1-12-2000

John Ashbery

(1927 - † 3-9-2017)

Famous Poets and Poems

The TLS n.º 5254, de 12-12-2003

Two Million Violators

Like a hair falling on sand

the return address is emptiness

or openness,

whichever way that leads us,

makes us happen.

Stars shift in their sockets.

God patrols the bottom of the sea,

lifts the doric snails

to fire-escape level.

Sees us coming

and turns a corner.

Pasteboard men idle in their shops

past the gliding hour,

serve us tea and sherbets

conniving in the small back room.

We have filled those orders

over and over, it says,

exported our waste

to the furthest reaches of the empire.

Still no ermine slope

fanning downward,

nor eyrie for the mind.

Distressed stone terraces contain

all the abatement.

The TLS n.º 5410  December 8, 2006

Are You Ticklish?

We’re leaving again of our own volition

for bogus-patterned plains, shreds of maps recurring

like waves on a beach, each unimaginable

and likely to go on being so.

But sometimes they get, you know, confused

and change their vows on the ground rules

that sustain all of us. It’s cheery, then, to reflect on the past

and what it brought us. To take some books down

from the shelf. It is good, in fact,

to let the present pass without commentary

for what it says about the future.

There was nothing carnal in the way omens became portents.

Fact: all me appetites are friendly. I just

don’t want to live according to the next guy trespass,

meanwhile getting a few beefs off my chest,

if that’s OK. The wraparound flux we intuit

as time has other claims on our inventiveness.

A lot of retail figures in it. One’s daily horoscope

comes in eggshell, eggplant, and, just for the heck of it,

black. ‘Nuf said. The deal is off. The rest is silence.

WHERE SHALL I WANDER
By John Ashbery.
81 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $22.95.

SELECTED PROSE
By John Ashbery.
Edited by Eugene Richie.
326 pp. University of Michigan Press. $29.95.

March 6, 2005

Mapping the Unconscious

By CHARLES McGRATH
 

John Ashbery is our great poet of the interior landscape -- all the bric-a-brac we carry around in the attic of our minds: imagery, quotations, movie dialogue, advertising jingles, song lyrics, snatches of overheard conversation. He's like Daffy Duck, if that's who the speaker is, in the poem ''Daffy Duck in Hollywood'':

Something strange is creeping across me.

La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars

Of 'I Thought About You' or something mellow from

Amadigi di Gaula for everything -- a mint-condition can

Of Rumford's Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy

Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller's fertile

Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged

Stock -- to come clattering through.

Ashbery has been curating and rearranging this material for so long now -- since 1953, when his first book, ''Turandot and Other Poems,'' came out -- that, almost without our noticing, he himself has become a part of our mental furniture. Once thought to be willfully ''difficult'' and impenetrably obscure, Ashbery now, at 77, seems almost avuncular, the grand old man of American poetry, both wise and ironic -- the party guest he describes in one of his new poems, who is ''bent on mischief and good works with equal zest.'' We may not know much Ashbery by heart, but we recognize his voice the instant we hear it, because nobody else writes this way:

Attention, shoppers. From within the
    inverted
commas of a strambotto, seditious
    whispering
watermarks this time of day. Time to get
   out
and, as they say, about.

Ashbery has written more than 20 books -- most of them of consistently high quality, with the exception of the tedious ''Flow Chart'' -- and he has been around so long, reinventing himself over and over again, that the experience of reading him now is a little like re-enacting the central drama of most Ashbery poems: the experience of suddenly coming upon something that is both deeply familiar and more than a little strange.

The publication of Ashbery's ''Selected Prose'' -- reviews, essays and occasional pieces written over the last 50 years -- is a reminder that from the beginning he set out to be different and not too easily understood. ''A poem that communicates something that's already known to a reader is not really communicating anything,'' he said once, and he was referring not just to content but to voice and tone. As a young writer, he consciously broke with the reigning poetic style of his time -- that of Robert Lowell and the ''confessional'' poets. More than that of any other American poet except Stevens, his early aesthetic was anchored in Paris (where he lived for 10 years), in surrealism and in the work of French experimental writers like Michel Butor and Raymond Roussel.

