“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

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

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!

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

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

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