Dear Andy,
If you want to pursue Ashbery through the Stevens line, I think it's easier
with his first book, Some Trees with the Auden intro if you can find it. If
you liked the rallying cry 'trilobites trilobite', then it's the Tennis
Court Oath for you. It's an insidious voice when you catch it, because it
can contain and reflect back so much of the way we talk and think and the
way we think we talk and think.
Basically stay away from later material when the float gets awful floaty. I
loved Ashbery right up to April Galleons, but then it just stopped working
for me.All the play with selves, the freedoms with linebreaks and tone, the
bravura mush of his vocabularies, all the rich chattiness I still adore in
O'Hara, Schuyler, Koch and the early Ashbery, seemed to have ossified. It's
like the bit in a Kraftwerk gig where they walk off and leave the robots to
do the dancing -- you love it for a bit, then you love it for a different
reason for a bit longer, then you wait for them to come back. Then you go
home.
I know there's a point in many poets where the idioms they've created begin
to form a kind of closed circuit -- late late Ashbery seems to me locked in
a biosphere and feeding off itself. That'd be interesting if we got to the
point of one bloated Ashberyism bashing itself off the glass, or several
emaciated gladiatorial cliches deciding to go to the beach instead of
slugging it out, but he just seems to grow some more and asks us to tell if
there's any difference between this year's turnips and last year's crop.
'Biosphere with Usual Turnip Suspects' -- he's done it again.
Best,
Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2000 5:59 PM
Subject: Re: John Ashbery
> Hi Hugh,
>
> Thanks for taking time to post this. I've a feeling I'm a lost
> cause as far as Ashbery goes though. Certain poets I find
> baffling but ultimately rewarding (Stevens, earlier Hill) --
> I think primarily because of those sonic surface details which
> are part and parcel of meaning (as I think Bill mentioned).
>
> Ashbery falls very flat on my ear, for some reason . . . .
>
> > We can live in The Heights and conjecture interestingly
> about how life is made, <
>
> Leaves me cold. Whatever he's saying here, I don't find myself
> moved to try and figure it out, due to the banality of expression.
>
>
> >The clothesline has fallen / to the enemy somewhere. Yet the awnings are
> still prim and / conspiratorial'.<
>
> Again, I'm none the wiser . . . why clothesline? Why not BBQ
> set or garden parasol? I come away from Ashbery feeling that
> his choice of words is largely arbitrary. That 'somewhere' looks
> unnecessary also. Conspiratorial awnings . . . . makes no
> sense that I can see.
>
> I should try reading him again to make sure I've not built up a
> prejudice -- my memory though is of a poetry both bland and
> infuriatingly surreal.
>
> I'd be very interested to hear others' opinions of Ashbery, to learn
> how far he divides opinion.
>
> I'll have another crack at it . . . . . thanks for the nudge :-)
>
>
> Andy
>
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