreword by John Ashbery. More recently, John Shoptaw\'s On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery\'s Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1994) surveys more of the work. A fine collection of contemporary critical responses will be found in The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Susan M. Schultz (1999).

As early as December 1966 the critic Howard Wamsley predicted in Poetry magazine that Ashbery might \'dominate the last third of the century as Yeats [...] dominated the first,\' and his twenty or so books now constitute a monument to that claim. In a recent poem he wrote that \'There is still something I\'d like to explain, / yet can\'t be sure I\'m ready yet.\' (\'Hierarchy of the Unexpected\', London Review of Books, 1999), lines which sum up the elusive character of his poetry, and the certainty that he will continue to attract critical commentary in the years to come.

IP, 2000



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Adapted from data developed by the H.W. Wilson Company, Inc. New material © Bell and Howell Information and Learning 2000


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[此贴子已经被作者于2004-1-18 4:54:25编辑过]

王敖

著作(到2001年):   他的最新诗集叫"传话游戏"(Chinese Whisper)

1. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Turandot, and other poems , New York (1953)  
2. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Some trees; with a foreword by W. H. Auden , New Haven (1956)  
3. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Melville [by] Jean-Jaques Mayoux; translated by John Ashbery , New York (1960)  
4. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Murder in Montmartre, by No雔 Vexin translated from the French by Jonas Berry [pseud.] and Lawrence G. Blochman , New York (1960)  
5. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The tennis court oath; a book of poems , Middletown Conn. (1962)  
6. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Rivers and mountains , New York (1966)  
7. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Sunrise in suburbia , New York (1968)  
8. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Three madrigals , New York (1968)  
9. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Light in art; edited by Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery , New York (1969)  
10. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
A nest of ninnies , New York (1969)  
11. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The double dream of spring , New York (1970)  
12. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The new spirit , New York (1970)  
13. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Avant-garde art; edited by T. B. Hess and J. Ashbery , London (1971)  
14. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The grand eccentrics , New York (1971)  
15. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Painterly painting; edited by Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery , New York (1971)  
16. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Three poems , New York (1972)  
17. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Penguin modern poets, 24: Kenward Elmslie, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler; guest editor John Ashbery , Harmondsworth (1974)  
18. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Muck arbour: the speculations of William Trainor; Bruce Marcus [ed. John Ashbery] , Chicago (1975)  
19. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Self-portrait in a convex mirror: poems , New York (1975)  
20. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The Vermont notebook , Los Angeles (1975)  
21. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Houseboat days: poems , New York (1977)  
22. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
How I wrote certain of my books; Raymond Rouissel [sic]; Translated, with notes and a bibliography, by Trevor Winkfield; with two essays on Roussel by John Ashbery; and a translation of Canto III of Nouvelles impressions d\'Afrique by Kenneth Koch , New York (1977)  
23. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Three plays [The heroes - The compromise - The philosopher] , Calais, Vt. (1978)  
24. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
As we know: poems , New York (1979)  
25. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The dice cup: selected prose poems; Max Jacob; edited and with introd. by Michael Brownstein; translated from the French by John Ashbery匸et al.] , New York (1979)  
26. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Shadow train: poems , New York (1981)  
27. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Fairfield Porter: realist painter in an age of abstraction; essays by John Ashbery and Kenworth Moffett; contributions by John Bernard Myers匸et al.] , Boston (1982)  
28. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Kitaj: paintings, drawings, pastels; [with contributions by] John Ashbery匸et al.] , New York (1983)  
29. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
A wave: poems , New York (1984)  
30. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Selected poems , New York (1985)  
31. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Fant鬽as; Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre; introduction by John Ashbery , New York (1986)  
32. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
April galleons: poems , New York (1987)  
33. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Collected poems, 1934-1953, edited by Walford Davies and R.N. Maud , London (1988)  
34. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Reported sightings: art chronicles, 1957-1987; John Ashbery; edited by David Bergman , New York (1989)  
35. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Every question but one; Pierre Martory; translated by John Ashbery , New York (1990)  
36. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Flow chart , New York and Manchester (1991)  
37. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Selected poems; Pierre Reverdy; selected by Mary Ann Caws; translated by John Ashbery, Mary Ann Caws & Patricia Terry; edited by Timothy Bent and Germaine Br閑 , Newcastle upon Tyne (1991)  
38. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Hebdomeros: with Monsieur Dudron\'s adventure and other metaphysical writings [of] Giorgio De Chirico; introduction by John Ashbery; trans. John Ashbery , Cambridge, MA (1992)  
39. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Hotel Lautr閍mont , New York (1992)  
40. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
And the stars were shining , New York (1994)  
41. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The landscape is behind the door; Pierre Martory; translated by John Ashbery , Riverdale-on-Hudson (1994)  
42. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Can you hear, bird: poems , New York (1995)  
43. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The heavy bear: Delmore Schwartz\'s life versus his poetry: a lecture delivered at the sixty-seventh general meeting of the English Literary Society of Japan on 21st May 1995 , Tokyo (1996)  
44. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Pistils; Mapplethorpe; essay by John Ashbery , London (1996)  
45. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
[Contributor to] The Phoenix Bookshop: a nest of memories. ed. Bob Wilson, Kenneth Doubrava, John LeBow , Candia (1997)  
46. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The mooring of starting art: the first five books of poetry , Hopewell (1997)  
47. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
The tennis court oath: book of poems , [Middletown, Conn.] ([1997?])  
48. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Novel , New York (1998)  
49. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Wakefulness: poems , New York (1998)  
50. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Girls on the run: a poem , New York (1999)


51. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Who knows what constitues a life , Calais (1999)  
52. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
100 multiple choice questions [poems originally published in Adventures in Poetry magazine, 1970] , 2000
53. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Other traditions , Cambridge, Mass. (2000)  
54. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Untitled passages by Henri Michaux; ed. Cahterine de Zegher; interview by John Ashbery; essays by Raymond Bellour [et al] , New York (2000)  
55. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Your name here , New York (2000)  
56. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
As umbrellas follow rain , Lenox, Mass. (2001)  
57. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Jane Hammond: the John Ashbery collaboration, 1993-2001 , Cleveland (2001)  
58. Ashbery, John  [Author Record]
Joe Brainard: a retrospective; Constance M. Lewallen, essays by John Ashbery and Carter Ratcliff , Berkeley (2001)

王敖

关于早年生活的访谈




            

dictionariesC.O.D.Webster\'sShakespearecombined







  

Full text
Ford, Mark: The Boyhood of John Ashbery: A Conversation
PN Review (Manchester) (29:4) [March-April 2003] , p.14-21.





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Ford, Mark: The Boyhood of John Ashbery: A Conversation



PN Review (Manchester); March-April 2003




John Ashbery in conversation with Mark Ford, ISBN 1-903291-12-7, 112 pp, approx. Paperback, £10.99, © Between The Lines, 9 Woodstock Road, London N4 3ET




MARK FORD: I thought we might start chronologically: you were born on 28 July 1927. Does that make you a Leo?



JOHN ASHBERY: Yes, with Virgo rising. I was born at 8.20 am, and there was a thunderstorm at the time, which may be significant.

That was in Rochester?
Yes. My parents lived near a small farming community about thirty miles east of Rochester, called Sodus. My father and his father had bought some farmland near Lake Ontario, where they grow a lot of fruit, mainly apples, cherries and peaches. There is a narrow band along the edge of Lake Ontario where fruit is grown. Just a few miles south the climate and the crops are different.

Did he plant the fruit trees himself?
Yes, with his own hands, like Johnny Appleseed! His father had owned a rubber stamp factory in Buffalo, which I can\'t imagine was very prosperous --- at least I don\'t think they produced them in mass quantities. For whatever reason, the Ashbery family wanted to leave the city, and they bought this farm in around 1915.

Was your mother keen on farming as well?
No. She was from the city and her father was a professor of Physics at the University of Rochester. In fact he was quite famous locally and did the first x-ray experiments in the US outside of New York City. This fact was often alluded to solemnly in family conversations. I think we sometimes omitted the \'outside of New York City\' when doing so. I knew he was the grand old man of our family, but was surprised when his obituary appeared in the New York Times when he died in 1954.

This is Henry Lawrence.
Yes. He was the head of the Physics Department for forty years, and was a friend of George Eastman.

Of Kodak?
Yes --- I think I met George Eastman when I was about four years old when my grandfather took me to a reception at his mansion, which is still there, and is now a famous photography museum.

Did your grandfather invest in Kodak?
No. He did, but not early enough. Eastman wanted him to and offered to lend him money to do so, but my grandfather was very suspicious of this newfangled gadget so he didn\'t do so at a time when he could have made a killing. He was very frugal. He was born in a very pretty little village, Pultneyville, on Lake Ontario. He was very poor, and walked several miles to a one-room schoolhouse and walked several miles to school, and somehow managed to educate himself.

How did your parents meet?
At a dance one night in or near this village, where her family used to spend the summer. In fact she probably was well on the way to becoming an old maid. She was thirty-two when they married, and my father was thirty-four. I think her sorority sisters at the University of Rochester --- who were family friends --- always thought she had married beneath herself, but it was probably lucky she managed to catch somebody when she was already thirty-two. Although she was very pretty at that time, she was very shy, extremely shy, much of which has rubbed off on me.

Was she more intellectual than your father?
No, not at all. Neither was intellectual. She studied Biology in college, and taught Biology at High School at Albion, a small town west of Rochester. But her father, my grandfather, read a great deal in addition to books about Physics. He had the works of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Huxley, Tyndall, all of which he actually read, and I think he read Greek also --- plus the works of Tennyson, Browning, Jean Ingelow and Shakespeare. He had a wonderful Victorian edition of Shakespeare --- which I still have --- including ghoulish steel-engraved illustrations of things like skulls with snakes emerging from their eye-sockets. Actually I read Shakespeare from about the age of ten or eleven. I didn\'t understand much, but I also had Lamb\'s Tales from Shakespeare.

Your first schools were in Rochester rather than Sodus: why was that?
Until I was about seven I lived mainly with my grandparents, which I much preferred, since it was in the city, and there were lots of kids to play with. In Sodus there was no kindergarten, so I went to kindergarten in Rochester, and also part of first grade. Then my grandfather retired in 1934, and moved to the cottage they had in Pultneyville, which they\'d had remodelled, or as we\'d now say, winterised. After that I still used to spend almost every weekend with them --- my grandfather would come and pick me up at the school in Sodus on Friday and drive me to their house, about six miles away, and my parents would come and get me on Sunday.

Why did you spend so much time with them?



14


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Well, I didn\'t get along with my father. He had a violent temper. He could be very, not brutal, but he used to wallop me a great deal, often for no reason I could detect, so I felt always as though I were living on the edge of a live volcano --- although, on the other hand, when he wasn\'t being that way, he could be very nice. But my grandfather was much nicer. I resembled him physically much more than anyone in the family. He had this wonderful smell of wool and pipe tobacco --- I suppose the sort of \'old man\'s smell\' that makes Japanese girls faint with disgust.

He sounds somewhat like an eminent Victorian.
Yes. He was born in 1864, and my grandmother in 1867. I felt very happily plugged into the Victorian era at their place --- despite my familiarity with Hard Times and Oliver Twist… Also my parents quarrelled a great deal, though I never knew about what exactly.

Was the farm successful?
Not really. It was the Depression. I think one reason I lived so much with my grandparents when I was young was because I was a mouth to feed, and by that time I had a little brother; it was a way of saving money. I remember my father once opened a store in Rochester where he sold apples from the farm. I don\'t think that lasted very long, but I guess it was typical of the times --- people were selling apples on street corners all over. A very early memory is being in the store and smelling the apples.

How old were you when your brother Richard was born?
I was three and a half. In fact one of my earliest datable memories is of my mother coming back from the hospital after she\'d given birth to my brother, and my father carrying her up the stairs to her room, like a romantic hero, à la Gone with the Wind, though this was long before that movie was made, and my going up to her room after and doing a little dance to entertain her, a sort of jig, I guess… And the other thing that I remember and can date was my grandfather coming home and telling my grandmother that George Eastman had died. In fact he\'d committed suicide. That was in 1932, I think.

Snow features pretty often in your poetry. Does this come from your childhood?
No doubt. My father\'s farm was about a mile from Lake Ontario, just due south, and often snowbound. Even three miles further south it would not be snowing, while we were up to our necks in it.

How did you amuse yourself? Did you have neighbours?
There were some. But I didn\'t see much of them.



Did you have the book you allude to in \'The Skaters\', Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do?



No, I didn\'t have that one, but I did have The Book of Knowledge, which had similar advice on Things to Make and Things to Do. I don\'t think I ever actually did any of them because they required objects like hollowed-out elder branches, and I never knew quite where to find such things! But in the summer, when I spent as much time as possible with my grandparents, I had a whole group of friends whose parents came from Rochester and vacationed by the lake.

Your first poem was \'The Battle\', which you wrote when you were how old?
Eight. Actually, one influence on it might have been the movie of A Midsummer\'s Night\'s Dream, made in 1935, with Mickey Rooney as Puck. I remember boning up on Lamb\'s version before seeing this movie in which there were lots of fairies sliding down moonbeams and so on.

Well, your poem --- which is about a conflict between fairies and bunnies --- has the lines:
The fairies are riding upon their snowflakes,
And the tall haystacks are great sugar mounds.
These are the fairies\' camping grounds.

Very Shakespearean…
Yes! And at the time it seemed quite perfect to me. It even ended up being read by the best-selling author in America, who at the time was Mary Roberts Rinehart. She mainly wrote mystery stories, a number of which featured a female detective named Tish. She was very famous and lived on 5th Avenue --- though I\'d never been to New York City, I\'d heard of 5th Avenue. Anyway, her son married my mother\'s cousin, and on Christmas day, so the story goes, this poem was read aloud in her apartment to great acclaim. Alas, I wasn\'t there, and in fact didn\'t get to New York City until I was seventeen years old.