In the early essays especially, there's a contrarian impulse; the young Ashbery practically brags about how much he loves the kind of writing that at first or even second glance doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Ashbery was also greatly influenced by painters like de Kooning, Pollock and Jasper Johns, and it's meant to be high praise, for example, when he talks about Johns's ''organized chaos'' and ''arbitrary order,'' and how his painting ''seems to defy critical analysis.'' His own work strove for just that kind of artful abandon. Some of the poems from his 1962 collection, ''The Tennis Court Oath,'' were so dense and allusive, and so full of wild leaps and jarring discontinuities, that they should have come with a surgeon general's warning. Reading them gave you a headache.

But for all its complexity, Ashbery's poetic practice has often had a slangy, homespun quality, and over the years his idiom has come to feel more and more comfortable and familiar. No longer the dadaist enfant terrible, he has lightened up a little, and through sheer longevity and productivity he has taught us how to read him. ''I wanted to stretch the bond between language and communication but not to sever it,'' he said in 1995. Meanwhile, he has been outflanked on the difficulty scale by the Language Poets, for example (many of whom truly are incomprehensible), and even by Jorie Graham, next to whom he is a piece of cake. Ashbery's new book, ''Where Shall I Wander,'' is actually sort of mellow, the work of an aging poet who appears to have resigned himself to being, as he once said of his friend Frank O'Hara, ''too hip for the squares and too square for the hips.''

This is a less exuberant volume than, say, ''Your Name Here,'' which appeared in 2000. A number of poems begin not with his characteristic sense of adventure, of starting out fresh, but with a feeling of what one of them calls being in ''mid-parenthesis.'' There's often a vague feeling of loss or belatedness or impinging mortality -- an awareness that ''like all good things / life tends to go too long'' -- or else a sense of opportunity missed, choices not made. These poems tend to resolve themselves, though, not in mourning or in elegy but with a matter-of-fact resignation, as here at the end of a poem called ''More Feedback'':

There's no turning back the man says,
the one waiting to take tickets at the top
of the gangplank. Still, in the past
we could always wait a little. Indeed,
we are waiting now. That's what happens.

Or here, at the end of ''A Visit to the House of Fools'':

A ruler is pasted against the wall
to tell time by, but it's too late. The snow's
knack for seeking out and penetrating
   crevices
has finally become major news.
Let's drink to that,
    and the tenacity of just seeming.

Other poems involve a hint of crisis, a premonition of some loss or disaster. The very first poem in the book, for example, ''Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse,'' begins:

We were warned about spiders, and the
    occasional famine.
We drove downtown to see our neighbors.
   None of them were home.

And elsewhere, there are midnight forests, unlit fires, whistling winds, ebbing tides, skies ''cold and gray'' -- the whole romantic landscape seen in the flat, almost clinical light of hindsight. But the response is practical and accommodating, a recognition that things aren't as bad as they might have been; instead of full-fledged disaster there's just erosion and disappointment:

All hell didn't break loose, it was like a
    rising psalm
materializing like snow on an unseen
   mountain.
All that was underfoot was good, but lost.

Sometimes the poems even end on a note of pleasure and gratitude for whatever small happiness has been allotted and a gentle admonition against expecting too much:

A certain satisfaction
has been granted us. Sure, we keep coming
    back
for more -- that's part of the 'human'
    aspect
of the parade. And there are darker
    regions

penciled in, that we should explore some
   time.
For now, it's enough that this day is over.
It brought its load of freshness, dropped it
   off
and left. As for us, we're still here, aren't
   we?

Nothing about ''Where Shall I Wander'' is cheerful, exactly. The jacket painting, by Caspar David Friedrich, is of a gloomy sunset over a field streaked with puddles. But the book isn't really melancholy either; the question posed by the title isn't so much urgent as idle and meditative. The younger Ashbery, the poet of ''Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,'' was in fact much more death-haunted than this later one, who in place of the great, chilling clarifications, the glimpses into sublimity provided by such poets of old and middle age as Hardy, Larkin and Yeats (who is invoked here more than once), offers what amounts to a kind of humble, almost folksy stoicism: Things could be worse, be grateful for what you have -- or at least had.

