“How much longer shall I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher of life, my love”

“I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.”

“No more disappointing orgasms.”

“My wife thinks I’m in Oslo. Oslo, France, that is.”

“This honey is delicious, though it burns the throat.”

“We were on the terrace drinking gin and tonics when the squall hit.”

“It might give us–what–some flowers soon?”

“The lake a lilac cube.”

“The academy of the future is opening its doors.”

“The poem is you.”

You see? He doesn’t even have a memorable line, much less a memorable poem. Well, that’s the problem. You need ONE memorable poem, at least. ONE hit. If you stopped 50,000 Americans randomly on the street, I’d wager not one would know any of these lines. Now this doesn’t cancel out Ashbery, of course, but it does kind of support my point. If you translated these lines into French, and stopped 50,000 French people on the street, I could see many stopping and saying, “Wait, I think I know that one…” Some of it has to do with this country, but I don’t know if one can say that France is a better country than America…

Thomas
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That is a lovely video. Auden envied Shakespeare his biographical blank, saying all poets should be so fortunate. Perhaps it was this blank in Ashbery’s poetry which appealed to Auden on some unconscious level when he chose Ashbery for the Yale Younger.

When I learned the tragedy of Ashbery’s childhood I couldn’t help but feel I shouldn’t have known that, because Ashbery seemed funny, possessing the abandon of a Burns or a Byron, two poets who Auden, in his Light Verse anthology, said were two of the greatest Light Verse poets; the Ashbery I thought I knew was free of tragic taint, sitting under ferns, reading French philosophy, watching cartoons. I was reminded that no poet could be as blithe as Ashbery seems to be, and suddenly all his evasive poetry seemed to be pouring in from a different direction, the fractured nature of his prose-poems arising not from elan, but from silence and heartbreak.

The erudite who read Ashbery find him refreshingly hilarious, but the rest mutter to themselves, ‘what torture! who could read this?’ Ashbery’s restraint, in never revealing his life, his polemics, never ‘getting to the point,’ will seem a virtue to the erudite but a thorn to everyone else. To the religiously dogmatic, God has a point; but to the erudite who embrace a more random view of the universe, Ashbery’s restraint, his ‘never getting to the point’ seems to them almost divine. Ashbery is almost erudition itself. Or perhaps a spoof version of erudition? Isn’t Modernism a kind of spoof of all that was once considered morally and intellectually virtuous? This divided view of Ashbery is the crack in the House of Modernism, that divide which rips in two the Public for Poetry, since Modernism will always seem to be AGAINST the general public before it seems FOR anything else. Ashbery’s dilemma, his great split, his failure to be popular in general while being wildly loved within po-biz, is the odd-looking Flower of Modernism.

Thomas
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How much longer shall I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher of life, my love

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

No more disappointing orgasms.

My wife thinks I’m in Oslo. Oslo, France, that is.

This honey is delicious, though it burns the throat.

We were on the terrace drinking gin and tonics when the squall hit.

It might give us–what–some flowers soon?

The lake a lilac cube.

The academy of the future is opening its doors.

The poem is you.

. . . . . . . . it’s actually a very pleasurable game! But will the long line of people like Thomas who make this claim over and over again be satisfied only once someone memorizes the entire Collected Works? Ask David Shapiro to recite some! No, surely it will still be said that he is not memorable until Thomas himself tries to memorize a poem. Why not try “As One Put Drunk in the Packet Boat”? It’s worth it!
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I agree Ashbery is the ‘least polemical of poets.’

Ashbery’s dreamy, flowing, indefiniteness is evasive in the extreme. Ashbery won’t be pinned down; he won’t argue; he won’t fight. Which makes him pedagogically worthless.

Polemics is the soul of Letters. Polemics is necessary for a healthy society.

Ashbery is jelly. He has no bones.

The polemicist is always preferable to the solipsist, for you can always play lovely music and calm the polemicist down; play a trumpet blast for the solipsist, and he will only cover his ears, sinking deeper into his solipsism.