Yet despite this early triumph, you were more interested in music and painting while you were growing up?
Well, I\'d always drawn ever since I was old enough to hold a pencil, and I took piano lessons also from an early age. Then my school at Sodus dropped its art department, so I was given special dispensation to take Friday afternoon off to go into Rochester to an art class for children at the art museum there.

Was it in Rochester that you used to see Mary Wellington, the girl you were in love with?
No. She used to come and stay with her grandmother in Pultneyville --- which is a rather elegant place with pretty, early nineteenth-century houses right along the lake. Mary\'s grandmother had a cottage there, and next door to us was another girl called Carol, the daughter of one of my mother\'s college friends, whom I also liked very much. I could never make up my mind which one I liked best, though things never really got very far physically. It wasn\'t until I was about thirteen that I actually kissed a girl --- and that was about the last time too! Not that I didn\'t like it… And another girl who used to come and stay was Eleanor (I must be sounding like Marcel on the beach at Balbec in A l\'ombre



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des jeunes filles en fleurs!) She was nicknamed Barney after the famous racing driver Barney Oldfield…

Doesn\'t he feature in the novel you co-wrote with Jimmy Schuyler, A Nest of Ninnies?
Yes, Jimmy dropped him in. Anyway, I had a big crush on Barney; we\'d go to the movies and hold hands, and then nothing else would happen, and neither of us would ever allude to this. But my biggest crush was on a girl named Frances, whom none of my friends knew. She was in my art class. She was so beautiful that I felt a painful sensation like an electric shock whenever I saw her. Though I barely knew her, I asked her one day if she\'d like to visit the current show at the museum --- an exhibition of Van Gogh reproductions! --- and while we looked at the pictures I told her I loved her. She seemed quite horrified and was quite distant with me after that. We were both about thirteen. I would occasionally keep tabs on her through a girlfriend of hers who eventually moved to New York and edited an art magazine with Hilton Kramer, so I knew she had attended Goucher College. Years later when I gave a reading there, I mentioned her to an older teacher who remembered her and showed me her photo in a yearbook, mentioning that she had died. It was strange to see her picture for the first time and to learn at the same moment that she was dead.

Were your dates with Barney the beginning of your obsession with the movies? How often did you go?
Never as much as I wanted to. We went quite often in the summer at the movie theatre near Pultneyville, and in the village of Sodus there was a movie theatre which I went to, but this would end up quite an expedition, because my parents would have to come in to drop me off and then pick me up and drive me home. Then there was a largish town nearby called Newark, which had an almost first-run movie theatre. My father was very fond of musicals so we\'d tool over to see the latest Busby Berkeley.

What kind of painter were you? Were you a Surrealist?
Well, I wanted to paint Surrealist pictures but they didn\'t really come out the way I meant, and I was told I had to be a realist painter first…

You were greatly impressed by the pictures reproduced in Life magazine of the 1936 show at the Museum of Modern Art, \'Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism\'.
Yes.

When did you first come across the American Surrealist magazine, View?
Not, I think, until I was at Deerfield Academy, that is sometime after 1943; but I had a cousin, Wallace, in Buffalo, my father\'s brother\'s son, who was the only intellectual in the family, and he once brought me a copy of a poetry magazine called Upstate, edited by John Bernard Myers, whom of course I wasn\'t to meet for years. I think there was something by Auden in it, and Wallace knew I liked Auden. There was one issue that was devoted to Latin American poetry, in particular Octavio Paz, who was actually the first Surrealist poet I came across.

And that inspired you?
Well, I was already by that time experimenting a bit. There were other kinds of Surrealist American poets, and the early Randall Jarrell, for instance, and Oscar Williams, and Charles Henri Ford whose 93rd birthday, I think, is in a couple of days.

Were you seen as a prodigy in your family, with your successes in spelling bee competitions, and on radio as a Quiz Kid?
Sort of --- first of all with my successful poem, my pocket-career as poet. Then I was the spelling-bee champion of the county, and got to go to the New York State Fair to take part in the state-wide contest in which, however, I didn\'t fare too well. And then the following year I won this Quiz Kid competition --- Quiz Kids was a very famous programme on the radio. I picked up an entry form in Sibley\'s, the main department store in Rochester, and went back there for the early rounds. I kept winning, until I reached the finals, which were very exciting --- they were held on the stage of the RKO Palace, the grandest movie palace of the city --- it got torn down, alas, in the Fifties… Anyway, I won, and got to go to Chicago, with my mother and grandmother. That was my first proper long trip --- we went by train, in a Pullman, and stayed in a hotel. I\'d never stayed in a hotel before --- I\'d only dreamed of things like that. Unfortunately I tanked on the programme…

Was it all fixed, as in the movie Quiz Show?
When I got to Chicago they asked me what I was interested in and I said eighteenth-century French painters, so they gave me a question related to that, which I answered.

Was it fingers on the buzzers?
You raised your hand. There was a warm-up period before we were actually on the air, during which I answered a whole bunch of questions, not realising the more seasoned \'kids\' weren\'t wasting their arms on these. I knew the answers to a few questions in the contest proper, but I didn\'t get my arm up in time.

When exactly was this?
December 1941. In fact it was just a few days after Pearl Harbor, and much of the half-hour programme was used up by the latest news bulletins from the Pacific, which annoyed me no end.

Were you very different from your brother, Richard?
Yes. 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



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my parents.

In a recent poem, \'The History of My Life\', included in your 2000 collection, Your Name Here, you seem to allude quite directly to aspects of your childhood:
Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even…

Childhood memories in fact figure pretty often in your work…
I guess, in an abstract kind of way. But while writing about it I\'m not aware that that\'s what I\'m doing. Then on finishing a poem --- immediately on finishing it in the case of \'The History of My Life\' --- I realise that that\'s what I\'ve done, but while I was writing it I thought I was just writing another poem. Then I start asking myself, \'How did that happen?\'

Later in the poem you describe yourself as becoming \'weepy for what had seemed / like the pleasant early years\'. You quite often sound this backward-looking or nostalgic note, with varying degrees of irony, of course --- I\'m thinking of the end of \'Daffy Duck in Hollywood\', \'Always invoking the echo, a summer\'s day\', which, it suddenly occurs to me, itself invokes the end of Roussel\'s \'La Vue\', \'[le] souvenir vivace et latent d\'un été / Déjà mort, déjà loin de moi, vite emporté\'.
Summers were particularly important to me, not just the way summer is for everybody, but that was when I had my social life when I was a kid. I was sort of an outcast among the other kids in Sodus. I was considered a sissy. I didn\'t like sports. So I didn\'t really have many close friends, except one very good friend who was a nerd like me.

What did your brother Richard die of?
Leukaemia.

Was it very sudden?
I think it was about six months or thereabouts --- I don\'t know how sudden that is. He became ill in January, then was hospitalised several times in Rochester. Nobody told me much about it. It never occurred to me that he had a fatal disease --- or even that children got fatal diseases. He was finally released from the hospital when, I guess, they realised they couldn\'t do any more for him, so he could spend his last days with my parents. I was sent away to stay with the son of yet other friends of my parents in Rochester. I stayed at their house almost a month in the end. Then I was allowed home and found my brother had just died.

Did that change things in the family a lot?
It did. There was enough age difference between my brother and me so we weren\'t actually that close. I suppose I loved him but also considered him a pest. The house was certainly much quieter… Also, I realised my parents were now pinning all their hopes on me.

It was in 1943, wasn\'t it, that you won a current affairs competition sponsored by Time Magazine?
Yes; the contest itself was no big thing; they had them weekly in every school. But that was when I won the prize of a book and chose the Modern British and American Poetry anthology, edited by Louis Untermeyer. I had a choice of four books --- and although I wasn\'t very interested in poetry then, it was the one that seemed the most promising.

Untermeyer was a close friend of Frost\'s, wasn\'t he, and his anthology heavily influenced by Frost\'s ideas about poetry?
He may well have been, but Frost would have been in any anthology at that time. In fact we even read him at high school --- that was about as modern as poetry in school ever got. We read Elinor Wylie also.

And Ella Wheeler Wilcox?
No, I think she had already lost whatever fame she had had.

Did you like Frost?
Yes, but I hadn\'t at that time read any other modern poetry, so I had nothing to judge him by.

That same year you went to Deerfield Academy, a rather posh boarding school in Western Massachusetts. How did that come about?
Through a friend of my mother\'s, Mrs Wells. The Wellses had a summer place on the lake near our farm. They had three sons who all went to Deerfield, and Mrs Wells persuaded my parents that I should go to a better school than the one in Sodus, which wasn\'t great (although I did study Latin and French there) and actually paid my tuition, although I wasn\'t told this at the time. I was interviewed at Deerfield, accepted, and then told I\'d been given a scholarship. This wasn\'t true. Just before I was about to graduate I happened to see a file card in the office with my name on it, on which was written \'Tuition paid by Mrs. Wells.\'

Was it a scholarly place? Did it groom you for Harvard?
Deerfield was very upper class --- like most boarding schools in America. The emphasis was more on athletics at that time. I mean there were good teachers but it wasn\'t very scholarly. They had an artist-in-residence, who was a kind of afterthought, which meant there was a studio where we went and painted, but this was slightly frowned upon by the headmaster, a kind of benevolent despot; he taught there from about 1902 to, I don\'t know, 1972, and turned it into a very prestigious school. It had been a local public school (as we call them) in the eighteenth century, and according to the terms of its charter, there had to be a certain number of young girls from the village enrolled as well. So there were these girls, about a dozen of them, who were really ignored by everyone else in the school. It was strange: there were



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about three hundred or more horny jocks, whom you\'d think would be slavering at the sight of these girls, but they weren\'t. I guess it was some kind of class thing. They were just conditioned not to see them.

Were you pleased to go?
I wanted to get out of the house, but I wasn\'t quite sure about Deerfield. I was sort of at the lowest level of the food-chain when I got there. Obviously I was not of the same class, economically and socially, as most of the students, though there were some other charity cases like me. I was mostly invisible. In fact, though, I won some kind of award from them in the Eighties for distinguished something or other. That was the first, or maybe only the second time they gave it. Ironical when you consider my non-person status when I was there.

And did you write a lot at Deerfield?
I\'d already been writing, and I continued to do so. Actually I published some of my first poems in the Deerfield Scroll, a school newspaper.

And it was while you were at Deerfield that someone sent your poems under a pseudonym to Poetry, who published them?
Yes, it was during my second year there. I roomed for a semester with a boy named Haddock, who also wrote poetry of a sort I suppose you could call Surrealist. That year there was a poet in residence, also a kind of afterthought, an elderly gent from Amherst, called David Morton, who I think was a friend of Robert Frost\'s, and was somewhat known at the time. Both Haddock and I showed him our poems, but Haddock submitted his first, including a bunch of mine; Morton liked them and sent them on to Poetry magazine in Chicago, which then chose to publish two that I had written. I didn\'t know about this. When I showed Morton these same poems he looked at me rather oddly and said dismissively, \'Well, yes, these are very nice,\' and gave them back. I only found out about all this the following December by which time both Haddock and I were at Harvard. I bought the December issue of Poetry and there were my poems under the pseudonym Joel Michael Symington.

Were you pleased the poems had been accepted?
No! I was horrified. First of all because I realised that not only David Morton, but the editors of Poetry probably thought I was a plagiarist, because I had sent these same poems to Poetry, and got them back with the briefest of rejection notes that said simply, \'Sorry.\' I thought I\'d be blacklisted at what was effectively the major American poetry magazine for the rest of my life --- there were really very few other places to publish poetry at that time.

So what was the first poem that came out under your own name?
I published a number of poems in the Harvard Advocate over the next few years, and in my last year at Harvard I had two in a magazine called Furioso, based at Carleton College in Minnesota.

What was it like arriving at Harvard?
It was an improvement over Deerfield, just as Deerfield had been an improvement over home. I\'d always wanted to live in a metropolis and Boston was the closest I\'d come so far to that. I arrived just before the end of World War Two, in July 1945, about a month before Hiroshima. In fact there was practically nobody there. Most college-age men were in the armed services, and until the following year it was pretty under-populated.

You were too young to fight?
Yes, my eighteenth birthday was that summer. I was going to be called up and I did go for a physical exam, but by the time that happened the war had ended and they weren\'t interested in taking on a lot of new recruits, especially types like me.

When did you meet Kenneth Koch?
In 1947, in my junior year.

And he helped you get elected to the board of the Harvard Advocate?
Yes. The magazine had been closed a long time, partly because of the war, though there were rumours of a homosexual scandal there, after which the alumnus who funded it said he would continue to do so, but there had to be a rule stipulating that no homosexuals be allowed on the board. Kenneth didn\'t know I was gay at that time, and whenever I suggested my election might infringe against this law, he\'d say, \'No, no, don\'t be ridiculous!\' So, anyway, despite such qualms I was eventually elected --- and it turned out that half the people on the board were also gay.

What other poets were around at that time?
Well, there was Robert Bly and Donald Hall, and Kenneth, who were all on the staff of the Advocate, and there was Adrienne Rich, and Robert Creeley, with whom I took a course in the eighteenth-century novel, and of course Frank O\'Hara, but I didn\'t meet him until about six weeks before I graduated.

Did you take any classes in modern poetry?
My freshman year I had a poetry workshop --- which was pretty unusual for Harvard in those days, or for any college. Creeley and the future novelist John Hawks were in the class. And my senior year I took a course on Wallace Stevens with F.O. Matthiessen, who was a very inspiring teacher. He got me interested in Stevens, whom until then I hadn\'t really been able to \'dig\'. My favourite poet for a long time had been Auden.

Did you meet Auden while you were at Harvard?



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Yes. He came to give a reading. I was in the front row, and rushed up at the end with my Collected Poems and had it autographed. In fact, I\'ve still got it. Then I went to a party given by George Montgomery, a photographer, who somehow knew Auden --- he had gay New York connections. He gave a party in his rooms for Auden, whom I met properly then. Actually on this occasion he sort of started coming on to me; but much as I was intrigued by the idea, because I loved his poetry so much, I couldn\'t quite, well, bite the bullet…

Did you know Chester Kallman at this time?
No, I didn\'t get to know him until several years later when I was in New York and after I\'d met Jimmy Schuyler. This first Auden reading would have been in about 1947. I think I also met him another time when he gave another reading at Harvard, and then I wrote my Honours thesis on him.

