Mark Ford Reviews Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life

At The Guardian, Mark Ford strolls through Karin Roffman's recently published biography of John Ashbery's early life, Songs We Know Best. As with other reviews, Ford praises Roffman for illuminating a part of Ashbery's life that was foundational to his poetic development, and one that has often remained obscure to Ashbery devotees. Ford writes:

The American poet John Ashbery, who turns 90 this month, is often figured as the epitome of cosmopolitan sophistication – as a refined but radical innovator whose open-ended lyrics and narrative-free long poems refract and dramatise the anxieties of postmodernity. Doyen of the avant garde Ashbery may have become, and yet, as Karin Roffman demonstrates in this illuminating account of his early life, the originality of his poetic idiom owes as much to his provincial rural upbringing, and to the compound of guilt and nostalgia that was its legacy, as it does to his embrace of the experimental in New York and Paris.

Ford kindly walks the reader through the narrative line of the book and then focuses on instances of Roffman's close reading, where she connects poems to biographical material:

Although Ashbery is the least confessional of poets, the upstate New York landscapes and lake vistas of his early years are often filtered into his poems in obliquely revealing ways. His longest poem, Flow Chart (1991), was begun in the wake of his mother’s death, and features numerous passages that evoke his life on the farm, or at his grandparents’ houses in Rochester and then Pultneyville (where Ashbery spent a series of idyllic summers), as well as elliptical characterisations of the tedium and excitements of childhood and adolescence. As Roffman demonstrates in close readings of poems such as the very early “Lost Cove”, Ashbery’s need to make his works present generic or “one-size-fits-all” transcriptions of experience, applicable to anyone, never wholly obscures their origins in the personal.

She also suggests that the cryptic aspects of his work can be related back to his dawning awareness of his homosexuality. From 1941 to 1945 he kept a series of diaries, which he strongly suspected were periodically read by his mother. Shortly before his 14th birthday, he and a male friend of the same age hugged and kissed and fondled each other, and he ejaculated for the first time. This event was commemorated in his journal with a fractured sequence of words that would not look out of place in his most disjunctive volume of poems, The Tennis Court Oathof 1962: “tulip garden / old dutch / home all our own until / recall once more / fashion in shows / dog cast in / days before …” This reads like an embryo version of a poem such as “Leaving the Atocha Station”, which, with its reference to “mouthing the root”, is in fact rather more explicit.

More to consider at The Guardian.