The polemicist, by nature, cares for things outside himself, and because he cares, he illuminates those issues to some degree, by attacking or defending them; Ashbery, as you have said, is the ‘least polemical of poets;’ Ashbery has nothing to do with issues or things or ideas; he is only a relaxation technique, a stiff drink, which may be a good thing after a hard day’s work, but if there is only the relaxation technique without the work, without the need to relax, then you have the still waters of the swamp, the damp mold, the cake which will not rise, the giggling guru who lazes before his sleeping followers.

Of course he is a sweet man. I want to give John Ashbery a hug.

The problem is that he has never written a poem which is memorable. He has written nothing that is memorable as a whole piece, memorable in its entirety. This is why he has never caught on with the general public, while having great opportunities to do so, being so feted by the poetry establishment for so long. Unity of effect is perhaps the single most important criterion in aesthetics; poets once understood this; now they do not. Rhetorical sweep and Paterian gems lose a great deal without unity of effect. Ironically, you mention Whitman, and he is to blame for much of this. Ashbery was born into an era in which unity of effect had been smashed as a requirement by the modernists, and Ashbery took this license–to have NO unity of effect–and ran with it.

Thomas
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Thanks so much for digging up that 1957 review. J.A. would have already been in France when he wrote it. I was going to suggest to people on this thread, or anyone for that matter, who find Ashbery’s work “difficult” – or worse – to read some of his prose: Other Traditions, Selected Prose and Reported Sightings are all readily available. These books, besides being monuments of contemporary criticism (especially the more formal Other Traditions) will show Ashbery from another angle in that they connect more directly with the man himself.

Here, as well, is a marvelous video, in which the poet shares an “autobiographical” poem with us – written by accident, or so he says. He also talks about the difficulty of living abroad and his relationship to American English.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20340

Martin
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You’re right, Ashbery’s review of Stein is ‘balanced;’ I said as much; Ashbery said Stein’s work was “annoying” and “tedious” but, then, as I was at some pains to point out, he talks of moments of pleasant surprise. I was trying to talk *past* the superficial idea of ‘balance:’ the mere formula of: he found some good things, he found some bad things, etc.

I guess I don’t see what your disagreement on this point with me is.

As for the ideas of Poe and Aristotle, these happen to be tools which fit the case; Ashbery doesn’t have the right to repel them just because he doesn’t mention Poe and Aristotle by name in his review. I would not be so hand-cuffed. Ashbery is a mountain terrain; he has a natural defense, though no human one; Mr. A. is always agreeable; no critical armies invade because Harvard ’49 and Yale Younger ’56 is a small, neutral country, like Switzerland; Ashbery’s offense is all defense–we don’t think we have the right to invade. I feel differently; little Switz. is not as innocent as it seems. We defend Ashbery-ism at great cost. If my soldiers have thrived in his mountains and taken his cities, they have been kind; my intentions are good, better than Ashbery’s in any case.

You misquoted me misquoting Mr. A; I did not say he compared Stein’s poems to people; I knew he was talking about parts of a poem–my thesis depends on this; he said lines, not words; I had written lines originally; I didn’t have the actual text before me at that moment.

William James is one of the major pieces which connects the transcendentalists and the moderns. The sister of 19th century ‘Dial’ poet Christopher Peace Cranch (whose ‘Correspondences’ sounds like Baudelaire’s) married T.S. Eliot’s grandfather–William Greenleaf, Unitarian companion of Channing and Emerson. Mr. Emerson, of course, was William James’ godfather–James taught Gertrude Stein and Santayana who taught Eliot and Wallace Stevens at Harvard.

I am glad distinguished defenders of Ashbery are coming out of the woodwork, so to speak, for otherwise we don’t get the balance which is always required, even though balance is rarely a simple manner.

The poetry world is so small that my taking shots at Mr. A almost feels like I’m saying unpleasant things of a beloved uncle at a family breakfast. But Letters ought to be larger than this.