Did you feel you were making significant breakthroughs with poems like \'The Painter\' or \'Some Trees\' which were written the year after, in 1948?
Yes, I think I was quite pleased with them.

Were you consciously trying to write in a manner that was different from that of High Modernist American poets of the previous generation --- T.S. Eliot, say, or Marianne Moore?
No, no --- well, I eventually wanted to if I could, but really I was just fascinated by their work --- though in fact not at that time that of Eliot so much. It was really only later in life that I suddenly realised how good he was. But, yes, Moore very much, and Elizabeth Bishop and also Delmore Schwartz.

There are a number of poets who were writing in the Thirties and Forties, like Schwartz, or Paul Goodman, or John Wheelwright, or David Schubert, whom you feel have been overlooked by standard accounts of twentieth-century American poetry. Why is it these writers have been so neglected?
I think the war probably played a big part in this. A poet like Randall Jarrell, whose early work I had liked, went off to war and began writing dreary war poetry. And the new poets who began publishing after the war, like Robert Lowell, were very serious and depressing, and not, to me anyway, verbally engaging. I remember giving a reading at the ICA in London, after which I was \'in conversation\' with Peter Ackroyd. Somebody asked me, \'Why is it that you don\'t like Robert Lowell? Do you find him too serious\'?, to which I replied, \'Yeah, I guess so.\' But, as Peter pointed out to me afterwards, what I should have replied is that I found him too hysterical… In fact I also think something similar happened in England; before the war there were the bright young things of the Thirties like Auden, MacNeice, Spender, Prince and Nicholas Moore. After it, there was the boring New Apocalypse, with the likes of Henry Treece and George Barker, and in art, there was, say, Henry Moore, whom I\'ve always found very dull. I suppose people had got fed up with experimentation and were too tired to want anything jarring.

Did you become interested in the work of Hart Crane?
Well, I like his quieter moments. I don\'t really go for his attempts at the epic, but I like the small lyrics in White Buildings. Some of The Bridge is good, especially the part where he mimics the cacophony of Manhattan, but at other times it sounds pretty hollow.

What about William Carlos Williams?
I like him very much. In fact in my early years I went through a period of being enchanted by his work. It always seemed to me much more lyrical and romantic and more closely knit than the people who surrounded him, such as the Beats or the Objectivists, had you believe.

Were you ever drawn to the experiments of the writers associated with Black Mountain College?
Not much, though I do like Robert Creeley --- I didn\'t so much at first but in later years I\'ve come really to admire him --- his early minimalism has exfoliated naturally in the manner of John Adams\'s music. And Robert Duncan I\'ve never really been able to fathom, though he intrigues me. His work strikes me the way my own must appear to many people.

I assume you read Whitman in school. Did his work make an impact on you then?
I didn\'t enjoy Whitman until I was a consenting adult. In high school we read the sort of Whitman poems it was thought high school kids should read, but they struck me as too overblown and heart-on-sleeve. Then later on, the craft of his work, which I\'d never noticed before, suddenly became evident to me. I find a tremendous technical excitement in the way he handles long lines. It\'s something very few people can manage.

\'The Instruction Manual,\' which was written in 1955, has often been seen as influenced by Whitman.
Yes, well, it came at a time when I was reading him a lot.

Critics also like to link you with Emily Dickinson. Your poetries both embody states of epistemological uncertainty, exploit the indeterminacies of language, etc., etc. Do you read her a lot?
Not very much, though when I do read her, I like her, and think I should read her more. I just came across an interview with the poet Dean Young, which expresses quite well my feelings about her. \'Emily Dickinson gives me a headache, but there\'s definitely a greatness there and something about the language is totally engaging; but finally it doesn\'t sustain me.\'

Who do you feel were the most important influences on the poems collected in Some Trees?
Well, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. I think the poem \'Some Trees\' was very influenced by Marianne



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Moore, and \'The Painter\' by Bishop\'s \'Miracle for Breakfast\'. I probably discovered the sestina when I read her first book, North & South. Then there was Auden and Russian poetry, in particular Pasternak and Mandelstam. I had a J. M. Cohen translation of Pasternak, published in about 1945 in London. In fact in my new book, Chinese Whispers, I use a line of Mandelstam\'s as an epigraph for one of the poems: \'Golden fleece, where are you, golden fleece?\' It\'s from his Tristia, which I first read years ago. I suddenly remembered how much I liked it.

How did meeting Frank O\'Hara and Kenneth Koch affect your work? Did their ways of writing push you in new directions?
We began, when we first knew each other, by copying each other\'s poetry; and then I think it became more a question of example: If this person can strike out in a new and interesting way, I\'d think, maybe I can do so too, in some other way.

How much of Some Trees was written while you were at Harvard?
I think only \'The Painter\' and \'Some Trees\'. I wrote quite a lot of poetry there, but I didn\'t include it in the book. The first year I lived in New York I wrote \'The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers\' and quite a few others, such as \'The Mythological Poet\' and \'Illustration\'. But then there was a period when I didn\'t write for about a year and a half. I had a writer\'s block that started in about June 1950, when the Korean War began. I thought I was probably going to end up going to the Pacific and having to be in it… Then, as I remember it, it was when Frank and I went to hear a concert of John Cage on New Year\'s Day, 1952, a mere fifty years ago, that I suddenly saw a potential for writing in a new way.

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Full text
Ward, David C.: His Name Here
PN Review (Manchester) (27:3) [January-February 2001] , p.65-66.





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Ward, David C.: HIS NAME HERE



PN Review (Manchester); Jan-Feb 2001




JOHN ASHBERY, Your Name Here (Carcanet) £7.95

JOHN ASHBERY, Other Traditions: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, (Harvard University Press) £15.50



John Ashbery\'s poems reject biography both in the sense that they are not confessional and their speakers resist identification. Elusive in his long lines, Ashbery won\'t be pinned down. His poems are always going somewhere, usually with speed. He is fascinated by water but his aqueous voyages aren\'t full of the tragedy or melodrama that inflect the work of other American authors --- Melville, Twain, Eliot, Berryman --- when they take to the water. Not that Ashbery is universally chipper and upbeat, but his fatalism is usually picaresquely comic and his tristesse that of Chaplin\'s clown: he may not have gotten the girl today but, with a jaunty click of the heels, he will head down the road and try again tomorrow. Above all, Ashbery is accepting. His sensibility is helped out by the most distinctive style in modern American poetry, a streaming jumble of words and rushing imagery that forces readers to disengage their conscious minds. Ashbery is the master at marrying ridiculously incompatible figures of speech in a way which makes a curious, perfect sense if you don\'t stop to think about them: \'Turning and turning in the demented sky, / the sugar-mill gushes forth poems and plainer twists. / It can\'t account for the roses in our furnace\' (from \'Paperwork\' and chosen almost at random). Ashbery is probably accused of writing nonsense by the same people who think that Picasso couldn\'t paint: \'Why, my six year old daughter could make this mess!\' Ashbery is not a symbolist because he never sets an image \'over there\' (see it?) and has it refer to something else; symbolists preen like magicians, Ashbery is a constantly moving busker. Neither does Ashbery write stream of consciousness since he skips the step where the mind of the observer encounters some objective reality; if Ashbery was writing Mrs Dallomay, he never would have had to go out to get flowers. I\'m sure Ashbery has an ego, but it never appears in his poems; from \'Sacred and Profane Dances\': \'Being is only a way of being. / When in doubt, fast forward, I always say.\'

So is the tone of elegy, loss and finality --- even fatigue --- in Your Name Here real or just another masque that Ashbery is trying out? He\'s seventy-three and entitled to be reflective (even self-pitying) about the end of days. But since his previous book, Girls on the Run, was a witty, fanciful confection it would be unwise to make predictions about the future course of Ashbery\'s career; he\'s always avoided signposting. None the less, Your Name Here is shot through with a sense of finality, of using up, of endings to a time that might have been ill-spent. There\'s not a lot of playfulness at work here even though Ashbery displays his trademarked signature of verbal gymnastics and humour: \'And of course one does run on too long, / but whose fault is it? At five dollars / a blip, who\'s counting?\' If Ashbery hasn\'t totally stripped down his language, there are still fewer ornate figures here and his lines seem to be slightly shorter than usual; or perhaps there are more short lines than in the past. Ashbery is still going journeying but the trip has the inevitability of fate not the desirability of passion; from \'A Descent into the Maelstrom\': \'Hell no, the creators weren\'t anguished, / just determined to keep you dangling / above the maelstrom a few more seconds.\' With this the ghosts of the great American puritans (Cotton Mather, etc.) come alive to scourge us for out lack of vocation. Sinners in the hands of an angry god, we\'re just bumbling along, unable to change, unable to serve a higher purpose. We\'ve got no destination. In his first great poem, \'The Instruction Manual\', Ashbery lit out for the unknown territory of Guadalajara. Now, in \'A Postcard from Ponteverda\', \'I\'m not sure / where Ponteverda is. If I was I\'d have to ask myself / / so many other questions, ones you never taste in the brightness of your day …\' The old Ashbery never stopped to ask himself questions, he always tasted them for himself.

Is this, from \'It is Written\', a mordant comment on the trap that Ashbery created in his style: \'Dark spool, / moving ocean-ward now --- what other fate could have been yours?\' In \'Merrily We Live\' there is a heavy sense of loss and disconnection, a lament which is rare in Ashbery:

          So we have only our trapezoidal
                                             reflections
to look at in its blue glass sides, and
                                perhaps admire ---
oh, why can\'t this be some other day?

Even Ashbery\'s old friend the water is no help to him now; from \'Rain in the Soup\':
I\'d like to push a raft down the beach,
wade into the water waist-deep, and get
                                                    on it
But clearly, nothing in this world was
                                         made for me.
It\'s sixes and sevens, the chimes go out
into the city and accomplish something
                                                   valid.
I can stand to stand here, standing it,
                                             that\'s all.
Good day Mrs Smith. Your daughter is
                              as cute as anything.

The last line is a typical Ashbery touch, a clown-like catch-phrase (literally clown-like: think of Jimmy Durante\'s signature sign-off line, \'Good night Mrs Calabash, wherever you are.\') designed to distract you from the pathos that\'s been seeping out. Here, though, there\'s a real sense that there will be no performance tomorrow, that the road had ended for the Tramp.

But since Ashbery has never been end-stopped in his writing, I would not count on his being so now. He ends, \'Pastilles for the Voyage\' with a nice tribute to the New York School (especially Frank O\'Hara) and a reaffirmation:

                         O my friends
(For I have no other), the beginning of
                              fermentation is here,
right on this sidewalk or whatever you
                                                   call it.
We know, they say, and keep going.
If only I could get the tears out of my
               eyes it would be raining now.
I must try the new, fluid approach.

Or, as the case may be, the old, fluid approach.

Through his very openness, both poetic and personal, Ashbery has always resisted criticism, especially criticism which is exclusionary or fraught with identity politics. One aspect of his poetry which Ashbery insists on, is that it has no exclusive reading or meaning. Chary with self-commentary and open to letting the poems say whatever the listener hears in them, aspects of Ashbery\'s taste and the influences on him can be teased from his writings on other poets. Ashbery himself hints in Other Traditions that he has chosen to discuss poets who \'probably\' influenced him but as always he refuses to close off the possibility that they did not. He does admit that the poets he has chosen are poets he reads when he wants to jump-start his own writing. It\'s easy enough to track what he takes from the six poets who make up Other Traditions. Mostly it\'s a matter of sensibility and inspiration rather than any direct borrowing or appropriation. From John Clare, for



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instance, its his receptivity (a \'nakedness of vision\') to the immediate that is appealing. Thomas Lovell Beddoes gets included in Ashbery\'s cabinet because of the fantastic, figured weirdness of his language; in contrast to Clare, \'Nature is exclusively literary for Beddoes.\' The appeal of the almost hermeticailly sealed French poet/play wright Raymond Roussel is his peculiar subversion of the Enlightenment, that by encyclopedically including everything, one ends up by including nothing and so ends up with something approaching modern life: \'Nouvelles Impressions is thus an anomaly: a narrative poem without a subject, or almost.\' The chaotic, short-circuited career of John Wheelwright is admired for its inability to support opposites even while the poet tragically goes on constructing them, Laura (Riding) Jackson for her prickly (she should have been a diva instead of a poet) refusals of everything from criticism to the idea that poetry is actually of this world; David Schubert for assembling his poems from scribblings on match-book covers in a bricolage which resists biography for the words themselves. It\'s easy enough to trace the lineages of Ashbery in these poets and it is also clear why he finds them useful and inspiring for his own work. As to Ashbery as critic: he is modest, avoiding the kind of emotionally overblown language that blights a lot of contemporary American criticism. He also has sly sense of humour which is a plus. This slyness is reflected in his title since the whole thrust of Other Traditions is to deny anything as serious or as exclusionary as any \'traditions\' even \'other traditions\'. Because of Ashbery\'s openness he resists proscription and sometimes even analysis; it actually would be good to hear Ashbery on a poet he doesn\'t like. Wanting to be receptive, Ashbery tends to the descriptive which ends up working against his role as a critic. Since judgement makes Ashbery uncomfortable, his role here is to introduce us to these poets, providing biographical detail, and ending by quoting from them at some length. Ashbery is a proselytiser, not a judge, and his goal is to bring readers to the texts.

