Tuesday, September 5, 2017

John Ashbery / Hotel Lautréamont




Hotel Lautréamont 

1. 
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society 
working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. 
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it. 
We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”   

Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. 
The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds 
we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” 
or, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto. 

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds 
the world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé, 
or in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto. 
Not to worry, many hands are making work light again. 

The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé. 
In any case the ruling was long overdue. 
Not to worry, many hands are making work light again, 
so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure. 


   2. 
In any case, the ruling was long overdue. 
The people are beside themselves with rapture 
so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure 
and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future. 

The people are beside themselves with rapture 
yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria, 
and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future. 
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained. 

Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria. 
In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel. 
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained, 
and night like black swansdown settles on the city. 

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel. 
Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward, 
and night like black swansdown settles on the city. 
If we tried to leave, would being naked help us? 


   3. 
Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward. 
Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside. 
If we tried to leave, would being naked help us? 
And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river? 

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside, 
when all we think of is how much we can carry with us. 
And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river? 
All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time. 

When all we think of is how much we can carry with us 
small wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate. 
All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time. 
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality. 

Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate. 
It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination. 
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality 
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages. 


   4. 
It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination. 
Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open 
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages, 
to end the standoff that history long ago began. 

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open 
but it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error. 
To end the standoff that history long ago began 
must we thrust ever onward, into perversity? 

But it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error. 
You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns. 
Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity? 
Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her. 

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns. 
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society; 
only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.


John Ashbery
“Hotel Lautréamont” from Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.


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Monday, September 4, 2017

John Ashbery and Pierre Martory / With eyes wide shut


John Ashbery (right) and Pierre Martory stroll along the Seine in Paris, 1958

John Ashbery and Pierre Martory

With eyes wide shut


Adam Thorpe enters a world of vivid dreams but elusive meanings

Adam Thorpe
Saturday 25 October 2008 00.01 BST

John Ashbery is regarded as America's leading poet, the grand old master of a "difficult Modernism". The Landscapist is his translation of the poems of his one-time companion Pierre Martory, in a handsome dual-language edition intended to establish a poet almost entirely unknown.
What it certainly establishes is the importance to Ashbery's career of his nine-year stay in Paris in the 1950s, when he lived with Martory and discovered the richness of modern French poetry. His fluid translations sound at times like a "lite" version of his own verse - which in his introduction he claims was something of a surprise: "I started to find echoes of his work in mine . . . though I hope I haven't stolen anything." Even the arch titles sound similar - "What I Say, Perhaps, Isn't True" - while "A Widow" manages to be eerily prescient of a specifically American catastrophe (Martory died in 1998): "How does one get to the foot of the twin towers? / One doesn't. The towers have stifled the streets. / Then nothing leads to the river under the bridges? / A recognized city reproaches us with yesterday."

Martory, born in 1922, belongs firmly to the post-second world war generation, while sharing the experience of resistance and combat (he fought in Morocco, where he'd grown up) with older poets such as René Char, Louis Aragon or Paul Éluard. In an interview he claims to have written poetry out of loneliness during the war, starting as a "descriptive" poet but swiftly turning dream-like and, well, hard to understand. Even his army experiences have left little overt trace, although Morocco flashes its exotica here and there.
While Ashbery claims the poems are sui generis, with just faint echoes of Rimbaud or Char, they seem to me, like most contemporary French poetry, firmly in the symbolist-surrealist tradition (as a dissident once put it to me: "Blame Mallarmé!"). They sound gorgeous in the original language, and conjure no end of images and associations, but their concrete meanings are always just around the corner. Zig-zagging from phrase to phrase, changing the dynamics mid-flow, they typically leave you either more space or none at all. The final lines of the aptly named and very obscure poem "Collusion" seem to be addressing this frustrated reader with some glee: "He has lost: I've invented for myself a friend / Without a face."

In that sense, Ashbery and Martory are the perfect match. "So I don't need reality's trampoline for flight?" cries Martory in "Serenity", a poem about being frank with himself. Poetry for him is a flinching from brute physicality and disappointment, something like a retreat into what is passing through his head (he suffered periodically from depression). In the title poem, shutting his eyes reveals a vast, forested landscape: depth is not in sight but in a willed blindness, a looking inwards that reveals "these bouquets, this fog of leaves, words of the wind . . . "
Martory wrote for himself, inhabiting his "private domain" and barely showing his poetry to anyone. It is significant that one of the few identifiable places in his work is the Père Lachaise cemetery, itself risen to symbolic status. "Père Lachaise" is a prose-poem written for a book of etchings, and is unusually approachable: "adolescents listen to the sap rising in them which shall one day flower under these flagstones and don't give a damn". The poem finally disappoints, however, never really rising above its descriptiveness.
If "Life" is a "whore with false eyelashes", there are many fractured glimpses of a paradise, an Eden linked to "ancestral memory" or the deeper layers of consciousness that, once reached, justify the act of writing verse in this associative way. Behind this, however, is emptiness or absence: "Door opening on nothing to say" (Porte ouverte sur rien à dire). This is the reality - the existential understanding of personal and general extinction. A poem ostensibly about drinking wine is haunted by the end of such pleasures, albeit drunkenly mixing its metaphors: "I know that of my footsteps nothing will remain / But a trace a cluster a drop."
I wonder if there's enough vigour in the impressionistic lines for more than a handful of the poems to be memorable, in either language - the kind of vigour, that is, that fires Ashbery's equally hermetic verse and sparks exhilaratingly across to the reader. My favourite poem is "Red and Black Lake", in which a straightforward storm on the water ends with a superb image: "Then the rain breaks loose in long curtains / that tuck themselves up from the asphalt in the glare of the headlights." Even without the music of the original, the vivid observation survives, and sticks.
• Adam Thorpe's Between Each Breath is published by Cape.
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Sunday, September 3, 2017