This is a muted, middle-register message and it makes at times for a muted, middle-register book. There are no clunkers here of the sort that used to turn up occasionally in Ashbery collections, but there is also not a single poem that is really large or overwhelming. The pleasure is in the little jokes and surprises (some of them literary, some of them slapstick), and in watching an old hand so effortlessly work so many tiny but elegant variations on familiar music. ''It's not as easy as it looks,'' he says in ''Sonnet: More of Same.'' ''Try to avoid the pattern that has been avoided, / the avoidance pattern. . . . It's like practicing a scale: at once different and never the same. / Ask not why we do these things. Ask why we find them meaningful.''

For variety he also includes several prose poems, including the long title piece. At least since ''Three Poems,'' which were in fact three long prose pieces -- a flood of sprawling, unparagraphed sentences -- Ashbery has been overly fond of this dandified, hybrid form so beloved by Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein, among others he has acknowledged as influences. But the prose poem doesn't bring out the best in him (or in anybody else for that matter, except for poets like Charles Simic and Michael Benedikt, who treat the whole notion with a certain amount of irony). The long sentences, loose and rambling, let all the music leak out, and they often feel arbitrary, made up on the spot:

Smack in the limousine, the friendly fog next door placed a hand on my shoulders, cementing matters. The professor looked wary. 'Flowers have helped pave roads,' he mooted. The ocean filling in for us. Too many vacant noon empires, without them you can't rule a hemisphere or be sated other than by watching. Our TV brains sit around us all brave and friendly, like docile pets.

This isn't poetry; it's -- well, prose, and not particularly interesting prose at that.

On the evidence of ''Selected Prose,'' in fact, it's tempting to conclude that prose is something Ashbery isn't especially good at, which makes him unusual among poets of his stature. Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, to take the two most obvious examples, are brilliant critics and essayists, with prose voices as original and as pleasing as their poetic ones. Ashbery's prose writing is clear and competent (he worked as a journalist and art critic for many years) but also dutiful and uninspired. Most of the pieces in this volume are the equivalent of literary chores -- reviews, introductions and the like -- and from them you get no sense of how much fun Ashbery can be or what a master of tone and voices he is, able to shift gears in a single line. Most of ''Selected Prose'' is written in an all-purpose monotone.

Now that he has backed away a little from the grand manner of his earlier books, it has become clearer that Ashbery's great gift is for the burnishing of ordinary language, for the redeployment of slang and cliché in ways that render the prosaic more poetic. The writing of verse somehow releases him into limberness and playfulness and openness -- a happy state that is itself the subject of some of his best poems, and the opposite of what happens when he works the other way and allows poetic language to unravel dreamily into prose.

The difference is in large part one of tautness and compression -- an intensity that propels him down the page, not across it. This is the Ashbery who now seems so much a part of our mental landscape -- the one who at times seems almost aphoristic in his compactness and precision. And for some of his readers at least, the only worrisome thing about this book, otherwise so wise and so assured, will be the title and the title poem, with their suggestion that the poet may now, near the end of his career, be drawn more to wandering than to getting anywhere.

Charles McGrath, the former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large at The Times.

Parallel lines

A farmer's son, John Ashbery learned about poetry from an encyclopedia and progressed to student magazines. Part of an avant-garde New York scene in the 50s, he left the city for Paris where he worked as an art critic. His early work was barely reviewed, but his originality and range soon won him admirers and he went on to win major prizes. His latest book is published this month

Nicholas Wroe
Saturday April 23, 2005
The Guardian

In 1976 John Ashbery made a remarkable breakthrough to mainstream audiences. His collection of poems Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won three prestigious awards, beginning with the inaugural American National Book Critics Circle Award. As someone whose work had until then been routinely described as deliberately obscure, he was an unexpected winner. "It was a great surprise," he recalls. "Then it became common knowledge, months before the official announcement, that I was going to win the Pulitzer poetry prize as well." Between them came the National Book Award, which he did not believe he could win "because I was going to win the Pulitzer. I went to the National Book Award presentation ceremony anyway, and when my name was read out [as winner] I was caught in probably the only spontaneous photograph of me that exists. But it obviously made people think I was someone to be reckoned with."

