john ashbery, aka john ashberry

this is a thread for john ashbery.

The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.

sometimes i like to read john ashbery and sometimes i don't.

i'd like someone to tell me how to do it. like, i feel like i don't know how. whether to read fast or slow, what the rhythm is, how loud or quiet to read (in my head). how much i'm supposed to like it.

like, when you hit a fracture in the syntax that upsets the prosody, what's it supposed to sound like?

i like this one because right away you're like ok this is a bunch of rivers and the surprise/not surprise of every single sentence is pretty much exactly what you bargained for, a verb here, a noun, there, a river name to recognize or not

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dusk-charged-air

Whenever I think about the ease with which I can write an Ashbery poem – assemble clichés, demotic speech, sampled dialogue – I forget his rhythm and enjambments.

i've been reading lots of blank verse lately that lends itself to real motorik forward motion so not knowing that is just, like,

http://www.text-works.org/Texts/Ashbery/JA-Sk_data/JA-Sk_TS1-01.html

genetic critical edition of 'the skaters'

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lol oops

https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/LOA_Ashbery_interview_on_Collected_Poems.pdf

from this interview

Recently I think he's lost the plot.

but that's his shtick since 1960.

love forever the most

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ashbery.php << crucial resource
"Song" is very beautiful; a friend sent me an MP3 of Ashbery reading it that was my introduction to his work; it's one of the few poems I have by heart.

Be sure to check out the 1964 Washington Square Art Gallery reading.

Note: Bill Berkson gave the introduction at this event. The gallery reading was organized by Ruth Kligman, and the reading of "The Skaters" was the first ever. It is Berkson's recollection that the standing-room-only audience included Edwin Denby, Frank O'Hara, and "many of the younger New York poets (Padgett, Berrigan, Towle, Shapiro) and also Andy Warhol."

The next day I had my first conference with Allen; we were supposed to go over some of my poems. I spent a long time in front of the mirror before going over to Allen's because I noticed that the better looking you were, the more Allen liked your poems. For example, there was a guy named Bobby Meyers. I thought his poems stunk. Allen raved about what a genius Bobby was. At parties, Allen would introduce him as the next Ezra Pound. It always burned me up. Bobby was cute, with a lot of dark, curly hair and a cherubic face. He looked like one of the Romantic poets, even if he couldn't write, but for Allen, that was enough. Allen put my work aside and took out Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery. He turned to a longish poem called "The Skaters."

"Now tell me," Allen asked, almost pleading at his desk. "What does this mean? I can't understand it. I want to know what it means, what is happening in this poem. Why does he have to be so mysterious about everything? Is it too much Manhattan psychiatry?"

I dodged Allen's bullet. I said a lot of people keep asking what Ashbery's poems are about, and he probably wants to know the same thing. "I think it's about skating, about falling through the ice of our own conscious mind." I was getting good at appropriating little phrases I had picked up from my teachers' interest in Buddhism. It seemed like a salve that covered all sorts of ailments. I also think that it may have really been what the poem was about. I wasn't sure.

"I hate feeling stupid, I hate not getting the idea," Allen said. Anne later said she thought Allen really wanted to be the smartest man in America. I asked her about Allen's poem "Ego Confession." She said that they were sitting next to each other somewhere in San Francisco when Allen started to write it, but that he was embarrassed or for some reason didn't want her to see him writing his poem, so he cupped his hand around the piece of paper like a schoolboy guarding answers on a test.

I returned to Ashbery's poem. "'The apothecary biscuits dwindled.' I like lines like that," I told Allen. "I can't even explain why. It's just pleasing to the ear."

"But shouldn't it be about something?" Allen asked, really upset that he couldn't get a handle on Ashbery's poem, which was like a greased pole he kept trying to climb, only to come sliding back down again. I wondered what was wrong with not knowing something. I was certainly getting used to it here.

Sam Kashner, When I Was Cool

RIP :/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/03/poet-john-ashbery-dies-age-90

Ugh

LRB have made all the 50+ poems they published by him available:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/john-ashbery

Sad news. He was a true original and a master of his craft.