John Ashbery dies age 90


John Asbery

Poet John Ashbery dies age 90


Ashbery, who won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for his collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, died at his home on Sunday of natural causes
Sunday 3 September 2017 21.54 BST

John Ashbery, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 90.
Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.
Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1975 collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, was the rare winner of the American book world’s unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing “how we read poetry”.
Among a generation that included Richard Wilbur, WS Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.
“No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,” Langdon Hammer wrote in the New York Times in 2008. “Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us.”
But to love Ashbery, it helped to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as “You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork” not to worry about their meaning.
Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music”. Writer Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about.
“I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”
Interviewed by the Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery”, it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people”.
Ashbery also was a highly regarded translator and critic. At various times, he was the art critic for the New York Herald-Tribune in Europe, New York magazine and Newsweek, and the poetry critic for Partisan Review. He translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and numerous other French writers.
He was a teacher for many years, including at Brooklyn College, Harvard University and Bard College.
Starting at boarding school, when a classmate submitted his work (without his knowledge) to Poetry magazine, Ashbery enjoyed a long and productive career, so fully accumulating words in his mind that he once told the AP that he rarely revised a poem once he wrote it down. More than 30 Ashbery books were published after the 1950s, including poetry, essays, translations and a novel, A Nest of Ninnies, co-written with poet James Schuyler.
His masterpiece was likely the title poem of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by the 16th century Italian painting of the same name. In 400-plus lines, Ashbery shifted from a critique of Parmigianino’s painting to a meditation on the besieged 20th century mind.

I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.


Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and remembered himself as a lonely and bookish child, haunted by the early death of his younger brother, Richard, and conflicted by his attraction to other boys.
He grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, The Battle, written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he didn’t write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper.
He grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, The Battle, written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he didn’t write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper.
Meanwhile, he took painting lessons and found new meaning in Life, the magazine. An article about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years. At Harvard University, he read WH Auden and Marianne Moore and met fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley. He would be grouped with O’Hara and Koch as part of the avant-garde “New York Poets” movement, although Ashbery believed what they really had in common was living in New York.

His first book, Some Trees, was a relatively conventional collection that came out in 1956, with a preface from Auden and the praise of O’Hara, who likened Ashbery to Wallace Stevens. But in 1962, he unleashed The Tennis Court Oath, poems so abstract that critic John Simon accused him of crafting verse without “sensibility, sensuality or sentences”. Ashbery later told the AP that parts of the book “were written in a period of almost desperation” and because he was living in France at the time, he had fallen “out of touch with American speech, which is really the kind of fountainhead of my poetry”.
“I actually went through a period after The Tennis Court Oath wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it,” he said. “And then I must have said to myself, ‘Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I’m not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.’”
His 1966 collection, Rivers and Mountains, was a National Book Award finalist that helped restore his standing and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror raised him to the pantheon. In 2011, he was given an honorary National Book Award for lifetime achievement and declared he was “quite pleased” with his “status in the world of writers”.
His style ranged from rhyming couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to president Warren Harding. As he aged, he became ever more sensitive to mortality and reputation. How to Continue was an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1960s and 70s, a party turned tragic by the deadly arrival of Aids, “a gale [that] came and said/it is time to take all of you away”.
Reflecting on his work, Ashbery boasted about “strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion”, but acknowledged that: “I grew/To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew/Those few paces from the best.”
In the poem In a Wonderful Place, published in the 2009 collection Planisphere, he offered a brief, bittersweet look back.

I spent years exhausting my good works
on the public, all for seconds
Time to shut down colored alphabets
flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It
draws like a rout. Or a treat.
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Saturday, September 2, 2017

Poem of the week / Life is a Dream by John Ashbery

Joh Ashbery


Poem of the week: Life is a Dream by John Ashbery


To celebrate the 90th birthday of this majestic writer, a poem whose casual telling of what might be a coming-of-age story reveals some fascinating ambiguities

 Carol Rumens
Monday 31 July 2017 10.31 BST

Life is a Dream
A talent for self-realization

will get you only as far as the vacant lot

next to the lumber yard, where they have rollcall.

My name begins with an A,

so is one of the first to be read off.