The final section of the book's title poem is representative and if the sounds, textures and images conjured can be alluring, it remains challenging and radical stuff:

   We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
   Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
   On its balcony and are resumed within,
   But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
   Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
   Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
   In the mere stillness of the ease of its
   Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
   And each part of the whole falls off
   And cannot know it knew, except
   Here and there, in cold pockets
   Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

But with his triple crown of awards Ashbery was transported from the avant-garde to the front rank of American literary life, a position he has continued to occupy for three decades. Supporters include the critic Harold Bloom, who recently identified Ashbery's As We Know (1979) as the book of poetry published in the past 25 years that has meant most to him: "He is our major poet since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955".

In some sense it is a familiar career trajectory. The critic and poet Mark Ford has written about Ashbery and his circle and says he "did have a very slow start, but he was always conscious of how avant-garde work and avant-garde writers are often neglected early on". Bloom's advocacy was important, in Ford's view, as was the supportive group Ashbery had around him. "It's true that until he was into his 40s he didn't have much of a profile, but the people who are now known as the New York School were an important coterie who always believed in him."

The New York School, comprising Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, came together as friends in the 1940s. "For a long time we were our own, very small audience," Ashbery says. "And we had no idea that we were the New York School. The idea that people might be reading us and thinking about us in that way would have seemed very far-fetched."

He admits they had a shared artistic outlook in that they were all dissatisfied with the then poetry establishment, had a leaning towards French and other European writers and set out to be more experimental than the academic poetry of the 40s and 50s. "And we all somehow ended up in New York when the arts were in a state of high ferment and were very exciting. People like Pollock and de Kooning were changing their worlds. We knew John Cage. We wanted to approximate something similar in poetry but it seemed unlikely there would ever be an audience for what we were doing."

Ashbery's 25th volume of poetry, Where Shall I Wander, is published in the UK by Carcanet this month. The doyenne of American critics, Helen Vendler, was dismissive of his early work - "wilful flashiness" - but has subsequently come to value him more. She says the new book "is rich in grimly funny images of the dance of approaching death".

"What is to be gained by writing this way?", Vendler asks of a section of his poem "Broken Tulips":

   Another's narrative supplants the crawling
   stock-market quotes: Like all good things
   life tends to go on too long, and when we smile
   in mute annoyance, pauses for a moment.
   Rains bathe the rainbow,
   and the shape of night is an empty cylinder,
   focused at us, urging its noncompliance
   closer along the way we chose to go.

"In answer, we need only imagine the poem done conventionally," she continues. "A first-person narrator evokes his erotic anxiety, his sense of spring, his feeling of taedium vitae, his foreboding of a failure of spring, and his fear of death. These topics are so worn one can hardly think of writing about them - and yet what else stirs feeling in our hearts? 'Make it new' - Pound's old command - is still as talismanic as ever."

But as Vendler has moved towards Ashbery, others have turned away. Alan Jenkins, deputy editor and former poetry editor of the TLS, where many of Ashbery's poems are first seen, says "Some Trees (1956) is one of my favourite poetry books. But for me he has become a bit samey. There are still some pleasures to be had, but I don't find the same sense of excitement. In those earlier books he developed a new voice and incorporated perhaps not very exciting aspects of American life that hadn't got into American poetry much before that. He suggested the weirdness and surreal oddness of American suburbia."

Professor M Wynn Thomas of the University of Wales, Swansea, identifies some factors that combined in Ashbery's dramatic elevation in the mid-70s. Apart from Bloom's advocacy, which provided academic credibility, Robert Lowell's death in 1977 prompted a search for the new great American poet and Ashbery's work was susceptible to a succession of critical theories. "Take postmodernism. Is his work a libertarian, democratic, catholic approach to the world that its champions claim? Or is it, as others say, the corrupt aesthetic of capitalist consumerism? You could argue that it is both." Thomas teaches Ashbery to undergraduates, and says their response is mixed: "Some are bemused but there are always one or two who are passionate about him and students are generally attracted to his omnivorous aesthetic. There are references to advertising which are then mixed with references to Dante and he doesn't prepare you for the shifts in tone and register and the bringing together of words from different vocabularies."

As an aesthete Ashbery is a paradoxical figure in that he seems willing to incorporate virtually everything. For many years he was an art critic and, as one friend puts it, "what he doesn't know about movies you could write on a postage stamp". He also has an extensive knowledge of music beyond the standard repertory. Leon Botstein is president of Bard College, 100 miles north of New York City, where Ashbery has taught since 1990. Botstein is also a conductor and says: "I have done lots of rare opera but it was John who put me onto Chausson's Le Roi Arthus which I went on to record. His taste and discernment is extraordinary and the breadth of interests is absolutely remarkable."