Ashbery writes a tribute to Schubert that Ashbery has applied to himself at the beginning of Other Traditions: \'The actual sense of the words, though, is that the poem consists of speaking of what cannot be said to the person I want to say it: in other words, the ideal situation for the poet is to have the reader speak the poem.\' Or for \'speak\' substitute \'write\'. Ashbery concludes \'Lemurs and Pharisees\' with \'Next time, you write this\', suggesting the indistinguishability or interchangeability of author and reader. This indistinguishability, however, is a literary fiction which supports the author in his writing but which cannot be sustained (except by academic game-players) in practice. It\'s not an accident that Ashbery\'s style looks deceptively easy to imitate, his casually displayed demotic speech is essential to his marriage of romantic individualism with the determinisms of post-modern society. That it\'s not easy to imitate is the irony on which Ashberv\'s work rests: while denying the authority of the authorial voice, the very uniqueness of that voice makes it impossible for the reader to do anything but submit to it: Go with the flow.

DAVID C. WARD

© Copyright 2001 Poetry Nation Review.



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Bedient, Calvin: Charms and afflictions
Salmagundi: a quarterly of the humanities & social sciences (Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY) [Fall 2001] , p.186-194.
  




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Charms and afflictions
Salmagundi; Saratoga Springs; Fall 2001; Calvin Bedient

Issue:  132
Start Page:  186-194
ISSN:  00363529
Subject Terms:  Nonfiction
Poetry
Literary criticism

Personal Names:  Ashbery, John
Logan, William (poet)

Abstract:
"Other Traditions" and "Your Name Here" both by John Ashbery and "Night Battle" and "Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry" both by William Logan are reviewed.

Full Text:
Copyright Skidmore College Fall 2001
[Headnote]
Charms and Afflictions*


After all these years, John Ashbery still has it out for simplicity, harmony, and being forgotten. Especially the last: yourname here, or else. Although his poems assume that one + everything is already an impossible mathematics, they don\'t like to say it any more than they like to say it. Lately, in fact, he has been publishing so many fat volumes that he might be piling up sandbags against the anticipated flood of oblivion.

It\'s the recent flood of his ink that has me worried. But, of course, the excesses in what has become one of the longest codas in recent memory-his spectacularly spoiled sentiments, his increasingly glaring, bewildering sense of humor-hardly matter. His name, Ashbery, with its built-in trope of having it both ways: ruin and fruition, is already written into the history of poetry. In a sense, it was always already written there; as the poet who created the reverse side of Whitman, who drowned modernism in disappointment, he was as inevitable as he is unique. He\'s arguably the major American poet of the last forty years. Forget that.

In his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, delivered at Harvard ten years ago but only recently ballasted with end notes, he befriends six minor poets whose eccentricity compares with his own and who (almost for that reason) must not be forgotten. One way to recommend yourself to Ashbery is to be wrongly afflicted with neglect, both because your work needs some tolerance and because it didn\'t help that you went crazy, committed suicide, died early of a disease or an accident, or like Laura Riding shot your Pegasus after riding him ruthlessly toward "An empty whole, a whole emptiness" ("The Signs of Knowledge"). This poet turns away from the splashy, overvisited, dahlia talents ("I myself value Schubert more than Pound and Eliot," and he means David, not Franz, Schubert) and lingers, instead, before relatively unmolested yuccas with their "cadaverous bloom" (Wallace Stevens). He even calls the work of John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Riding, and Schubert other traditions, as if each alone were a tradition-a magnificence of status even a Pound or an Eliot could not sustain. He wonders aloud if he too wishes "to be given `special treatment,"\' or is it just that he likes "writing that isn\'t simple, where there is more than at first meets the eye." But even ten years ago he had already had plenty of special treatment (how much is enough?), and without the inconvenience of having to die first. And can he really be saying that Eliot and Pound are simple?

What makes this brilliantly peculiar major poet a friend to brilliantly peculiar minor poets may be a touching case of survivor\'s guilt. But for the grace of W. H. Auden-who on the recommendation of a friend called back the manuscript of Some Trees, which had not passed the initial screening test for the Yale Younger Poets award-there goes another David Schubert, if even so much. From Auden\'s The Sea and the Mirror Ashbery quotes Caliban\'s remark to his master that "we might very well not have been attending a production of yours this evening, had not some other and maybe-who can tell?-brighter talent married a barmaid or turned religious," etc. Should not those of lucky prominence remember the others? Ashbery says in his new poem "Hang-Up Call"-the title is his trope for personal existence-"Now give me my pants and money and let me go back and join the others. They\'re crying, you know."

"We believe in what survives," he notes in a lecture. In fact, the six poets had been surviving in a minor-minor way before his intervention, and he quotes dutifully and helpfully from the scholarship. So his quarrel is perhaps not so much with oblivion as with the neglect of High Eccentricity.

Adopting Ashbery\'s guess that his lectures might "shed some light" on his own work "for those who feel the need of it," what does one find? On the one hand, in Clare, Beddoes, and Roussel, there are anticipations of the poetics of open form that Ashbery himself has occasionally licked like sherbert. Clare, he writes wonderfully, "often starts up for no reason, like a beetle thrashing around in a weed patch, and stops as suddenly." But of course anything comparable in Ashbery\'s own work (and there isn\'t much) is already self-lit and on stage; it\'s sophisticated artistry. And after each of his flow-chart book-length poems, he returns to his favorite form, the traditional lyric (still traditional, no matter how many scrims of strangeness are hanged before it). Hence Ashbery\'s praise of and attention to short, stringent formal triumphs in lectures-for instance, Clare\'s "I Am," Beddoes\'s "Dream-Pedlary," Wheelwright\'s "Why Must You Know?," Schubert\'s "The Visitor," and Riding\'s-but I\'m not persauded by his choices from the work of this humorlessly hectoring poet; I recommend "Dear Possible." Though his new book hardly sustains the fact, he loves form for form\'s sake, almost as much as he loves mad little fits of splendor in modest contexts.

There is a much better reason to read Other Traditions than to look for what points toward Ashbery\'s own poetry, maps to which have already been supplied in spades by Ashbery\'s interviews and by his critics. More to be valued, I suggest, are the painstaking, generous deliberations of Ashbery\'s clear and balanced intellect and his numerous fine discriminations between each poet\'s good and not so good work.

With regard to his own recent books, the not so good has dominated. The reader\'s expectation of more masterpieces from him may well sit down on the wayside and turn to that sillier thing, hope. Ashbery\'s work, from having been "a steely glitter chasing shadows like a pack / of hounds," as he put it in Flow Chart (1991), has become garrulous and desultory. (Flow Chart itself is so.)

Certainly, there are still passages in Your Name Here that electrify, that are strange new things in the world, such as, from "Last Legs,"

My nephew-you remember him

tongue along a dusty fence.

And I the day\'s coordinates.

That\'s what an impression I am

--but much of the poetry relaxes into a patter whose intention to amuse fails to percolate: "This is my day! Anybody doesn\'t realize it / is a goddamn chameleon or a yes man!" ("Lemurs and Pharisees"). Chuckling to itself, it asks to be indulged: "The Sheriff of Heck is coming over, and you know what that means." Or else Ashbery now wants to have a good time in poetry. Where "Once it was all grace in the lifting. Awkward, yes, and not a little disconcerting" ("The Water Inspector"), often the new work is glibly cynical: "Life is a carnival, / I think. Besides, it\'s elsewhere" ("Slumberer").

We glimpse the greatly charming Ashbery again in the following moment in "Short-Term Memory":

What about your immortal soul?

I may have lost it, just this once, but other chapters

will arrive, bright as a child\'s watercolor,

and you\'d want to be around me.

Strong, too, are parts of "Crowd Conditions," "Enjoys Watching Foreign Films," "Strange Cinema," "Has to be Somewhere," "Vintage Masquerade," "And Again, March is Almost Here," "Slumberer," "Onion Skin," "This Room," and "The History of My Life." But even the good poems are given to slumps. Ashbery\'s apparent low opinion of himself, of us, of life, naturally makes it hard for him to rise above the Heck level. As for escaping oblivion, who really deserves to do so? "The History of My Life," the one poem in Your Name Here that walks a straight plank, minus blindfolded caperings, raises the question:

Once upon a time there were two brothers.

Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,

even. There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests

someone might take an interest in. No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed

like the pleasant early years. As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable

with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man\'s.

Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking

it up for what seemed like months or years.

With that cloud soaking up the horizon (the antithesis of the six-day Lordbearing cloud in Exodus), it hardly matters who survives and who doesn\'t. But, no, it must. The work must justify the life. Art is forgiveness through style and form-that kind of "grace"-if not a forgetting in the content. Nonetheless, Ashbery\'s poems are now likely to cut themselves into funny paper hats and it\'s all over but the sad little party. His work implies that it is time to be charitable toward it all, with an apologetic laugh. So, often stanza follows stanza without necessity, "like a barber adding an extra plop of lather / to a stupefied customer\'s face" ("Heartache").

As a poet, William Logan is as confident and serious as Ashbery is jittery and apologetic. The antithesis lies deep: where for Ashbery a subject is a crisis-how circumscribe it? identify it? tolerate it?-Logan goes up to one as if it were simply there, like a house, an event, and sternly confronts it. He sets up before it his powers of observation and judgment, and not least his determination to take a formal stand and to display, in the snap and grace of his craft, an indomitable will to remain self-possessed, intact. Notable among his confreres in this regard are the English poets Michael Hofmann and James Fenton.

Logan stands off the subject, and stands apart from it even as he takes it on. Just how it reaches him, if it does, is not always apparent. The impression of his own poise and singleness is the thing. Those who prize self-possession as the highest quality in poetry will instantly take to his work. Of its kind, it is solidly made and pure.

Though Logan\'s fifth book of poems, Night Battle, is often good in very much the way that, among others, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Geoffrey Hill have already been good, there is much to admire if one adopts while reading them the poems\' own terms of ambition and measure. Logan\'s work has what he hopes to find in others\' poetry: intelligence, knowledge, a tone distanced from "psychological concerns," serious insights, and the decencies and superior air (but not airs) of form. Often his lines are taut and vivid, as in "Long Island Sins":

At 91, coldcocked on Demerol,

Grandmother basks among the hyacinths,

lost to the stale, sweet pall of Jacksonville,

the lazy river and its hoodlum boats.

Like James Fenton (whom Logan admires) and Frederick Seidel, not to go back to Lowell, Logan makes quatrains fist up: the formal equivalent of machismo brooding within the tradition.

Unlike Lowell and Seidel, Logan lacks the rack and benefits of a commanding obsession, of a question addressed to existence or a passionate objection against it-lacks the ultimate note of necessity. His insights are usually familiar. Consider these lines in "The Livery of Byzantium": "the banded owl calls down / dominion on the pathways of the mouse. /More light! More light!" The manner and words (and not just Goethe\'s dying cry) re-echo in the marble halls of "the tradition" (something of Shakespeare, for starters). And the intimation, evoked in an oldfashioned high style, is, after all, a commonplace, if one of the great ones of literature: death (an owly darkness) terrorizes life. And although Logan occasionally refers to religious concepts, his poems neither confirm belief nor open it up as an abyssal question. "And then the rain-/ the corrugated tin erupted like sin" is powerful evocation, but in a poem by Lowell or Geoffrey Hill, the concern with errancy itself would have rendered secondary the rained-on tin, made it the illustration rather than, as here, the focus.

Even when he doesn\'t address it openly, Logan feels a nostalgia for purity. It dominates my favorite among these poems, "aradise." I\'ll begin with the fourth stanza:

The British goddess lies beneath the shed

in a frieze of worm-not a Paradise,

still less what Paradise would become:

weedy, mean, trivial,

the flint knapping up through the winter ground.

In the bleakest marches,

Romans never passed a night

without a pitched camp of rampart and ditch.

Your house still overlooks a prospect

of benevolent brick facades,

each concealing its private signature of garden.

Not much changes. Not much in us changes

here, beyond the material end of Paradise.

These lines have the substance, and not just the accents, of seriousness. The language is direct as a thumb pressed against the jugular. The thought snaps along electrically, you cannot stop it. Here is the real thing.

In his criticism, too, Logan is in some ways Ashbery\'s opposite. Ashbery is not quick to judge or at least to condemn; Logan, famously, is quick to do both. His opinions are frank, sometimes blunt, and come forward at once.

Logan is a fiery critic (though less so in Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry, the most recemt collection of reviews and essays, than before) partly because he has a commanding, almost unforgiving sense of what poetry is and should be. It\'s true that as you read through this new collection, it\'s hard to locate the center and shape of that sense. But its force is felt as Logan displays again and again his acute sense of how underachieving the poets are whose work comes before him. It is the same sense that history has displayed toward the hundreds and thousands of poets in each generation. Logan has the ambition of being as smart about contemporary poetry as history itself will be. His severe scrutinies are not as charming-or as charmingly wicked-as Randall Jarrell\'s (and of all critics Logan most resembles Jarrell; his manner is a nephew of the master\'s): usually, but not always, the bubbles are missing from the champagne. But there is much stimulation in their sharp-edged, decided intelligence and their frequent hum of gyroscopic precision. They turn a book of poems every which way to the light, albeit a jack light. And there is force, fluidity, and trajectory in their phrasing.

Not the least of Logan\'s qualities and merits as a critic is his undauntedness. His mind seems dressed in a natural armor (the metal of a good conscience?), which makes it fearless. Unlike most critics, Logan brushes the tissue paper of reputation aside to see what is really in the box. (And it doesn\'t help, so it appears, to be a long-standing friend of his, like Geoffrey Hill, even if Logan rivals Yale in admiring him. You could be a Milton and still get it from Logan, so long as you hadn\'t yet died. Because in that case you might learn something about the plaguing mixture of strengths and limitations in what you\'re doing.) Logan doesn\'t hold tea parties for older reputations; instead, he conducts trials. Here he is on Adrienne Rich: "Adrienne Rich was a poet before she became a polemicist.... It is not the politics I object to but the banality of their expression, the rhythm that becomes a rant." On James Tate: "He shares with Ashbery a sublime self-indulgence.... Ashbery, at least on occasion, toys with large and important concerns; but Tate usually settles for the hollow laugh or frivolous act (a better poet would know how to make his frivolity pointed.) ... Tate is proud of his carelessness, of his unwillingness to favor the Imagination in a kingdom ruled by Fancy." On Robert Creeley: "In Creeley we never get a memorable image, a thing seen precisely, a sentence carried as far as thinking will take it. He has eliminated most of the texture of verse, of the pleasurable massing of words.... Nothing replaces this loss of the frivolity of beauty except the quiet squalor of sentiment."

