Stephen Malkmus Thinks Highly of John Ashbery

Musician Stephen Malkmus shares his literary influences with Scott Timberg for Los Angeles Review of Books. Why, yes, he too loved Ashbery:

When did you really start getting into poetry? Was there a period where you were really set on it and kept finding new people? 

I was always more into music lyrics, and I was just looking for ammunition or something to distinguish myself. Of course, you know, I like Mark E. Smith from The Fall; he has a similar style; he has chewy things that he likes to say, that get into his mouth, but they’re awesome. I guess I’m just looking for connections between some of the words I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to write really tight country songs. I mean, I appreciate that, but my mind doesn’t work that way. It’s not that it couldn’t work that way, you know? I like songs like that, and I would write songs like that for somebody else as like a paying job, but it’s not my aesthetic.

But, no, not in college, I didn’t read poetry much then. There was a lot of art at that time, in the early ’90s. There were a lot of people like Christopher Wool and other artists that were text-based that I was finding out about — Lawrence Weiner, and then more political versions like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. Yeah, they’re really awesome too.

So it was just like, at least in my mind, what could you do with words that was different than that of the music at that time? So one way is reading somebody like John Ashbery. It’s all a little stoner-y with the way those things work. It goes with music, because music should get you a little high feeling, even if you’re not high. [Laughs.] It should make sense in a more subconscious way.

Yeah, it does feel like Ashbery is coming out of the unconscious or something.

Yeah, he is a fan of 19th-century French Symbolism and stuff like that, so it’s not surprising that he would go that way. He was a badass dude.

Read it all at LARB.