I am wondering where to stand – could that group of three
or four others be the beginning of the line?

Before I have the chance to find out, a rodent-like

man pushes at my shoulders. “It’s that way,” he hisses. “Didn’t they teach you anything at school? That a photograph

of anything can be real, or maybe not? The corner of the stove,

a cloud of midges at dusk-time.”


I know I’ll have a chance to learn more

later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.

It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things

definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,

for instance, that glides

so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.
John Ashbery reached the age of 90 on Friday. By way of congratulation, and as a tribute to his majestic artistry, this week’s blog features one of the later poems, Life is a Dream. It first appeared in the poet’s new-millennium collection, Your Name Here and is reprinted in the Collected Poems.
Characteristically, the narrative jostles together and de-familiarises commonplace scenes and feelings, adding its own shifting weather of hovering menace, anticipation and regret. The poem is dreamlike, except that dreams rarely pause for quasi-philosophical commentary. These are signature moments, in which we recognise not only a voice but a whole style of thought. It’s more than playful: this is the way the dream elements are pulled together and become life-reflecting truths.
It starts as if making grand generalisation. “A talent for self-realisation” hints at the language of the “how-to” guide, and yet it’s not overtly ironical. Doesn’t everyone want to self-realise, and isn’t it a goal in almost every urban person’s reach? Inclusiveness, noted by Mark Ford when he compared Ashbery to Whitman, is among his most appealing qualities. The assertion beginning this poem is like a friendly arm thrown around a mass of human shoulders, if not a mass as classless as Whitman’s reach aspires to. And the self-debunking joke the assertion becomes in a mere three lines carries us with it. “A talent for self-realization / will get you only as far as the vacant lot / next to the lumber yard … ” Wry smiles concede, as the brilliance evaporates – yes, well, that’s life.

A “vacant lot” is a piece of unused land where, typically, there was once a house or building. It has a socially endorsed past, remnants of which might teasingly survive, and is a space freed to attract the urban transgressors, the unrealised adolescents, the rule-breakers and re-makers. You can invent an alternative life in a vacant lot, and, what’s more, find the means of its construction in the retail-ready materials of the lumber yard next door. However, in the poem, as in life, authority isn’t so easily evaded.
What’s happening in the vacant lot is a “rollcall”. Can rollcall ever be a neutral word, post-Auschwitz? Even its lighter associations, eg with schooldays, are not entirely benign. Yet the fact that the poet inserts himself alphabetically into the registration is soothing. That secret desire of readers to believe the poet “really” speaks in his or her poems is humorously satisfied: A is for Ashbery! This might simply be poetry’s rollcall, those “three / or four others” merely poets, hoping to realise themselves without breaking all the rules.
Nothing ostensibly terrible happens. The rodent-like man, a vicious homophobe, we might initially surmise, who physically bullies the protagonist into line, seems to change even as he speaks. His aggression is channelled into a sort of accommodation, a comic philosophical note emerging as idiomatic rage (“Didn’t they teach you anything at school?”) morphs into the more serious question, “Didn’t they teach you anything … ” as if anything itself were a subject, like maths or PE. A postmodern muse of the dazzling anything and everything in poetry’s kitbag, Ratty is even a bit of a Zen master when he instructs the young protagonist “that a photograph of anything can be real, or maybe not (?)” Dreamlike in its fluidity, the chameleon voice finally becomes a poet’s, though not, perhaps, a very good poet’s, fading away into the stereotypical “corner of the stove, / a cloud of midges at dusk-time.”
Life is a Dream reads well as a poetic coming-of-age story. The willingness to wait and learn suggests confident, curious youth, a constrained, not overly impatient player imagining a bigger orchestration for his dream of life. The time-words “later on” and “meanwhile” seem unthreatening. An agreeably mature voice breaks in with the observation, “It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things / definitely aren’t it” and, once more, in our comfy chairs opposite the poet’s, we readers happily acquiesce.
It may additionally be an allegory of love – another area in which “the talent for self-realisation” is likely to be chastised. At the end of the narrative, a significant other will prove inconstant: he is already recognised as a passing phenomenon, the seemingly trusting hand masked by a glove. WH Auden’s villanelle If I could tell you is recalled in the last line, where the gloved hand appears “as though it intends to stay”. However, it’s clearly excluded from the category of things which are life. That’s the sting in the poem’s tail. Whether the hand that “glides so securely” into the speaker’s represents a parental or erotic love, the loss is inevitable: the poem, regretfully, gets over it.
Life is a Dream manages to be both a Song of Innocence and a Song of Experience. Let it float among its rich potentialities, forever young, forever letting process transcend resolution, and, like the poet’s own talent, at home in numerous places and seasons. We’re lucky to be among Ashbery’s contemporaries.

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Friday, September 1, 2017

John Ashbery / Just Walking Around



Just Walking Around
by John Ashbery
BIOGRAPHY

 What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is not name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

 That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

 The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other


KISS
John Ashbery / Ignorance of the law is no excuse
John Ashbery / How to Continue
John Ashbery / The Art of Poetry



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