Logan likes best (until the next surprising judgment) art that responds "to tradition ... within tradition." By tradition he seems to mean the English measure (it is strategic to echo William Carlos Williams here). But there are other traditions, if not, a la Ashbery, one per poet. What does "within" mean in Logan\'s formula for correctness? It sounds like a fold, a pale, the city walls. Logan favors poets (such as Amy Clampitt, J. D. McClatchy, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg) who keep a formal distance without altogether sacrificing warmth ("the world is at times more deeply entered through an isolation from it"). He can be as severe on a "chilly formal manner" and rinky-tink neo-formalism as on the weak generation of fields of meaning in some avant-garde poems (of Michael Palmer\'s work he says, "My complaint is not that this poetry raises a challenge, but that it is not challenging enough"). Such preferences are matters of temperament-basically unarguable. My own bias tells me that for some time now "the tradition" has been overfull of itself and in danger of becoming stuffed. Ashbery knows the feeling-Ashbery whose sensibility, Logan too killingly says, is "utterly fraudulent." Logan is the critic as the Man of Taste, to whom the man attuned to primordial indeterminacy, in the distinction Giorgio Agamben makes in The Man Without Content, draws a blank.

[Footnote]
*Review of John Ashbery, Your Name Here (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001) and Other Traditions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000 ); William Logan, Night Battle (New York: Penguin, 1999)and Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999)


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Full text

Chiasson, Dan: Him again: John Ashbery
Raritan: a quarterly review (Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ) (21:2) [Fall 2001] , p.139-145.
  




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Him again: John Ashbery
Raritan; New Brunswick; Fall 2001; Dan Chiasson

Volume:  21
Issue:  2
Start Page:  139-145
ISSN:  02751607
Subject Terms:  Poetry

Personal Names:  Ashbery, John

Abstract:
"Your Name Here: Poems" by John Ashbery is reviewed.

Full Text:
Copyright Rutgers University Fall 2001

Your Name Here: Poems, by John Ashbery, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Your Name Here is John Ashbery\'s twenty-first book of poetry and his third in three years. It is (like 1998\'s Wakefulness and unlike 1999\'s Girls on the Run) a book of lyrics, most of them more or less the length of a single page. You saw them emerge, one or two at a time, in the Germ and hat - or was it Conjunctions and the American Poetry Review or perhaps the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and the New York Times? Ashbery is aware of his own productivity and ubiquity; "Not You Again" begins:

Thought I\'d write you this poem. Yes,

I know you don\'t need it. No,

you don\'t have to thank me for it. Just

want to kind of get it off my chest

and drop it in the peanut dust.

Ashbery\'s inclination to anticipate - and, fond hope, preempt - readerly irritation is one of his defining tendencies, and one which may (depending on the reader) only deepen that irritation. But such irritation, Ashbery suggests, works both ways - after all, it is the reader who opens the pages of the magazine to find the exclamation "Not You Again," and the reader, with his hectoring expectations, who demands that poetry speak more or less to him - in the same language, that is, as the headlines and cartoons, the obituaries and the box scores. When we stare at a page of Ashbery, the page, you might say, stares back at us.

Ashbery is one of the few writers alive who can make textuality register on the pulses, who can make self-reflexiveness seem like a human, and not just an academic, impulse. His tics - the sliding pronouns, the hallucinatory antecedents, the shifting tones - are by now thoroughly indexed, and his new work carries some of the pathos of the faded avant-garde, but Your Name Here shows how much of the world can still be seen, and seen movingly, in terms of a problem for language. Any single self, Ashbery suggests, contains both writerlike elements (that mumbling, frightened inwardness) and readerlike ones (that multitasking, short-tempered irritability) and finds those two sides of the self noisily at war. The standoff between reader and writer, then, is only a figure for the ongoing and immensely affecting problem of how mutually, grumblingly recalcitrant seem the inner life and the language available to it when put face to face. How are we to conduct our solitude and inwardness through the screen of language - language which, after all, subordinates even the most desperate and immense individual claim?

Your Name Here, like all of Ashbery\'s best work, finds its emotions in the deepest reaches of the self, but finds its expressive idiom almost exclusively in this vast territory of what might be called "legal tender" American language. Here, for example, is the final stanza of "Merrily We Live":

I\'ve got to finish this. Father will be after me.

Oh, and did the red rubber balls ever arrive? We could do something

with them, I just have to figure out what.

Today a stoat came to tea

and that was so nice it almost made me cry--

look, the tears in the mirror are still streaming down my face

as if there were no tomorrow. But there is one, I fear,

a nice big one. Well, so long,

and don\'t touch any breasts, at least until I get there.

The passage is a compendium of phrases anyone might say, each with its own distinct sonic contour ("I\'ve got to finish this," "Well, so long"). And yet these lines don\'t seem to be spoken, exactly; Ashbery\'s monologues are to actual speech what a photograph album is to someone\'s vacation: no match for the real thing, but a means at least of preservation and display. The occasionally jarring substantives ("red rubber balls," "breasts") create the acoustics for these "collectible" phrases: the meaning-bearing aspect of a phrase like "don\'t touch any breasts, at least until I get there" would be muffled if the noun "breasts" were replaced, say with the noun "wine." These phrases are not, as some critics have suggested, cliche; cliche is devalued language, language which makes fools of us, and poems are powerless to do much but mock it. Ashbery\'s interest is rather in current language, the phrases that act as our currency, getting us into and out of experience-- acceptable for most any transaction the average American might wish to perform. This linguistic legal tender, this bland minimalia, is what buzzes in the poet\'s ear as he searches for le mot juste, what bombards him from TV and the dinner party; to allow it into the poem\'s frame is to insist that the poem has ways of making it meaningful, even beautiful and true.

Ashbery\'s poems are almost spoken by someone not quite other than the poet: we are meant therefore to read them as attempts at communication, staged dramatically, and meant to see the insufficiency of their idiom as figuring the insufficiency of all idioms, the difficulty of linguistic self-expression. Where the stakes are highest, the argument goes, language is most sure to fail - and where are there higher stakes than in a lyric poem? This, in a nutshell, is the argument of literary deconstruction, a movement with which Ashbery is often linked. Except that no art as complicatedly attuned to linguistic rupture as Ashbery\'s can be said to have given up on the chance, though slight, of meaningfulness. As I read him, Ashbery, like Frost, locates meaning not in the substantive content of the poem (in "Merrily We Live," the "rubber balls" and "breasts"), but rather in its tonal content, its quality of having been sounded out according to bodily, not intellectual, necessity. Frost famously called these tonal shapes "sentence sounds" and suggested they were best heard through a closed door "that cuts off the words." Frost tends to dramatize this "sound of sense" by writing with a paucity of substantives ( a moon, a horse, a wall, a peach tree) and an excess of what William James called "the little words" - prepositions, adverbs, articles - and by making the strong stresses of his lines fall precisely on such otherwise meaningless words. Ashbery, on the other hand, writes with an abundance of substantives, some of them very memorable, but which often seem to be arbitrarily chosen or chosen for their charm or scarcity, not their appropriateness. But both techniques, Frost\'s and Ashbery\'s, dramatize the difference between what passes for entreaty in the world (asking for directions to a restaurant) and what passes for entreaty in the self (asking for directions to one\'s past), the latter category being poetry\'s domain.

But "Not You Again" is also plausibly what Ashbery, a poet in his mid-seventies, the author of some of the most famous contemporary poems, might say to himself fifty-odd years and twenty-odd books into his career. From its title forward this book conducts an examination, Stevensian but spry, into the ways old age can make the world seem excruciatingly intelligible. "I feel about life as you do," he says in "De Senectute," "a diary from many years ago." These poems map a landscape already thoroughly mapped, one where even the ghosts have gone home, and therefore dead to poetry\'s sophisticated instruments for discovery and detection. Ashbery\'s late poems, like Stevens\'s, are thick with lethargic adverbs: "again," "still," "ever," "often," as though perception all by itself added weight to its objects. Ashbery has always seemed languid, in a fashionable, Victorian sort of way, but his ennui has never before seemed so scary because so scared. Many readers will find his poem "The History of My Life" amusing and sly, a devastating parody of bourgeois self-regard, and congratulate Ashbery and themselves on their superiority to the usual drivel and drone of autobiographical convention. But for Ashbery to consign himself - and us -- to such an absurd script is a despairing gesture, a gesture that spares no one. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Once upon a time there were two brothers.

Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,

even. There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests

someone might take an interest in. No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed

like the pleasant early years. As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable

with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man\'s.

Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking

it up, for what seemed like months or years. This is precisely the fussy and fatuous idiom of someone who has held the floor for too long, who takes his listener\'s silence for spell-- boundedness. Of course it is the way a poem about subjectivity and its relation to language would talk; but it is also how a poet afraid of his own death would talk. Ashbery is not suggesting, playfully, that since some people talk this way you and I shouldn\'t do so; rather he is asserting, damningly, that whatever we might say about ourselves, all self-- recollection adds up to these "thoughts and ideas" truly, awfully "at least as good as the next man\'s" - which is to say interchangeable with, no different from, the next man\'s.

The "great devouring cloud" at the end of "The History of My Life" is one of many such images in Your Name Here, images of great, insouciant sublimity, immense in scale, mysterious and sudden. Such images are common throughout Ashbery\'s oeuvre, tending to stand for the blank spots, inaccessible to consciousness, in experience. Here they stand for death. The presence of death, just offstage, gives the players in these poems their distinct personalities: busybodyish, ner- vous, nostalgic, a little haughty, a little sentimental. Increasingly the poems are set in a kind of small-town twilight, on a summer evening when perhaps the carnival is in town, with everything (the town, the season, the daylight, the carnival) seen under the sign of its own vanishing. The year is, what, 1935? Something awful looms nearby. In "Get Me Rewrite" the nature of language - necessarily found, and useless because used-up - is implied in the cast-off wrappers of outmoded, candy shop candies:

Long ago we crept for candy

through the neighbor\'s gutter

but found only candy wrappers

of an unknown species: "Sycamores,"

"Chocolate Spit," "Slate-Gray Fluids,"

"Anamorphic Portraits of Old Goriot."

In "Industrial Collage" something called the "neighborhood police" shows up, arrests a "miscreant," and lets him go: "which is normal for this type of event." The American nostalgic past, blurred, prewar, rural, with its picturesque disruptions and minor triumphs, provides Ashbery\'s image trove for his own, for anyone\'s, private past, as though all of life were a matter of who showed up to entertain us and who was hauled off for making mischief.

Ashbery learned from Elizabeth Bishop, and perhaps from Joseph Cornell, how to make a work of art no bigger or more "real" than a snow globe and still represent human life. There is something absurd, after all, about the cultural status attributed to these miniature things called poems. But like the trapped stargazers in Cornell\'s boxes, Ashbery imagines an outside, an elsewhere, the prospect of which keeps the heart arched and clenched. Some of the most affecting moments in Your Name Here describe this other realm, which provides for the reader, too, an escape into a real landscape, a place outside the confines of speech and text. These valedictory moments often occur at the ends of poems, making the brief span of time described by lyric contiguous with actual time, with the time lyric actually takes. This is a book of dilation, of procrastination, in the face of an obstinate immovable deadline. But the palpable imminence of time makes experience seem abruptly, inexplicably real. At the end of "Life Is a Dream," someone from outside the frame reaches in and takes Ashbery by the hand:

It\'s true that life can be anything, but certain things

definitely aren\'t it. This gloved hand,

for instance, that glides

so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

At such moments the self finds itself to be uncannily outside of the tropes that seemed to succor and define it, outside of textuality and, in the final tally, actual.

[Author note]
DAN CHIASSON teaches writing at Harvard University. His recent work has appeared in Agni, The New Yorker, Slate, and Threepenny Review.


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Full text

Gibbons, James.: Eccentric visions: Ashbery\'s Other Traditions.
Raritan: a quarterly review (Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ) (21:2) [Fall 2001] , p.146-161.
  




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Eccentric visions: Ashbery\'s Other Traditions
Raritan; New Brunswick; Fall 2001; James Gibbons

Volume:  21
Issue:  2
Start Page:  146-161
ISSN:  02751607
Subject Terms:  Nonfiction
Poetry
Essays
Biographies

Personal Names:  Ashbery, John
Clare, John
Beddoes, Thomas (1760-1808)
Roussell, Raymond
Wheelwright, John
Riding, Laura
Schubert, David

Abstract:
"Other Traditions" by John Ashbery is reviewed.

Full Text:
Copyright Rutgers University Fall 2001

Other Traditions, by John Ashbery, Harvard University Press.

WHAT Is minor poetry? In the opening remarks of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard in 1989 and i.99o, John Ashbery regards the .question, rightly, as an invitation to frivolity. It\'s not asked much these days, for reasons that probably have more to do with the fate of reading than the nature of the question. As for frivolity, Ashbery cites the example of Auden, who in his introduction to NineteenthCentury British Minor Poets (1966) proposed that a major poet satisfies "about three and a half" of five conditions concerning output, range, originality, technical skill, and evolution of style and treatment. The minor poets are those who fail the test. Granting his usual archness, Auden might well have been serious, but only to the extent that such criteria confirmed rather than displaced his intuited sense of value among poets. He writes, "I know perfectly well that Shelley is a major poet, and [William] Barnes a minor one," and so do we, so why can\'t we leave it at that?