If the range of his references has left some readers baffled, and frustrated by the lack of clearly discernable meanings, Ashbery has stated that "a poem that communicates something that's already known to a reader is not really communicating anything to him, and in fact shows a lack of respect". Vendler has suggested that for Ashbery, "a change of mood is the chief principle of form... every poem is unique, recording a unique interval of consciousness", while in a review of David Herd's study John Ashbery and American Poetry (2000), Robert Potts said that the book offered "not a reading of Ashbery but a way of reading Ashbery, and a critical language more appropriate to Ashbery's peculiarities than pre-packaged approaches, which merely make Ashbery reflect their own concerns".

Ashbery and his partner of more than 30 years, David Kermani (who is also his bibliographer) oscillate between a home in Hudson, near Bard, and a Manhattan apartment. Their Hudson house was built for a 19th-century coke merchant and its careful restoration, its art, furniture and stained glass windows have been the subject of newspaper and magazine features. Kermani, speaking to a local paper a few years ago, said the house is "filled with all of the objects and collections that are, I don't want to say part of the work, but are reflected in the work. It's all the same sensibility."

Ashbery appears to have had a highly developed and sophisticated taste since childhood. He remembers reading a feature in Life Magazine about a major Dada and Surrealism show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936 when he was only nine. "It was tremendously exciting and although I probably didn't say I wanted to be a surrealist when I grew up, it did take me in that direction. I started taking painting classes and looked at books about surrealism."

He was born in July 1927 on a farm in Rochester, upstate New York. His father, Chester, grew fruit and his mother, Helen, taught biology. His brother, Richard, three years younger than him, died aged nine of leukaemia in 1939. Ashbery says his parents were not particularity literary and his early exposure to poetry came via a 1912 edition of a children's encyclopedia which included anthology pieces from minor Victorian poets. "They were the sort of thing a child would recite to his parents in the parlour," he explains. "I always had a soft spot for them while acknowledging what they were."

The most important intellectual influence on his young life - everyone knew he was a bright child and he won a wartime radio show called Quiz Kids - was his grandfather, Henry Lawrence, a professor of physics at Rochester University with whom Ashbery lived for some time. "I was the first grandchild and he sort of took me over and gave me books. He could read Greek and had sets of Victorian novels and poetry. He was a very cultivated Victorian gentleman who had been born during the Civil War and was completely self-made. When he was a kid he had walked to school without shoes."

Ashbery attended the local primary school but then became a boarder at the exclusive Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He was told he had won a scholarship but learned later that his fees had been paid by a wealthy neighbour whose sons attended the school. While at Deerfield a friend, unbeknownst to Ashbery, sent some of his poems to Poetry, a prestigious magazine, under a pseudonym. When they printed two of them Ashbery was caused some unexpected anxiety as he had sent the same poems to the magazine and worried they might think the was a plagiarist.

While his interests weren't exactly frowned upon - "no one really paid much attention to them at home or at school" - he has spoken about how his brother was more likely to have grown up to be the son his parents wanted. "He was interested in sports and life on the farm, and he would probably have taken it over from my father. He would probably have been straight, and married and had children, and not been the disappointment that I undoubtedly was to my parents."

Ashbery says he became aware of his sexuality when very young. "I also had crushes on girls, but that just didn't seem to happen for me. Then just before I went to college my mother discovered I was gay from finding some letters I had written to a friend. She was obviously extremely upset but she somehow blocked it out and it was never referred to again."

In 1945 he went to Harvard to read English. Robert Hunter, now retired from teaching English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, roomed with him in their first year. "I came from a very small town in South Dakota and John was the most brilliant person I'd ever met. He was also very funny and while we were serious about literature we also spent a lot of time at the movies or drinking beer. In terms of taste he was always at least one step ahead of me, but even in this he was good fun. I remember going to see the Martha Graham dance troupe with John and we ended up getting the giggles."