I speak up only because I sincerely feel the insidious nature of Ashbery-ism is real and the damage it is doing to intellectual discourse is real, and larger than anyone can know.

The smallness of the poetry world is certainly not my fault! The small, coddling, nature of the poetry world is certainly a problem, too. It is a bigger problem than all of us. We live in its alps-shadow. We are hemmed-in by its hidden correspondences.

Thomas
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Years ago during a time when I was reading Ashbery’s Three Poems I wrote a poem for him. It is in four sections. Each section in a different style. It ends with the thoughts:
Time swallows us.
We do not digest well.
-

It’s unlikely Ashbery ever read it, and that’s fine.
My point is that conversing with other authors (albeit indirectly) and tangling with the vagaries of time are activities I, for one, cannot break from.
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That’s a very illustrative review by Ashbery, paying homage to Gertrude Stein and Henry James. He is absolutely in the line of William James/Gertrude Stein Modernism. He knew where he stood. He wasn’t about to give Gertrude Stein a bad review. Thanks to Aristotle and a misreading of Poe, he doesn’t have to.

Aristotle said poetry was imitation, which is precisely why Plato did not trust it, for poetic imitation is 1) inaccurate 2) unlearned and 3) there’s no certainty it will be socially useful.

Ashbery can barely disguise his contempt for Stein’s poetry; he calls it “annoying” and “tedious.”

But Ashbery is tacitly rescued by Poe’s famous formula: a long poem will inevitably be “tedious” in parts. When Ashbery tells us Stein pleasantly surprises now and then, he hints that it is the “annoying” and “tedious” passages which condition the reader for a pleasant surprise.

Ashbery, invoking Aristotle’s mimesis theory, compares Stein’s words to people, and people, he says, will inevitably be annoying or pleasing. He then goes on to compare Stein’s poetry (and by inference all poetry) to a scene in which the wind shifts and we are suddenly able to hear a far-off conversation; a landscape of physical filtering is described, which inevitably creates both obscurity and clarity, sun and shade, look! Someone suddenly ceases to speak and wanders off. Here is Ashbery’s poetry by way of Stein’s, excused because it imitates the vicissitudes and confusions and brief clarities of life.

Ashbery compares a pleasing moment in Stein’s poetry to a splash of de Kooning yellow, a pleasant experience because the yellow is “out-of-context.” Here is Poe’s formula taken to its logical extreme: all moments of poetry, because they ARE moments–in the otherwise tedious flow of the long poem (or the tedious flow of life) are “out-of-context,” and here we see the justification of abstract art (out-of-context ‘moments’ of color, pure because they are out-of-context, out-of-context because they are pure).

But of course this is pure arrogance. Comparing a poem to ‘people who are sometimes annoying’ is a strategy both cowardly and inane; and Ashbery’s tacit use of Poe forgets that Poe said a poem should not be too brief, either. A splash of yellow, no matter how delightful to the eye, is no work of art.
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my 2cents: he’s certainly a worldclass poet and if they don’t give him a Nobel they’ll be as ashamed in retrospect as they are about Rilke, Auden and all the other greats they passed over——

Ashbery, Parra, Bonnefoy, Tanikawa, Enzensberger, Transtromer,

the list goes on and on of poets who should have already won Nobels——

i never understood why they don’t split it and give two every year, one to prose and one to poetry——

just another example of how poetry is undervalued and insulted . . .

incidentally, for what it’s worth, may i invite readers to look at an “appreciation” i did of one of his poems:

http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2009/05/appreciation-john-ashberys-farm-film.html