Ashbery\'s Norton lectures, touched up and published last year under the title Other Traditions, suggest that the question of minor poetry is still worth asking, if only as a point of departure. The book provides a survey of Ashbery\'s taste for poets who are peripheral for most readers but of central importance to him. By way of introduction, he claims with somewhat unconvincing modesty that he could add little "of value to the critical literature concerning the certifiably major poets whom I feel as influences," a group that includes Stevens, Stein, Bishop, and Auden. Instead, he asks us to consider six poets of a different order: the Englishmen John Clare and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the French writer Raymond Roussel, and three American modems, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. These poets are cherished for being "certifiably," and more than merely, "minor": Ashbery contends that he values Schubert\'s slender oeuvre more than the poems of Pound or Eliot, and he has made substantial claims for John Wheelwright for decades. The poets of Other Traditions are eccentric, erratic, quirky, sometimes mad, but they are not, for Ashbery at least, second-rate.

These lectures might be taken as a rejoinder to Eliot\'s remark, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that "no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone." Ashbery\'s six poets are tangential to any tradition, and not only the "canonical" one (always a vaguer notion than it seems, in any case). The "other" traditions, it turns out, aren\'t really traditions at all, since these poets are all lonely figures whose works, as Ashbery writes of Beddoes\'s "Death\'s Jest Book," have a "stupefying originality." Originality, that is, without issue. Raymond Roussel\'s writing is distinct "from the rest of literature ... almost as though it had a different molecular structure"; John Wheelwright\'s strain of improbably visionary protest poetry defies imitation; Laura Riding\'s imperious perversity in refusing to allow her work to be reprinted guaranteed its limited if not quite negligible influence. Madness claimed Clare and Schubert. Because these poets do not take center stage, Ashbery can read them in isolation, which, given the peculiarities of each, is the most profitable and perhaps the only way to read them.

The eccentricities of the poets in Other Traditions provide more than just the seasoning of novelty and particularity. Ashbery isn\'t interested in those secondary figures whose poems are so often numbingly representative of their own era, defining the ground that sets off the major poets in high relief. None of Ashbery\'s poets are "minor" in this way; they are all too odd for that. He likes poems that seem ragged and fractured even in their diction: David Schubert\'s lines are "sharpened" by their "slight skewings"; the works of Roussel and Wheelwright are characterized by radical shifts of focus that Ashbery likens to the effects of Cubist paintings. As for larger formal structures, Ashbery regards the failure to realize fully achieved forms as an accomplishment of sorts, particularly when he discusses the two nineteenth-- century figures, Clare and Beddoes, whose works anticipate later developments in poetry. Clare\'s "sonnets haven\'t the shapeliness of real sonnets, his longer poems the graceful expansiveness of the odes of William Collins he so admired, but to our ears they capture the rhythms of nature, its vagaries and messiness, in a way that even Keats never did." Ashbery values Clare for his refusal to let the countryside of his native Northhamptonshire stand for anything but what it is, without relying on the mediating concepts favored by the preceding generation of Romantic poets. "We are far from emotion recollected in tranquility or even the gently shaping music of Keats\'s grasshopper sonnet. Clare\'s poems are dispatches from the front," Ashbery writes. This is Clare\'s "seeming modernity." The ornately decadent verse of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the subject of the second lecture, seems as far as possible from Clare\'s visionary sincerity (and Ashbery notes that the two poets represent opposing tendencies in his own work), but perhaps they aren\'t so different after all: Beddoes\'s fractured poems also anticipate modernism, and "Eliot\'s and subsequent fragmentations in poetry have shown us how to deal with fragments: by leaving them as they are, at most intuiting a meaning from their proximity to each other, but in general leaving it at that."

Ashbery\'s taste for fragmentary poems attracts him to works that resist interpretation, poems whose difficulty often edges toward opacity. At times he comes off as a connoisseur of the esoteric, or at the very least as a reader incapable of frustration. But not all forms of bewilderment are identical, and one of Ashbery\'s virtues as a critic is the patience he brings to poems that don\'t give up their secrets easily, if at all. Ashbery\'s refusal to rush to judgment about a poem, his pleasure in holding manifold possibilities of meaning in suspension, results in a kind of focused reticence that allows him to remain alert to a range of effects and to convincingly show that these poets are worth a second look-or perhaps a first look. Ashbery wants to make the seemingly paradoxical case that these six poets are marginal and essential, and for the most part he succeeds.

It\'s a case that he makes almost in spite of himself. Ashbery\'s appointment to the Norton chair appears to have surprised him, and he is reluctant to make sweeping critical generalizations about even these "certifiably minor" figures. He tells us that his judgments can\'t be separated from his career as a poet, and if his readings seem bound to his working needs, well, perhaps this was why he was awarded the Norton chair in the first place. He speculates that the committee that named him to the lectureship might have expected an explanation of his own "hermetic" poems, since "there seems to be a feeling in the academic world that there\'s something interesting about my poetry, though little agreement as to its ultimate worth and considerable confusion about what, if anything, it means." If this were the case, the committee, by his own admission, is bound to be disappointed. For Ashbery, as we\'ll see, explaining poetry is the same as explaining it away, and poets, at any rate, are notoriously faulty guides to their own work. At the beginning of the first lecture, he recalls a workshop hosted by Richard Howard in which Howard\'s students, mystified by Ashbery\'s work, were freshly baffled when he tried to answer their questions about it. "They wanted the key to your poetry," Howard later told him, "but you presented them with a new set of locks." Ashbery doesn\'t want to seem willfully obscure or coy or haughty about the import of his work, but he insists that the poetry is its own explanation. Nevertheless, he keeps hinting that the lectures may leave some clues for those who care to look, perhaps because of some nervousness about their coherence as a whole. In the lecture on Laura Riding, the fifth of the series, he claims that he "chose the writers under discussion partly because I like them and partly because I felt they would shed some light on my own writing for those who feel the need of it. So far, I agree, not much of the latter has happened, but perhaps by the end it will have, if only by default." This sort of diffidence is found throughout Other Traditions, which seems at first glance a genial but merely personal tour of Ashbery\'s avowedly off-center sensibility, and one that will be of interest only for those devoted to him as a poet, admittedly a substantial group. But Other Traditions is more than simply a gloss on the poetry "for those who feel the need of it" (and whether the lectures succeed in illuminating Ashbery\'s poems "if only by default" is an open question).

Rather startlingly, given the affable and nearly defensive tenor of some of his observations, Ashbery asks whether there is something minor poetry "can do for us when major poetry can merely wring its hands," and tells us that he often returns to his minor poets when he needs to be reminded "what poetry is." There are several ways his claim for these poets can be taken. In its weakest sense, it is simply a comment on his working methods, since each of these poets, with the exception of Roussel, have set him to work on new poems (in his phrase, they have provided him with "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down"). Why these poets in particular? Ashbery shrugs his shoulders; his preferences seem arbitrary and mysterious in their origin. "One can\'t choose one\'s influences, they choose you," he writes. "If that means I too am off-center, so be it: I am only telling it as it happened, not as it should have happened."

For Ashbery, the distance between "as it happened" and "as it should have happened" is what separates the experience of private reading, with its missteps, grasping intuitions, and random endearments, from the retrospective consensus of literary history. Although he has been reading these poets for years, he has not been able to dispel the aura of oddness that first attracted him to their works. Nor, it seems, would he want to. Their poems remain as peculiar as ever; repeated reading does not lead to mastery but to a state of lucid familiarity, which is not quite the same as comprehension or interpretive certainty. This sort of reading experience is hardly confined to Ashbery\'s six poets, of course, and one way to distinguish major writers is by the inexhaustibility of interpretations that can be brought to bear on their works. But even the most difficult and demanding of poems, if it has been written by a major poet, has been integrated into narratives of literary history and can be read on terms other than simply those of the poem itself. Or, to go further, even if we limit ourselves to "the poem itself," the way we read it tends to be informed, if not overdetermined, by the accumulation of criticism and influence. This must be what Ashbery means when he claims, in his fifth lecture, that reading the work of the poets in Other Traditions "isn\'t quite as simple as it is with a poet such as, say, John Keats, where one can simply take down a book from a shelf, open it, and begin reading and enjoying it. With each of them, some previous adjustment or tuning is required." Keats, presumably, doesn\'t require such adjustment because it has already been made, since Keats\'s poetry has helped to define what we expect when we read a poem.

Apart from his personal enthusiasms, then, Ashbery is making a larger claim for these seemingly peripheral figures. It is, I think, that the poets in Other Traditions, precisely because of their idiosyncrasies, restore poetry to its fundamental strangeness. Their poems demand to be read on their own terms. He speculates that were Beddoes\'s verse dramas to be staged, "they would require a specially trained audience," and the same might be said of the other poets he takes up. These poets give us unexplored alternatives: if John Wheelwright\'s work, as Ashbery claims, is "as pregnant with options for the future of poetry as anything Pound or Eliot produced," we have to take this on faith, since no one, except perhaps Ashbery himself, has tried to realize these options. The poems remain isolated artifacts, "pure" in the sense that they resist assimilation into the story of a movement or era except in the broadest terms. In short, for Ashbery\'s minor figures as for his own poetry, the poem is its own explanation.

Ashbery\'s sense of the poem\'s autonomy leads him to reject the guidance offered by the poets themselves. Considering Laura Riding, whose fanatical theorizing culminated in a smug and vigilant renunciation of poetry, Ashbery writes:

Her poetry, hedged about with caveats of every sort in the form of admonitory prefaces and postscripts, presents us with something like a minefield; one reads it always with a sensation of sirens and flashing red lights in the background. What then are we to do with a body of poetry whose author warns us that we have very little chance of understanding it, and who believes that poetry itself is a lie? Why, misread it, of course, if it seems to merit reading, as hers so obviously does.

Riding\'s case is so extreme that misreading her is inevitable, but Ashbery\'s views here typify his attitude toward any attempt to paraphrase or decipher the work of the poets in Other Traditions. Noting that admirers of Roussel have sought "some hidden, alchemical key for decoding the work," Ashbery insists that this sort of approach risks "diluting the very glamour that brings readers to that work in the first place." And, he might have added, brings them back to that work again and again. Ashbery wants to illuminate these poets without demystifying them, preserving the "glamour" that retains something of the excitement and uncertainty of a first reading. This skirts dangerously close to critical impressionism, but Ashbery is able to provide real insight into the works of these poets, which he has been reading since at least the 1950s, while keeping their mystique intact.

The lecture on John Wheelwright is the strongest chapter of Other Traditions, the essay in which Ashbery\'s biographical commentary is fused most seamlessly with his discussion of individual poems. Although a small but varied group of poets, ranging from Kenneth Rexroth to John Hollander, have expressed their admiration for Wheelwright\'s poetry over the years, Ashbery has been the most persistent and enthusiastic advocate. Writing in the New York Times Book Review in 1979, he called Wheelwright\'s Collected Poems "one of the hundred most important works of Western civilization since World War II"; thirteen years earlier, eulogizing Frank O\'Hara, he had written that O\'Hara\'s death had been "the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed by a car in Boston in 1940." I\'d like to spend the remainder of this essay discussing Ashbery\'s treatment of Wheelwright and his work, in part because Wheelwright remains a relatively little known figure, but primarily because Wheelwright epitomizes the sort of poet who Ashbery feels is far too important to be ignored, yet remains stubbornly, intractably marginal.

Wheelwright\'s value as a poet depends on the quality of his poems, but his life is important too, as are the lives of the five other poets in Other Traditions. I\'ve noted that the eccentricities of the poems that Ashbery discusses are not incidental to his estimation of their worth, and neither are the oddities of these poets\' lives. In each of the lectures, Ashbery includes a biographical sketch of the poet, which need not be taken as anything more than a courtesy to his audience (who might recall something of the lives of Clare or Riding, but can hardly be expected to know much about the others). And yet these biographies, extreme even by the standards of poets\' lives, suggest a pattern of attraction. There is the case of Laura Riding, whose erotic entanglement with Robert Graves and the Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs led her to leap from the third-story window of the house she shared with Graves on the island of Mallorca; this was but one-and not the final-act in a life of outrageous histrionics. Writing the verse novel La Doublure, the nineteen-year-old Raymond Roussel experienced, by his own account, a monomaniacal "sensation of universal glory" that caused him to believe he was the equal of Dante and Shakespeare: "I felt what the aging Victor Hugo felt at seventy, what Napoleon felt in 1811, what Tannhauser dreamed at the Venusberg: I felt glory." The madness of Clare and Schubert has already been mentioned. Without a doubt, Ashbery is drawn to these sorts of personalities: we might recall that his Girls on the Run (1999) was inspired by the works of Henry Darger, the Chicago recluse whose illustrated epic of child heroines pitted against their enslavers in cosmic warfare has made him, posthumously, the world\'s most renowned outsider artist.

These biographies make for some fascinating storytelling-and are certainly more interesting than a resume of prizes and university appointments-but they serve a larger purpose by confirming that the difficulties and quirks of the poems are not the result of willful obscurity. These poets write the way they do because of needs that have something to do with their "disordered affective lives" (a phrase Ashbery uses to describe Clare and Beddoes but that could be applied with equal aptness to Roussel, Wheelwright, Riding, and Schubert). Ashbery is too astute to marry the biographical cause to the poetic effect with specificity; in fact, a good share of the lecture on Schubert argues against a critic who reads the poems too literally as a gloss on the life. The personalities of the poets are, nonetheless, important because they guarantee, as it were, the authenticity of the odd features of the work. This seems especially important for the three Americans who came of age during the 1920s and 193os, since, as anyone who has browsed the little magazines of the time will recognize, there were plenty of poets writing during these decades whose difficulties are merely the borrowed clothes of modernism. The lives of the poets in Other Traditions suggest that the idiosyncratic gestures of each poet are the expression of an evolved sensibility, however mannered, and represent more than the superficial appropriation of fashionable trends.