Ashbery published poetry in the Harvard Advocate and eventually joined the editorial board along with Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly and Donald Hall. Hall says: "the most important thing about John, and his relationship with the other poets around Harvard, was that almost without exception we looked upon him as the best of us. Such generosities were uncommon." Hall also remembers the other editors once chiding Ashbery for not publishing in the magazine for a while and coercing him into going back to his room to get a poem. He emerged half an hour later with a poem which was published. A couple of weeks later Hall asked Ashbery whether he had gone back to his room to write it. Ashbery said he had. "Fifty years later I happened to see John in New York and I repeated that story to him and his comment was, 'I took longer then'."

Ashbery, who wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Auden, says he knew early on that he wouldn't be able to make a living from poetry and so he took an MA at Columbia, writing a thesis on Henry Green, intending to go into teaching. "But I realised I didn't want to be a professor. I wanted to write poetry and so I got a very menial job in publishing in New York where basically I was a typist." He worked at the Oxford University Press and then McGraw-Hill from 1951-55 during which time he had plays put on off-Broadway and wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies , with James Schuyler which was published in 1969.

His first collection of poetry, Turandot and Other Poems (1953) was printed in an edition of only 300 copies. "I suppose it was some kind of breakthrough," he says, "but it wasn't until a few years later with my second collection Some Trees (1956) that I felt I might have a larger audience. But they only printed 800 copies of that and it took 10 years to sell out."

Some Trees, which Ashbery says was influenced by the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, won a competition judged by Auden for inclusion in the Yale young poets series and Auden wrote a foreword. Ashbery says in terms of short-term career development the Auden link was of limited value. "The few people who followed poetry would know about it, but it wasn't like winning an Oscar." Many years later he learned that Auden hadn't wanted to award a prize but was told he wouldn't get paid for judging unless he did. "In his foreword he didn't really talk about the poetry itself and while he was my favourite poet and I find a lot of things in my work that derive from him, I do understand that he might not have been able to like my work."

By the time Some Trees was actually published Ashbery was in France on a Fulbright scholarship and remained there, on and off, for the next 10 years. He acknowledges that the move to Paris was a self-consciously romantic literary adventure but says also that in the mid- 50s "I was dying to get out of America which was at the height of the McCarthy era and the Korean War which I might have been drafted to but wasn't. I was also in a dead end job."

After a year in France Ashbery returned to take some graduate classes in French at New York University before "hoodwinking" his parents that he had more academic work to do in Paris on a thesis about the experimental writer Raymond Roussel. He returned to Paris in 1958, soon abandoned formal academic life and "just stayed on as best I could" for the next seven years. His primary income came from art criticism for the Herald Tribune and specialist art journals.

"I wrote two reviews a week. They were short and only paid five dollars but with that and a little bit of translating I barely made a living." He now says it is "depressing that I used all that energy when I could have been writing things I really wanted to write. But I feel quite proud of quite a lot of those pieces, despite the fact that I wouldn't have written any of them unless I had to somehow cobble together a living."

He says his journalistic productivity didn't affect his ability to write poetry. "I never spent that much time writing poetry. Even now I don't and I could if I wanted to. And being in Paris and writing about art was very stimulating in its own way. I always liked the idea of being a foreigner and indeed in America I have often felt like a foreigner." Ashbery lived for a time with the French writer Pierre Martory who he says "had an enormous influence on my life. It was very comforting that the things that irritated me about France he also found irritating."

He was living in Paris in 1962 when his third volume of poetry, The Tennis Court Oath, was published. It received very lit tle review coverage and "no favourable ones at all". Mark Ford says that while Some Trees was poised between an avant-garde taking apart of poetry and an allegiance to the likes of Auden, the cut-up and collage techniques in The Tennis Court Oath were just about taking apart. "It was with Rivers and Mountains (1966) he began putting back together the poetry and ever since, even though he has experimented with things like prose poems ( Three Poems, 1972), the twin columns of Litany (1979) and the very very long poem of Flow Chart (1991), they have all essentially been different ways of approaching a relatively settled, while continually evolving, style."

Rivers and Mountains was published the same year as Ashbery came home to look after his mother following the death of his father. The America he returned to was radically different to the country he had left. "It was a shock leaving Paris and Pierre, and I was extremely unhappy for a time. But I did realise something had happened in the world and the old values that I had felt were so oppressive had been somehow turned upside down and that was something I could enjoy."

