R.I.P. John Ashbery
 

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/t...1927-2017.html

Maybe I'll finally read Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Here are two Ashbery poems I like:

Some Trees

These are amazing, each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

. . . . .

Street Musicians

One died, and the soul was wrenched out
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever
Called, through increasingly suburban airs
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself
In November, with the spaces among the days
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

"Some Trees" is quite fine. My favorite poem of his, though, is "The Instruction Manual":

We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.
What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.

I did. Some first thoughts here.

Reading Ashbery, which I did in the same Library of the Americas edition, tends to make me think of Orwell's praise of limpidity in "Politics and the English Language": I would say that limpidity is not a primary virtue of Ashbery's work. This is also true of a poet like Wallace Stevens, reminding me usefully that great art need not be limpid: "Il ne s'agit pas de comprendre, il suffit d'aimer", said Monet. And yet, my doubts remain about this direction in verse and its achievements. For what it's worth: since the Library of the Americas, for one, is obviously happy with this art.
"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" I thought was tremendous - a monument - when I last read it.

Cheers,
John

I adore that Monet quote, John, and it has gone straight into my journal. I like it more even than the opening of Robert Hass’s Praise, which I have long remembered and admired:

We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
“I think I shall praise it.”

I’ve tried to read Ashbery a couple of times and have failed; I could not get my hook into anything. This no doubt says more about me than about Ashbery. He seems to want to make a virtue out of the necessity of facing an incomprehensible world, unlike e.g., Frost, who strove for those ‘momentary stays’. I shall no doubt try again someday.

Hi Michael,

Thank you for that Robert Hass quote, and for the Frost as well. He does seem a world away from Ashbery.
To my own way of thinking, language uncoupled from meaning is whipped cream. But "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" blew me away when i read it and then when i reread it. I think it's very fine.

Cheers,
John

For anyone who wants to make “sense” of Ashbery’s poetry, I suggest the remarkably perceptive essay on his work by the poet and critic Mary Kinzie in her essay Irreference from her book The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose.

Given the title of her book one might come to think that Ashbery’s poetry points to the supremacy of prose over poetry in our day. Like much of non-metric, it might as well be prose. And at times beautifully so.

Kinzie points to his system of poetic construction by which he makes sense of experience. Whether using verb tenses or word particles, which Kinzie exhaustively explores in his poem Houseboat Days, Ashbery teases out some kind of meaning from his words.

One summary Kinzie gives of his poetry: The “plot” of an Ashbery poem is a matter of the arraying of tense movements to support metaphors and images of time consciousness—a stylized and masked durée. The ebb and flow of the images (deluge and rapidity versus hollowness and contraction) produce a time consciousness based on nostalgia.

“Nostalgia” leapt out at me as a primary emotion in Ashbery’s poetry—that is, for those who ever felt any emotion besides frustration or anger when reading him! If his writing is quicksand or his meaning as fixed as mercury balls slipping through one’s fingers, then as Kinzie beautifully puts it: …it is helpful to view his relation to the heterogeneous dreck of the modern world as primarily an elegiac one. It is poetry of continual loss. Including of one’s mind if that was all you had to read on a desert island.

For me, I am mostly indifferent to his poetry because after a while I need terra firma. His ocean of wave after wave of images, statements and mis-directions sooner rather than later leave me wanting the downright conventional like a beautiful sonnet. On the other hand his dexterity of language is impressive, overwhelmingly so. I’m convinced he would have made an outstanding metrist (technically he could do anything). But he applied his genius elsewhere: taking a sledgehammer to any kind of rational discourse, argument and clarity.

Hi Don,

Very nicely argued. I was just rereading some Ashbery stuff I've written, and came across this line of his: "Much that is beautiful must be discarded". It seems apt.

Cheers,
John

Aaron N., Your blog post is a fine piece of literary analysis. Did you like the poem? I think yes, yes?

Thanks, Aaron. Yes, I liked the poem. I usually try to avoid giving summary judgments like that in my posts—my aim is to piece together how something works. Often my sense of how much I like a poem changes after doing this. In the context of this poem, for the better.

As a longtime admirer of Ashbery's best work, I thought this commentary by David Orr might prove helpful for anyone who wants to give Ashbery's notoriously "difficult" work another try. (I hope the link opens for NYT non-subscribers.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/b...ide-nyt-region

Yup, it opens for non-subscribers. Thanks for the link, Ned - a nice article. i liked his focus on Ashbery's sense of humor.