Wheelwright\'s life, though by no means the strangest of those featured in Other Traditions, makes the eccentricities of his poems seem inevitable. Wheelwright had a large circle of acquaintances, as is evident from the dedications that accompany most of his poems, and those who remember him have left behind anecdotes of his peculiarities. Matthew Josephson remembers Wheelwright\'s taste for sharply creased suits and bowler hats even when taking summer hikes in the country and recalls that he carried fourteen pairs of shoes with him while traveling in Europe in the 199-os. He was known to burrow beneath a rug and crawl on all fours across a room in the middle of fashionable Boston parties. Descended from two of New England\'s original and most prosperous families, Wheelwright spent his childhood like a character out of a James novel, living in what he later called "the most splendid garden of Massachusetts," an enormous estate north of Boston that had been bought when Wheelwright\'s greatgreat-grandfather was the richest merchant in New England. He later became a passionately committed Marxist but never entirely disavowed his birthright of inherited privilege, which at any rate became increasingly symbolic after the family\'s fortune began to seep away in the wake of his father\'s suicide in1912 Not surprisingly, given his background, he was sent in 19 16 to Harvard, where he hoped to begin his education for the Anglican priesthood. There he became involved with a literary circle of students that included E. E. Cummings, Malcolm Cowley, and John Dos Passos (as well as the Blake scholar and forgettable poet S. Foster Damon, who would become his brother-inlaw and remain a close friend for the rest of his life). He was expelled shortly before he was scheduled to graduate either because of pranks or irregular class attendance. After spending two years in Europe, he returned to Boston and made an abortive attempt at a career as an architect, his father\'s profession. (Ashbery discusses one of Wheelwright\'s most moving poems, "Father," that begins with a description of the bridge across the Charles designed by the elder Wheelwright and ends by asking "my first friend, Father" to "come home, dead man, who made your mind my home.") By the early 1930s he had fully embraced socialism and became involved in the founding of Harvard\'s John Reed Club and the Vanguard Verse project, which sponsored a correspondence course in poetry and published the little magazine Poems for a Dime; he even ran for public office on the Socialist Party ticket. In the meantime, the family\'s "splendid garden" had been parceled into lots and sold, and Wheelwright\'s already modest allowance evaporated when his brother\'s investments collapsed in the first years of the Depression. But neither his reduced means nor his Marxism kept Wheelwright from playing the dandy: he sported his trademark raccoon coat and Molacca cane even as he took to preaching revolution from a soapbox during rallies in Boston\'s South End. He was killed by a drunk driver shortly after his collection Political SelfPortrait was published in 1940, an accident that seems all the more tragic to Ashbery since Wheelwright was, in his estimation, "at the height of his creative powers" and "at last poised for recognition as one of the leading American poets of his time."

Wheelwright\'s poems never moved far from the religious preoccupations that propel the exploratory thrusts and chaotic vigor of his early poetry, and as a result his work bears little relation to the poems of social protest that were spun out by the yard by "committed" poets during the 1930s. And, it must be said, he was far more gifted than the poets who shared his political sympathies at the time. He could write poems with intricately formal effects, though his use of traditional verse forms such as the sonnet was unorthodox and innovative, anticipating the unconventional sonnets of Berryman and Edwin Denby. He had a fine ear and could duplicate the weary speech of a New England fisherman (in "State of Maine") or mock the idiom of political sloganeering (in "Masque with Clowns") with an ease that rivals that of Dos Passos or Kenneth Fearing. Passages of ferocious social satire are scattered throughout the poems. When he chose, Wheelwright could write strange and brittle lyrics such as "Why Must You Know?" with its indelible closing quatrain, "One who turns to earth again/finds solace in its weight; and deep/hears the blood forever keep/the silence between drops of rain." Lyric writing, rarely sustained for very long in Wheelwright\'s work, is but one of several modes that make up the ever changing texture of the poetry. It is precisely this collagelike texture that appeals to Ashbery. Discussing the opening sonnet of the booklength sequence Mirrors of Venus, he charts how the poem moves from the "disarmingly folksy tone that could be out of the Saturday Evening Post" to end in an entirely different register. Later, in the lecture on David Schubert, he writes that "the typical Schubert poem has the appearance of something smashed, not too painstakingly put back together, and finally contemplated with remorse and amusement." Ashbery likes poems built out of incongruous fragments: instead of Williams\'s smooth-running machines made of words, these are roughhewn contraptions that have some of the charm (if none of the artlessness) of naive art.

Readers new to Wheelwright\'s work who have less tolerance for his disorienting shifts of tone may find his poems impenetrable at first and may be reluctant to return to them. Well aware that Wheelwright is a tough sell, Ashbery acknowledges the poetry\'s difficulty from the start but stresses that Wheelwright\'s "conviction is contagious." This may seem an odd quality to emphasize in light of Ashbery\'s subsequent remark that "in his person as well as in his writing, Wheelwright was literally a set of walking contradictions," but it is precisely Wheelwright\'s "conviction" that gives his contradictory gestures the appearance and weight of necessity. Wheelwright\'s reluctance or inability to resolve his conflicting tendencies yields the "positive results of failure in his work." Works of art thrive on contradictions, of course, and rarely efface all traces of opposing tensions. But even in the self-consciously fragmentary works of modernism there are usually movements toward resolution, transitions that mute the dissonance of antithetical techniques and themes. This isn\'t the case with Wheel-- wright\'s poetry, and Ashbery is right to emphasize his "inborn tendency to elide transitions." Although Ashbery claims (without much elaboration) that Wheelwright\'s late works dispel these antithetical pressures, it is clear that what interests him most about Wheelwright\'s poems is the "fertile short-circuiting, the result of many tensions pulling in opposite directions, that is the air his poetry breathes."

These terms recall Ashbery\'s praise of the painter R. B. Kitaj, whose greatness, according to an essay published in Art in America in 1982, results from "the spirit of genuine contradiction, fertile in its implications, [that] thrives in the work, though not in the discussions of it between Kitaj and his critics." The "discussions" concerned Kitaj\'s statements about the centrality of the human figure in art and his insistence that his paintings and drawings, despite their eclectic range of allusion, are meant for a mass audience. Ashbery stresses that Kitaj\'s works are more nuanced and conflicted than his more programmatic remarks would lead one to expect; Kitaj\'s "exemplary" contradictions give his paintings their force and vitality. Along the same lines, Wheel-- wright\'s poetry belies and even undermines his doctrinaire tendencies, the didactic side that comes out in the schematic (though hardly clear) commentary that accompanies the poems. As in the case of Riding, the poems are better than his explanations would have you believe.

That said, the quality of Wheelwright\'s work is uneven. Many of the more ponderous poems wear down the reader because of their dependence on symbols and archetypes steeped in the darkness of Wheelwright\'s personal cosmology. He was proud of his heterodox Puritan ancestors, particularly the John Wheelwright who was banished from Boston after supporting Anne Hutchinson in the Antinomian Controversy, and he inherited their disputatious temperament and dogmatic sense of righteousness. His work is pervaded by a sermonizing impulse that, at best, gives his knotty rhetoric a ceremonial grandeur. In its most taxing passages, the poetry reads like some remote doctrinal quarrel among the voices in Wheelwright\'s head, each with its own cryptic logic and angry fire. This gets exhausting (Ashbery cites a critic of the early poetry who wrote, hyperbolically but not without a measure of accuracy, that it "leaves the mind in a state bordering on collapse"), but to get anywhere with Wheelwright\'s work, one has to read all of it. His poems do not anthologize well (when they are anthologized at all), particularly the long poems that are all but impossible to excerpt meaningfully. The three books (excepting pamphlets and broadsides) published in Wheelwright\'s lifetime, Rock and Shell: Poems 1923-1933 (1933), Mirrors of Venus: A Novel in Sonnets (1938), and Political Self-Portrait (1940), contain interrelated poems, and even Wheelwright\'s seemingly self-contained lyrics suffer when read by themselves. A lyric from Rock and Shell, entitled "Would You Think?," gives a sense of Wheelwright\'s abilities and the limitations of reading his poems in isolation:  


The poem moves from its opening question to a scene so generalized that it appears to be hypothetical: an image reflected on frozen water offers itself as an emblem of a Platonic "real forest" protected from the threat of "the air of day." The mere suggestion of the otherworldly 11 real forest" leads to impenetrable thickets. The poem\'s speaker tries to clarify the relationship between sound, silence, and music-which are separated by distances akin to those that divide the living and the dead-but can only blur his distinctions. In characteristic Wheelwright fashion, every proposition the speaker makes is qualified, if not rescinded, by what follows. But by the end of the poem the scene reveals itself as not merely an enabling premise for speculation but an actual setting, subject to time. In one of the sonnets in Mirrors of Venus, Wheelwright claims to "unthink the nonsense of Shelley\'s `If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?\'-a mere treadmill, and no path to heaven." The wintry landscape of "Would You Think?" promises death rather than redemption in the cycle of the seasons; the unnamed menace of the "air of day" is brought forth in a shower of hail. Whether the "rattlesnake\'s song" is an act of compensation or scorn is one of the poem\'s unresolved ambiguities.

"Would You Think?" becomes less opaque-or at least achieves a fuller, more suggestive opacity-when read beside other poems in Rock and Shell. It appears to have been written as a companion piece to the previous poem, "Why Must You Know?," in which the sound of a frozen bird falling on a patch of snow prompts a dialogue about the violence of being (the air is figured as a bird of prey) and the longing for nonexistence. (Wheelwright tells us in a note that one of the two figures in "Why Must You Know?" speaks throughout "Would You Think?," but this isn\'t much help since the note also raises the possibility that the speakers may be the product of a single mind.) The pairing of "questioning, circumambient light" and "answering, luminiferous doubt," baffling when the poem is read by itself, recalls the "Argument" to "Forty Days," a long poem about Saint Thomas, which opens with the statement, "The risen Christ came to show not questioning but doubt to the Apostles as the arena of faith." The repetition of terms links the Platonic speculation of "Would You Think?" to the skeptically refashioned Christianity that characterizes Wheelwright\'s most ambitious work.

This helps, but how much? It\'s not that "Forty Days" or any of the other poems in Rock and Shell make "Would You Think?" more transparent. But Wheelwright\'s tendency to return to a circumscribed if by no means small set of terms, images, idiosyncrasies of phrasing, and oppositions allows one to make headway with the poems in spite of their difficulties and suggestive incoherence. For all that Wheelwright comes across as a poet of ideas, struggling through the orthodoxies of Christianity and Marxism in order to create a revolutionary credo of his own, what endures in his work is the record of a mind whose relationship to its own thought is constantly in flux. The best way to read Wheelwright\'s poetry is to track its recurring images and figures as they take on new and often opposed inflections. In the poem that Ashbery calls Wheelwright\'s greatest work, "Train Ride," the poet returns repeatedly to the slogan of the German socialist Karl Liebknecht, "Always the enemy is the foe at home," as he spins out his variations on Liebknecht\'s theme. The quotation orders the unfolding movement of "Train Ride" but is itself a part of the poem\'s motion, its meaning altered with each repetition. Although such characteristic shifts and dislocations of meaning can appear within the space of a line or two, these local transformations usually resonate with larger trajectories in Wheelwright\'s work as a whole. Wheelwright\'s poems are filled with ideas and abstractions that are incessantly fragmented by their contact with reality. As such they require a special kind of reading, and Ashbery may be as close to an ideal reader as Wheelwright\'s work will ever get. Which brings us back to the question of influence on Ashbery\'s own poetry. Setting aside Wheelwright\'s radical politics, there are strong affinities between the two poets. Wheelwright\'s example, more than any of the other poets in Other Traditions (with the possible exception of Riding), clarifies Ashbery\'s intention in his own poetry, stated at the outset of the first lecture, "of somehow turning these [thought] processes into poetic objects, a position perhaps kin to Dr. Williams\'s `No ideas but in things,\' with the caveat that, for me, ideas are also things."

Williams, of course, is a major poet, but after reading Other Traditions the distinction between "major" and "minor," though real, seems more irrelevant than ever. Ashbery\'s lectures celebrate the imagination\'s efforts to understand the particularity of experience without recourse to the false transcendence of purely abstract thought. Even more so than Williams\'s famous dictum, Ashbery\'s observations on poetry in Other Traditions recall the late poems of Stevens, the gorgeous final lyrics such as "The Course of a Particular" and "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself." "Ariel was glad he had written his poems," he writes in "The Planet on the Table," because they bore "Some lineament or character,/ Some affluence, if only half-perceived,/In the poverty of their words,/Of the planet of which they were part." Ashbery\'s lectures have increased our sense of poetry\'s affluence from unlikely sources, and for that we should be grateful.

[Author note]
JAMES GIBBONS

[Author note]
JAMES GIBBONS is Assistant Editor at The Library of America.


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Oser, Lee: other Traditions
World Literature Today: a literary quarterly of the University of Oklahoma (Norman) (75:2) [Spring 2001] , p.338.
  




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other Traditions
World Literature Today; Norman; Spring 2001; Lee Oser

Volume:  75
Issue:  2
Start Page:  338
ISSN:  01963570
Subject Terms:  Nonfiction
Essays
Writers

Personal Names:  Ashbery, John

Abstract:
John Ashbery. other Traditions Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 2000. viii + 168 pages $22.95. ISBN 0-674-00315-2

Full Text:
Copyright University of Oklahoma Spring 2001

John Ashbery. other Traditions Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 2000. viii + 168 pages $22.95. ISBN 0-674-00315-2

AH, FABULOUS, FANCIFUL John Ashbery. It must be difficult for such a man to gallop around Boston, New Haven, and New York amid the peeps and gawks of educated bystanders. John Ashbery is a genius. But he is also a modest, decent fellow like you or me. There is such a cozy air of rightness about other Traditions, which really has the comfortable feeling of a Cambridge tea party, that only an ingrate would criticize the book.

Not the least snobby, Ashbery invites us to join him on the right side (that is, the "other" side) of literature and culture. The subjects are minor writers of our own historical province: John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, Laura Riding, and two sufferers of neglect, John Wheelwright and David Schubert. They were all pioneers of abstract realms of apperception. Some were homosexual. Most struggled against insanity. All but Roussel wrote in English. Ashbery\'s other traditions are, we can see, much more local and familiar than those other, other traditions, of the troubadours of Provence, of the scops of Old England, of the poets of ancient Mediterranean lands.



