Literary Clusterfucks 2013

not "for thee"? tsk.

I want to apologize to imago. Was just trying to riff on donne. Not pick sides in a pile on.

John Ashbery got a lot of hate for a decade or three there, from poets who felt any pressure to imitate him.

I love ashbery

hate ashberry? only hippies!

Ashbery wrote some great poems.

I've read his long book-length poem, FLOW CHART, and after that, I never wanted to read him again. Not because it was bad, but because it sort of sated me for life.

I'm into Ashbery, not knocking him, but Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was the first book to sweep all the big poetry prizes in a single year, and (in the same way Raymond Carver would soon after for aspiring fiction writers) it divided those who followed him and those who felt marginalized by having an out-of-fashion approach.

One poet told me a story of how Ashbery took the podium once with two folders of poems. After doing the reading from one folder, he realized he had read from his rejected poems--implying that his games made irrelevant a "better" or "worse" one.

I love ashbery but I find some of the more frequent comparisons (to Stevens) puzzling and he makes for more sense to me as an heir of Laura riding and Marianne Moore, both of whom I love and both of whom he spoke of as influences. Particularly Moore's odd mix of looseness and precision, her love of banal language cropped strangely that gives them a common urban folksiness.

"Urban folksiness"! I love it. Sorta reminds me of Marjorie Perloff reacting to a poem by Charles Bernstein in this episode of PoemTalk (starting at around 09:45)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/151679/these-squiggles-a-discussion-of-as-if-the-trees-by-their-very-roots-had-hold-of-us-by-charles-bernstein

Eazy, that story makes sense— Ashbery in his day was an absolutely notorious drunk, a prof of mine had to chaperone him once and left him passed out on the lawn of another poet's house.

as long as he didn't commit sexual assault that's cool

xp table -- I was talking to someone a few weeks back who had second thoughts about the ZH Open Letter incident from 2014 (?) (i forget whether it was 2013 or 2014)

and yes -- that was indeed a Literary Clusterfuck

Ashbery or my prof? Haven't heard tell of the latter, and all I know about Ashbery is that his female students report that he was often very cold toward them and their work. He was a learned homo of a certain generation, after all, so the misogyny is almost a given, unfortunately.

lol I was referring to the issues in the infamous open letter incident of 2013/2014

re: the open letter and fall out from the Bay Area Poetry Summit in 2014— Z4ch H0uston *did* assault two friends of mine, that much is certain. I think that many people have realized that running abusive dudes out of town isn't a good solution, particularly in the frameworks of restorative justice and mercy, but this has to be a two-way street. The abusive individual has to listen to and own up to what they did, and in the case of ZH, he was refusing to do so.

But in terms of other fallout from that? Did some of the other dudes who were merely acting "creepy" deserve to be put on blast and expelled from the scene? I don't think so.

I think that many people have realized that running abusive dudes out of town isn't a good solution, particularly in the frameworks of restorative justice and mercy, but this has to be a two-way street.

Agreed ... I think I also found it "funny" that this Bay Area poetry scene was capable of "running someone out of town" ... in that the people seemed very ... non-threatening in that way. Reading the letter, it definitely did the thing where it lumped all the offenders together and listed a range of "crimes" in a way that it could be read that, hypothetically, a dude who accidentally elbowed a woman and caused her to spill her wine was actually a rapist.

Like, yeah, the rapist who didn't want to take accountability -- that's a real thing where I supported the community stepping up -- I forget whether the guy who threw the beer bottle and hit Chr1s R at Adobe Books was part of this or if that was a later thing and that guy just got banned from stuff as a result of Safe Space policies that grew out of the open letter Poetry Summit incident.

I think bottle thrower guy was named Kevin, but he wasn't any of the Kevins I knew or knew of in that scene -- a 3rd rate Kevin this bottle thrower guy was.

No, that was later. I don't even know about that!

I think that was 2015 -- Chris at Adobe announced that the store was closing and the reading group had to go, and 3rd rate Kevin rebelled against this act of authoritarianism by throwing a beer bottle at Chris and hitting him in the side of the head or something ...

Oh, was it Kevin Keating?

lol. that would make sense. Keating ran the "Yuppie Eradication Project" in the Mission for many years, which mostly consisted of him passing out fliers and then yelling at the Station 40 people for being "lifestylists" lol.

We're way beyond literary clusterfucks right now, tho.

hahah it wasn't Kevin Keating!! He was my first thought though!!! Trying to recapture the glory days of 2000 when he wheatpasted posters encouraging people to torch SUVs to combat gentrification and overthrow capitalism. Keating was a 2nd rate Kevin ... this guy was 3rd rate.

Killian is obv the 1st rate Kevin ... the ur-Kevin as it were

We used to call Keating "Mr. Clean" and "cue-ball"

lol

all I know about Ashbery is that his female students report that he was often very cold toward them and their work

There's an Ashbery poem in And The Stars Were Shining that I've wanted to go back to, concluding in a line about (as I remember) keeping a doorstop in the office door so that it's open a crack. It didn't point to anything bad/scandalous, but seemed to have to do with boundaries of intimacies.

Other than that, all's I know from Edmund White's NYC memoir is that he and Ashbery hooked up.

Ashbery was hot in the '70s

Sorry for this vmic post

you need to post a jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F9NeoeIl-54/Wa7CnPvxnqI/AAAAAAAAIyU/tpk20qy05tMNUJkbibTxiYiU1SASYbfRACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/ashbery.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F9NeoeIl-54/Wa7CnPvxnqI/AAAAAAAAIyU/tpk20qy05tMNUJkbibTxiYiU1SASYbfRACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/ashbery.jpg

Lol u get the idea

Thought that was a picture of this guy:
https://www.masslive.com/resizer/mapn3wPr9hYXGOEbE86j6pkt4xc=/700x0/smart/advancelocal-adapter-image-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/image.masslive.com/home/mass-media/width2048/img/breakingnews/photo/2015/10/16/2015-david-kelly-hampshirejpg-dd264a760f4dfa2e.jpg

So rude

Sorry, was not intended to be.

Wondering if silby reads this thread, probably not.

https://www.americamagazine.org/sites/default/files/main_image/2505956.0.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EE2v5ieWwAAY2hK.jpg

?

^ xp plax

Ruffalo as Ashbery biopic, dir. Todd Haynes.

be still my beating heart

Ruffalo toured a friend's apartment in the Mission many years ago. Apparently he's a very nice guy.

my husband saw MR at a coffee shop in silver lake once and freaked out lol

have also def heard my husband talk about the anti-yuppie protest stuff sarahell and tabes were talking about a few days ago, he lived in the mission in the late 90s/2000s

i don’t write poetry or even read tons of it but i do like learning about poetry gossip/clusterfks. B’s not on Twitter so sometimes i find out about stuff before he does lol (eg the danielle rose thing)

I'm also not on Twitter. Better this way.

Oh, I'd come, I remembered, chiefly to see my own reflection.

— John Ashbery (@AshberyEbooks) September 15, 2021

I semi-recently watched the movie where MR plays the West Virginia lawyer (the area is near where my Dad's family was from, though they had moved prior to the plant being built). ... I am always here for MR content