…
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There is certainly plenty of monotony in the 150-page title poem which forms the first half of this volume, but it is the fertile kind, which generates excitement as water monotonously flowing over a dam generates electrical power. These austere “stanzas” are made up almost entirely of colorless connecting words such as “where,” “which,” “these,” “of,” “not,” “have,” “about,” and so on, though now and then Miss Stein throws in an orange, a lilac, or an Albert to remind us that it really is the world, our world, that she has been talking about. The result is like certain monochrome de Kooning paintings in which isolated strokes of color take on a deliciousness they never could have had out of context, or a piece of music by Webern in which a single note on the celesta suddenly irrigates a whole desert of dry, scratchy sounds in the strings… Like people, Miss Stein’s lines are comforting or annoying or brilliant or tedious. Like people, they sometimes make no sense and sometimes make perfect sense; or they stop short in the middle of a sentence and wander away, leaving us alone for a while in the physical world, that collection of thoughts, flowers, weather, and proper names. And just as with people, there is no real escape from them… Sometimes the story has the logic of a dream… while at other times it becomes startlingly clear for a moment, as though a change in the wind had suddenly enabled us to hear a conversation that was taking place some distance away… The poem is a hymn to possibility; a celebration of the fact that the world exists, that things can happen.
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My comment above:

Thank you Michael for this bit; it’s wonderfully lucid and dovetails with what Ashbery has recently said, that if he has a subject, it’s time.

Martin

POSTED BY: MEARL ON JUNE 22, 2009 AT 6:08 PM

was referring to Michael’s comment of JUNE 22, 2009 AT 12:47 PM, and particularly to the following sentence:

“Ashbery is endlessly preoccupied with the criteria of poetic speakers & poetic time.”

which I think hit’s the mark.

My comment (I know it’s a small one compared with the rest of them) has been shunted around so often that it has lost all meaning, and looks fairly ridiculous on its present foothold.

I’d also like to apologize for not having time to come into the discussion in any meaningful way. I’ve been working against a major deadline this week. But I will do. Ashbery was my teacher, and continues to be one of my closest friends and favorite poets, though I’ve long since shirked off his influence (except for the buried part, the pith of what he taught me about poetry). Part of moving abroad and removing myself from the scene was to see if I could survive poetically without my supports.

One thing I would like to expand on (this evening I hope) is that I have never really understood the importance of this paradigm (much in evidence in the above discussion) – “difficulty vs. transparency”, or poems “about something” vs. poems “about the process” of getting to that something (or not getting to it). There are simply “ways” of writing which cannot be justifiably valorized to the disadvantage of other ways of writing. There has got to be another way to conduct what seems really to be more a discussion about personal aesthetics than it is about poetic technique.

Martin
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In John Ashbery there is nobody there in one sense, nobody to meet in other words, and in another sense there is nobody there but John Ashbery, so there’s only him to meet if only he were there. He’s the hum.

Rarely has there been a poetry that was so much a solo act—he must be so lonely!
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I’ve mentioned before that I like that Robert Zemeckis film called ‘Contact.’ Based on the novel by Carl Sagan, it’s about a young female radio astronomer (Jodie Foster) who is studying the huge hum that fills outer space in an effort to find a single ‘message’ sound, one that can detach itself from the clutter to become something else—something relevant, significant, communicative, helpful perhaps, hopeful even, almost like a friend. During the film we listen and listen and listen, and then suddenly we do hear something different from the senseless hum, a sound which resonates in us in a way the random noise doesn’t. Like the young scientist herself, we are passionately drawn toward something other than ourselves out there, something that comes toward us full of what we call in ordinary, down-to-earth terrestrial life, meaning.



I think the ending of the film is truly extraordinary. A huge, towering centrifuge is constructed and then begins whirling and whirling with the young astronomer inside a pod dangling in the middle of it. When the wheel becomes a rushing blur of speed it suddenly disintegrates entirely and becomes the most astonishing display of cosmic light, distance, staggering speed and wonder. Then suddenly there is silence as the young woman arrives upon an ordinary beach, and in a silvery moment meets another simple person face to face.



John Ashbery disintegrates in cosmic light and wonder alright, but for me rarely steps upon that beach. Of course I love the light show and the music, who wouldn’t, but for me that’s not enough. I want the real encounter.



Christopher
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