Ashbery did some good research for this project, and he combines shrewd observation with memorable facts. Riding was a "control freak" who influenced the early Auden. Michel Foucault\'s first book was about Roussel, though the book is really about Foucault. Robert Frost, in a happy cameo, emerges as both a kind man and an authority: he would "will-- ingly have provided [Shubert] with both financial and critical help in his later, desperate years but ... Schubert was too pround to ask for it."

Ashbery\'s case for Riding is especially strong. She was very gifted and she was studied by important poets. The cases for Wheelwright and Schubert haunt the mind and touch the heart. Their peoms merit reading, on their own right, as Ashbery says. Still, canons of taste are fading that would nurture the reputations of these writers. We are moving away from the inner frontiers of radical individualism. Two billion people will have to discover what it feels like to be a social animal.

other Traditions offers many insights about Ashbery the poet. His critics will be interested to know that he values Riding\'s poetry for the esthetic experience, not for the meaning itself, which "doesn\'t matter" and is largely "incomprehensible." He delights in the art of fragments. His own poetry has "swung... always between the poles of Clare\'s lumpy poetry of mud and muck and Beddoes\' perfumed and poisonous artifice." He did not come to Harvard to praise a "Great Tradition," and he is frank enough to say: "I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot." I wonder if he values Schubert more than Ashbery.

[Author note]
Lee Oser
College of the Holy Cross


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Phillips, Malcolm.
Herd, David.
** John Ashbery and American poetry: fit to cope with our occasions.
PN Review (Manchester) (28:2) [November-December 2001] , p.71.





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Phillips, Malcolm: One Way



PN Review (Manchester); November-December 2001




DAVID HERD, John Ashbery and American Poetry (Manchester University Press)



\'I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.\' These words, from John Ashbery\'s long poem in prose and verse, \'The New Spirit,\' have frequently been cited as an illustration of the twin impulses towards intimacy and concealment that characterise his oeuvre. The irony of which David Herd is well aware is that critics of Ashbery\'s poetry have similarly hesitated between putting it all down and leaving it all out, and not always to the reader\'s advantage. The hostile and dismissive response of some British reviewers has further complicated the situation for readers in the UK. Caught between Harold Bloom\'s \'disciple of Stevens\' and Tom Paulin\'s naked emperor, many readers would sympathise with Ashbery\'s own desire for a \'serious mixed critique\' of his work, and it is in this context that Herd wishes to situate his own book.

To have begun this review by \'setting the scene\' seems apt, since Herd proposes as the governing principle of Ashbery\'s poetic the \'desire to write the poem fit to cope with its occasion\'. In an impressive and wide-ranging introduction, Herd illustrates what this might mean with reference to Pasternak, who he sees as Ashbery\'s presiding poetic influence, and to the pragmatic philosophy of William James. He also gives an invaluable account of Frank O\'Hara\'s discovery of Paul Goodman\'s article \'Advance-guard writing 1900-1950\' which posits that in the alienated society of the 1950s community could best be constructed through a mode of occasional poetry developed by the avant-garde. Herd and behind him Ashbery both acknowledge O\'Hara\'s galvanising presence and influence in 1950s New York.

However, Herd is quick to contrast O\'Hara\'s sense of occasion as the shared moment of a literary coterie with Ashbery\'s concern for the \'time, place, situation and circumstances of the poem itself\'. That this makes the poetry less and not more insular is because of the way Pasternak\'s influence allows the apprehension of \'time, place, etc\' to become the essential relation of the writer to the \'situation as a whole\'. Dr Zhivago\'s narrative prepares the reader for the poems which signal its end and fullest realisation, and so the \'history of the birth of Zhivago\'s poems\' is also the history of the revolution which is the occasion of the poems. Herd identifies two ways in which the occasion is situated in Ashbery\'s poetry. Ashbery has remarked that a telephone ringing can alter the direction of the poem. Herd asserts that \'equally, at his best, and in a certain mood, when Ashbery sits down to write a poem, his sense of occasion is Pasternakian in its scope\'. This is interesting because it pits what some critics have seen as Ashbery\'s Cage-ian openness to incident against what is more or less privileged as a higher, epic contingency. Epic because, as Herd goes on to argue, Ashbery\'s poetry develops in explicit relation to contemporary American society. And indeed, had this book been written slightly later, its author might have had occasion to ponder the prophetic power of a poet who, in 1962, wrote the line \'You were not elected president, yet won the race.\'

Herd looks at Austin\'s sense of occasion as defined by a collective understanding of the proceedings and the role each person must play. Ashbery\'s occasions are not of the nature of the wedding ceremony or the other \'privileged moments\' of this kind, but take place instead in situations which are in William James\'s words \'tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed\'. Ashbery\'s poems are consequently produced by a series of \'pre-judgements\' arising from the following questions: \'What constitutes the present occasion? What are its parameters, its dynamics, its defining circumstances? What are the best means of acquainting the reader with that occasion, of making \'you realize that you actually are in it\'? Is it to \'put it all in\'? To \'leave it all out\'? Is it by cataloguing, representation, metaphor, parody, conversation, metonymy, deixis or studied neglect? And finally, after these pre-judgements have been made, what is the appropriate response?\'

This carefully developed perspective is intended to avoid what Herd sees as the reductive tendencies of theoretical readings in favour of a more fruitful consideration of the dialogue between theory and poetry which would reveal their \'interlocking\' relevance to the culture to which they are both contemporary. Ashbery\'s poetry is then a response to the \'liberal democratic culture from which it emerges\'. This is most clear in Herd\'s important re-evaluation of Ashbery\'s controversial second major collection The Tennis Court Oath, where the cut-up techniques of poems such as \'Europe\' are considered alongside the work of cultural commentators like Philip Rahv and C. Wright Mills in a discussion that more than adequately counters Bloom\'s refusal to see the book as a necessary development in Ashbery\'s poetic.

The book considers Ashbery\'s work from Some Trees (1956) right up to Wakefulness (1998) and provides many illuminating contexts along the way. The pressure on American poets to declare their opposition to the war in Vietnam forms a provocative background to the reading of Rivers and Mountains and The Double Dream of Spring, while the very different pressures confronting gay writers in the early 1980s are brought to bear in a sensitive passage on A Wave. More literary engagements are also well documented, particularly in Herd\'s discussion of Pascal\'s presence in Three Poems. The extensive contextualisation, combined with the closer reading of key poems and the willingness to suggest relative successes and failures in the oeuvre, make this the best introduction to Ashbery\'s beautiful, receptive and generous poetry as well as an important contribution to the academic criticism of his work.

Yet Herd does not entirely avoid \'leaving out\': there is surprisingly little discussion of the McCarthy era, the shadow of which is known to have caused Ashbery to stop writing for some time in the early 1950s. And while Herd justifies his dismissal of Shadow Train, the relegation of As We Know to one paragraph on the supposed failure of its long poem \'Litany\' is much less reasonable, being the greatest instance of a wider tendency to privilege the discursive, communicative Ashbery over the surreal, hedonistic, free-form Ashbery. At times, this makes the book read like an apology, an attempt to make Ashbery respectable for a British audience, which also explains the unwillingness to recognise the \'interlocking\' relevance of recent theory when not applied reductively, something that Geoff Ward\'s Statutes of Liberty managed with no loss of accessibility. Ironically, this sometimes closes the poetry down, reducing some poems to statement when their charm might actually be thought to rest in the weird impurities and suggestive juxtapositions so celebrated in recent textual criticism. There is, as yet, no single author study of Ashbery that satisfactorily accommodates both impulses. Perhaps it is inevitable that critics should always be putting in and leaving out.

MALCOLM PHILLIPS

© Copyright 2001 Poetry Nation Review.



71


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Full text
Phillips, Malcolm: One Way
PN Review (Manchester) (28:2) [November-December 2001] , p.71.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Phillips, Malcolm: One Way



PN Review (Manchester); November-December 2001




DAVID HERD, John Ashbery and American Poetry (Manchester University Press)



\'I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.\' These words, from John Ashbery\'s long poem in prose and verse, \'The New Spirit,\' have frequently been cited as an illustration of the twin impulses towards intimacy and concealment that characterise his oeuvre. The irony of which David Herd is well aware is that critics of Ashbery\'s poetry have similarly hesitated between putting it all down and leaving it all out, and not always to the reader\'s advantage. The hostile and dismissive response of some British reviewers has further complicated the situation for readers in the UK. Caught between Harold Bloom\'s \'disciple of Stevens\' and Tom Paulin\'s naked emperor, many readers would sympathise with Ashbery\'s own desire for a \'serious mixed critique\' of his work, and it is in this context that Herd wishes to situate his own book.

To have begun this review by \'setting the scene\' seems apt, since Herd proposes as the governing principle of Ashbery\'s poetic the \'desire to write the poem fit to cope with its occasion\'. In an impressive and wide-ranging introduction, Herd illustrates what this might mean with reference to Pasternak, who he sees as Ashbery\'s presiding poetic influence, and to the pragmatic philosophy of William James. He also gives an invaluable account of Frank O\'Hara\'s discovery of Paul Goodman\'s article \'Advance-guard writing 1900-1950\' which posits that in the alienated society of the 1950s community could best be constructed through a mode of occasional poetry developed by the avant-garde. Herd and behind him Ashbery both acknowledge O\'Hara\'s galvanising presence and influence in 1950s New York.

However, Herd is quick to contrast O\'Hara\'s sense of occasion as the shared moment of a literary coterie with Ashbery\'s concern for the \'time, place, situation and circumstances of the poem itself\'. That this makes the poetry less and not more insular is because of the way Pasternak\'s influence allows the apprehension of \'time, place, etc\' to become the essential relation of the writer to the \'situation as a whole\'. Dr Zhivago\'s narrative prepares the reader for the poems which signal its end and fullest realisation, and so the \'history of the birth of Zhivago\'s poems\' is also the history of the revolution which is the occasion of the poems. Herd identifies two ways in which the occasion is situated in Ashbery\'s poetry. Ashbery has remarked that a telephone ringing can alter the direction of the poem. Herd asserts that \'equally, at his best, and in a certain mood, when Ashbery sits down to write a poem, his sense of occasion is Pasternakian in its scope\'. This is interesting because it pits what some critics have seen as Ashbery\'s Cage-ian openness to incident against what is more or less privileged as a higher, epic contingency. Epic because, as Herd goes on to argue, Ashbery\'s poetry develops in explicit relation to contemporary American society. And indeed, had this book been written slightly later, its author might have had occasion to ponder the prophetic power of a poet who, in 1962, wrote the line \'You were not elected president, yet won the race.\'

Herd looks at Austin\'s sense of occasion as defined by a collective understanding of the proceedings and the role each person must play. Ashbery\'s occasions are not of the nature of the wedding ceremony or the other \'privileged moments\' of this kind, but take place instead in situations which are in William James\'s words \'tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed\'. Ashbery\'s poems are consequently produced by a series of \'pre-judgements\' arising from the following questions: \'What constitutes the present occasion? What are its parameters, its dynamics, its defining circumstances? What are the best means of acquainting the reader with that occasion, of making \'you realize that you actually are in it\'? Is it to \'put it all in\'? To \'leave it all out\'? Is it by cataloguing, representation, metaphor, parody, conversation, metonymy, deixis or studied neglect? And finally, after these pre-judgements have been made, what is the appropriate response?\'

This carefully developed perspective is intended to avoid what Herd sees as the reductive tendencies of theoretical readings in favour of a more fruitful consideration of the dialogue between theory and poetry which would reveal their \'interlocking\' relevance to the culture to which they are both contemporary. Ashbery\'s poetry is then a response to the \'liberal democratic culture from which it emerges\'. This is most clear in Herd\'s important re-evaluation of Ashbery\'s controversial second major collection The Tennis Court Oath, where the cut-up techniques of poems such as \'Europe\' are considered alongside the work of cultural commentators like Philip Rahv and C. Wright Mills in a discussion that more than adequately counters Bloom\'s refusal to see the book as a necessary development in Ashbery\'s poetic.

The book considers Ashbery\'s work from Some Trees (1956) right up to Wakefulness (1998) and provides many illuminating contexts along the way. The pressure on American poets to declare their opposition to the war in Vietnam forms a provocative background to the reading of Rivers and Mountains and The Double Dream of Spring, while the very different pressures confronting gay writers in the early 1980s are brought to bear in a sensitive passage on A Wave. More literary engagements are also well documented, particularly in Herd\'s discussion of Pascal\'s presence in Three Poems. The extensive contextualisation, combined with the closer reading of key poems and the willingness to suggest relative successes and failures in the oeuvre, make this the best introduction to Ashbery\'s beautiful, receptive and generous poetry as well as an important contribution to the academic criticism of his work.

Yet Herd does not entirely avoid \'leaving out\': there is surprisingly little discussion of the McCarthy era, the shadow of which is known to have caused Ashbery to stop writing for some time in the early 1950s. And while Herd justifies his dismissal of Shadow Train, the relegation of As We Know to one paragraph on the supposed failure of its long poem \'Litany\' is much less reasonable, being the greatest instance of a wider tendency to privilege the discursive, communicative Ashbery over the surreal, hedonistic, free-form Ashbery. At times, this makes the book read like an apology, an attempt to make Ashbery respectable for a British audience, which also explains the unwillingness to recognise the \'interlocking\' relevance of recent theory when not applied reductively, something that Geoff Ward\'s Statutes of Liberty managed with no loss of accessibility. Ironically, this sometimes closes the poetry down, reducing some poems to statement when their charm might actually be thought to rest in the weird impurities and suggestive juxtapositions so celebrated in recent textual criticism. There is, as yet, no single author study of Ashbery that satisfactorily accommodates both impulses. Perhaps it is inevitable that critics should always be putting in and leaving out.

MALCOLM PHILLIPS

© Copyright 2001 Poetry Nation Review.



71


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Send your suggestions, comments or questions to our Webmaster.
Copyright © 1996-2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company.
All Rights Reserved.