Cheers,
John

Well, at least they're not in hell.

Cage's discovery of silence as a key component of music, his music, is not the same as the superabundance of words that is Ashbery. More like, the "tribute" reminds one of a white painted canvas by Rauschenberg. Not everyone's cuppa but the analogy is more fitting. If anything, what Pollock did with paint, Ashbery did with words. That said, I get the humor.

I've spent a lot of time with Ashbery. I think he peaked in the volumes The Double Dream of Spring, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Houseboat Days, where the play of language was excited and exciting, the new styles of conveying the texture of everyday experience were still fresh and exploratory, and the narrative continuity was a bit more evident than elsewhere. The other volumes seem more spotty (as most volumes of poetry are), and the last several books seem stale and repetitive. As William Logan suggested, in the last couple of decades Ashbery became a machine that mechanically produced competent, barely distinguishable Ashbery poems. But at his best he was something special. Now W.S. Merwin is all that's left of that remarkable generation.

Added note: Arrgh, what am I talking about? How could I forget about the great Richard Wilbur, the great but often overlooked Donald Hall, and the perpetual caricature of himself who still managed to write some outstanding poems, Robert Bly?

Heaven
Heaven is a place
where nothing
nothing ever happens.

I enjoyed this last series of comments. Nice to be reminded that W.S. Merwin is still with us: the man who wrote other side of grief.

Cheers,
John

Where ought one start with Merein?

Here are a couple from The Second Four Books of Poems:

Presidents

The president of shame has his own flag
the president of lies quotes the voice
of God
at last counted
the president of loyalty recommends
blindness to the blind
oh oh
applause like the heels of the hanged
he walks on eyes
until they break
then he rides
there is no president of grief
it is a kingdom
ancient absolute with no colors
its rule is never seen
prayers look for him
also empty flags like skins
silence the messenger runs through the vast lands
with a black mouth
open
silence the climber falls from the cliffs
with a black mouth like
a call
there is only one subject
but he is repeated
tirelessly


We continue
by W S Merwin
For Galway Kinnell


The rust a little pile of western color lies
At the end of its travels
Our instrument no longer.


Those who believe
In death have their worship cut out for them.

As for myself we
Continue

An old
Scar of light our trumpet

Pilgrims with thorns
To the eye of the cold
Under flags made by the blind
In one fist

Their letter that vanishes
If the hand opens:

Charity come home
Begin.

https://merwinconservancy.org/2015/1...ek-presidents/
https://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/we_continue_454

I particularly love one of his later volumes, Travels (1993). That book has some wonderful narrative poems and, in a few cases, a return to rhyme and regular meter. Merwin is most often associated with the "deep image" school of the 1970's, a style that is easily parodied and has fallen out of fashion, but there's some remarkable poetry in The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970), along with some work that feels dated. "For the Anniversary of My Death" and "The Last One" (both from The Lice) are touchstone poems for me. Even some of Merwin's very early poems deserve a look: "The Mountain" and "The Station" from Green With Beasts (1956) are two that come to mind. He has an excellent, though quite large, volume of selected poems called Migration.

And Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats! He is 98.

I have a bilingual volume called Beat published in Moscow, 2004. It's pretty good. Ferlinghetti appears after Ginsberg.
There's a Wilbur thread in General Talk.

Cheers,
John

Gibberish.


Alas.

Not Ferlinghetti.

Allen, do you really think it is gibberish? Maybe the weaker poems, but "Into the Dusk-Charged Air," my favorite Ashbery, is hardly gibberish. I think it is amazing and beautiful; there is a recording of his reading it and I was struck by how everyone laughed at the same line—a line that has no right to be funny but somehow is.

I don't understand Sam's poem. Ashbery never wrote a blank poem, and his mien is totally different from Cage's. I appreciate the work of both.

I should never have spoken ill of the recently dead. I apologize to his ghost and his friends. Obviously, I haven't read enough of his good poems. Apologies.

Walter, Cage was an immense influence on Ashbery, though most of the latter's friends were other poets and painters. I like Ashbery at his most garrulous, poems like "Leaving Atocha Station" and "Daffy Duck in Hollywood." But he was notoriously reticent (though interviewed many times) about his own poetry. I don't think Ashbery knew Rothko very well personally, but his comments on the latter's work are revealing:

http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2007...my-rothko.html

I have revised the title to "Ashbery Met in Heaven by John Cage" and added a few lines of clarification.

One of my favorite Talking Heads songs. Heaven.