It's a Beautiful Interview With John Ashbery

John Ashbery talks with Jarrett Earnest about being the "greatest living poet" at the Brooklyn Rail. Nice opener: "Instead of asking you a lot of specific questions about poems, which is what people usually do and which I find quite tedious, I’m going to ask you more 'human being' type questions, if that’s ok." "Ok." It turns out beautifully:

Rail: Did your mom commonly go through your things as a child?

Ashbery: Oh, sure; that’s why I wrote in French in my diary. I believe one of my techniques was to use the word garçon, but I figured she might very well know what that means, so I used the slang word gar instead.

Rail: In an interview from the mid-‘60s you said, “My pronouns can never be trusted to refer to any one person for any length of time, I believe in a kind of polyphonic effect that I try to get” which interests me immensely.

Ashbery: I’m sort of notorious for my use of the pronoun “it” without explaining what it means, which somehow never seemed a problem to me. We all sort of feel the presence of “it” without necessarily knowing what we’re thinking about. It is an important force just for that reason, it’s there and we don’t know what it is, and that is natural. So I don’t apologize for that, though I’ve been expected to on many occasions.

Rail: How does that relate to writing criticism, where the job is to describe the “it” and define the “I”?

Ashbery: Writing criticism is a completely different procedure. Your task is pretty well defined by what you’re writing about. There are pictures or sculptures, which are concrete and present, and the presence of “it” is not a problem, I think, though I’ve never thought about that before.

Rail: You’ve made both collaged poems and collaged pictures—how does it work differently to collage words instead of images?

Ashbery: I don’t know, though undoubtedly it does. It’s much more difficult to control the meaning of language, but if you’re using an image cut from a picture, which is just there, it may reflect on the other elements of the collage, but not in the vast way that language allows or uses.

Rail: Because the abstraction of language can move further, or with more multiplicity?

Ashbery: I think so, yes.

Rail: Have you always made collages?

Ashbery: I think I started when I was in college. My roommate and I used to make them. I still have a couple from that period, one of which was in the show that I first had, at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 2008. A bunch of others unfortunately got thrown out when our house was sold—I wasn’t around when it happened, not that they were works of great importance but it would be nice to have them. One of those I still have is really good, in fact I think it may be one of the best I’ve done.

Read the full conversation at the Brooklyn Rail.