OK, here goes:
Ashbery is talking about a Stevens poem 'The Poems of Our Climate',
then goes on to say: 'I write about what is around me at a particular
moment and obviously climate is one of those things. I am looking out
of the window very often when I am writing. Rain is quite predominant.
But it is just one of the ambient things that concern me when I
write ... [he goes on a bit like this]
Peter Rose then notes that some of JA's climate references are benign
but at other times associated with destiny, futility, morality. And
death. Peter draws a link to Peter Porter in this.
So JA says: 'Of preoccupation with death? Well, I am preoccupied with
the great themes: death, love, the weather. Whenever people meet on
the street the first thing they talk about is the weather; it springs
foremost in everybody's daily talk, including mine. And I suppose I
write about those things because I think about them a lot and think
other people do too.'
The interview than goes on to discuss colloquial language (v the
Romantics - the sublime etc) - that JA thinks we are most ourselves
when we are talking - that said Romantics were less "high-falutin'"
than presumed - how we fail to say exactly what we want in speech, it
gets muddled, is unfinished, and that is what he is trying to mimic
the movement of that. Then the interview moves on to other matters ...
I think he may have been both serious and less than serious in what he
said.
Cheers,
Jill
__________________________
Jill Jones
[log in to unmask]
website: www.jilljones.com.au
blog: rubystreet.blogspot.com
On 19/02/2011, at 8:05 AM, Rachel Loden wrote:
> Yes, thanks--lovely moment, as Doug says. The Ashbery quote I can't
> find is
> also from an interview, something about politics, boredom, and poetry.
>
> How *does* he elaborate on the weather? If it's not inconvenient to
> say.
>
> Rachel
>
>> Lovely serendipity, Jill.
>>
>> Thanks for the memory.
>>
>> Doug
>> On 2011-02-18, at 12:25 AM, Jill Jones wrote:
>>
>>> Small serendipitous moment:
>>>
>>> For a number of years, I had been referring to a quote from John
>>> Ashbery
> about three
>> great themes of poetry - love, death and the weather. I knew I had it
> slightly wrong, and also
>> knew I had read it in something I had around and about me at one
>> stage of
> my life. I also
>> thought it had been lost when I had maybe lent it to someone and a
>> fire
> had destroyed a lot
>> of their papers. There was nary a reference to it via online or
>> library
> search,etc. I even
>> started to think I'd dreamed it up.
>>>
>>> Well, blow me down, here I am with it before me. The result of a
>>> huge
> cleanout. It's in a
>> supplement to an old magazine that our 'national broadcaster', the
>> ABC,
> used to publish,
>> called '24 Hours'. Any Aussies remember this wee journal? But
>> that's why
> the quote never
>> turns up in an online search.
>>>
>>> And the quote - from an interview with JA conducted by Peter Rose
>>> at the
> Melbourne
>> Writers Festival in 1992 - 'Well, I am preoccupied with the great
>> themes:
> death, love, the
>> weather.' And he elaborates a little further, on the weather.
>>>
>>> So, a small thing, but I now have it. As, among other things, I am
> giving a lecture on
>> Ashbery this semester, I am happy to have a source for quotes/
>> elaborations
> that's not always
>> used. But happier to have this before me - so I know I slightly
> misremembered it, but that it
>> was not a complete figment.
>>>
>>> Misremembering can be a good thing. But re-membering this one is as
> good.
>>>
>>> __________________________
>>> Jill Jones
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>> website: www.jilljones.com.au
>>> blog: rubystreet.blogspot.com
>>>
>>
>> Douglas Barbour
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>>
>> Latest books:
>> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>> Wednesdays'
>>
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.h
> tml
>>
>> Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an
>> instrument for
> exploring the
>> past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as
>> the
> earth is the medium in
>> which dead cities lie buried.
>>
>> Walter Benjamin
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