He says there was also an entirely new audience for poetry. "The Beats and the hippie revolution prepared the way. I don't really like beat poetry very much but there was a general housecleaning in literature and poetry and they played their part. When I left America poetry readings were just for people like Auden. When I came back there was something on virtually every night in New York." Rivers and Mountains was shortlisted for the National Book Award and Ashbery admits to a sense of vindication. "I was glad I had hung on and not abandoned poetry. And being in this new America had a liberating effect that enabled me to go beyond the unsatisfactory experiments that made up most of the Tennis Court Oath . "

As time went on he became an increasingly public figure and lent his weight to causes such as the anti-Vietnam war movement. "I went on the huge Central Park demonstration against the war when we marched to the UN, although me and my friends did stop off at a hotel bar to have a few margaritas on the way. But I don't put things like that in my poetry because I don't feel it is efficient. I think marching is an efficient thing to do while writing poetry [about it] would be too often preaching to the choir. I don't write about my personal life either. It's not because I don't like it or am embarrassed. I just think most people have the same type of experiences; we're sort of unhappy when we are children, we fall in love and we get disillusioned when we are a little older. There is a general pattern."

Alan Jenkins says Ashbery's work was a bracing reaction to the autobiographical and confessional work of the "big American poets like Lowell in the 50s and 60s. Instead here was this kind of hum of American life. If you don't tune into it, it can be someone writing down sentences in no particular order about nothing and that can be very irritating. But if you hear it, it can be very captivating and seductive. I'm not sure that all of it becomes poetry, but when it does it is mysterious and extremely appealing."

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) was Ashbery's eighth volume of verse and at the time of publication he had given up art criticism and was teaching a poetry course at Brooklyn College. "Those prizes were very welcome. I think I was probably going to get fired from Brooklyn College as New York City was retrenching but instead I was given tenure." He went on to lecture at Harvard for a year before moving to Bard where he has been since 1990.

He has continued regularly to produce new work - apparently publishing only about a third of what he writes, with the rest going straight into his papers at Harvard - and says the poetry world operates in a parallel universe to the general public, who rarely think about poetry. "There is a thriving scene of magazines and internet sites. In the early days I got hardly any positive reviews apart from one that was written by Frank O'Hara, and he was my friend. Almost nobody liked my second book and I did wonder whether I should take up some other form of work. But I thought that I enjoyed doing them at least and I decided to do what I wanted to do."

He says while he still has sympathy for and is attracted to avant-garde art, "I've also always enjoyed more traditional art and poetry. I think there was a false division between abstract art and figurative art for instance. To like one and not the other was always ridiculous. As Schoenberg said sometime in the 1930s, 'there is still a lot of music to be written in the key of C major' and a lot of contemporary composers seem to be trying to write a new kind of music which also can sound traditional. This is kind of what I'd like to do myself. I'd like to write like Tennyson but make it new."

He says when he won the prizes it changed people's perceptions of his work: "They started to think that if they couldn't understand it there was something wrong with them. Then I think some people became a bit resentful and started saying that it's not their fault it was mine. But people without any background in literature began to read my work and I got letters saying they liked it. It was very gratifying. Despite what everyone said, I always thought that there was something simple and penetrable in my poetry screaming to be let out."

John Lawrence Ashbery

Born: Rochester, NY July 28 1927.

Education: Deerfield Academy, Mass; Harvard; Columbia; New York University.

Partner: David Kermani.

Career: 1951-54 Oxford University Press; '54-55 McGraw-Hill; '60-85 art critic; '74-90 Professor of English, Brooklyn College; '89-90 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard; 1990- Charles P Stevenson Professor, Bard College, NY.

Some poetry collections: 1953 Turandot and Other Poems; '56 Some Trees; '62 The Tennis Court Oath; '66 Rivers and Mountains; '75 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; '79 Houseboat Days; '84 A Wave; '85 Selected Poems; '91Flow Chart; '92 Hotel Lautréamont; '94 And the Stars Were Shining; '98 Wakefulness; '99 Girls on the Run; 2002 Chinese Whispers; '05 Where Shall We Wander.

Where Shall I Wander is published by Carcanet.

Ashbery's anthology 'Notes From the Air' delivers, despite himself

Troy Jollimore

Friday, November 30, 2007

Notes From the Air

Selected Later Poems

ECCO; 400 PAGES; $34.95