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Like Clocks out of Control: the aleatory poetics of John Ashbery

Like Clocks out of Control: The Aleatory Poetics of John Ashbery

A personal review written to me from John Shoptaw, American poet master and professor of English, UC Berkeley: I’ve found time to read, however cursorily, your fascinating book on Ashbery’s poetry. Congratulations on your clarity of argument and expression. You’ve caught something important about Ashbery’s avoidance of sublimity, message, and teleology. I appreciated and enjoyed the vast array of poems and statements from interviews that you brought into play here, also your familiarity with classical paradigms and modern aesthetics (especially Sontag’s). I think Ashbery himself would agree with your sense of his poems. I wonder if there are moments in which you disagree with Ashbery, in which you find his poems doing something other than what he says either in the poems or out. I was also wondering how the ideas of sublimity, didacticism, and teleology belong together for you. They don’t have to, do they? Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” is didactic without being sublime; Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” is sublime without being explicitly didactic. For me, the issue of message is difficult to separate (keep apart from) that of meaning. Meaningful, readable poems, including those of Ashbery’s I can make sense of, are often what you might call value-added texts in that the differences in their figures and strucure are almost inevitably valued negatively or positively. I’m sure you know “They Knew What They Wanted” from Planisphere. With its collage of film titles, its many relatively interchangeable lines, the poem seems non-didactic and only marginally meaningful. Yet we do get a composite photo (mug shot?) of “They”: the criminal, marginal other; in the overt irony of the poem, “they” are mostly the good guys. The poem appeared in the wake of the passing of Proposition 8 in California, which made same-sex marriages illegal. If read in that light, the first line: “They all kissed the bride.” introduces heterosexual marriage, while “They dare not love” paraphrases the famous (from Wilde’s trial) “love that dare not speak its name”. Near the end, “they” shifts roles to the villain as the first person anti-hero enters: “They made me a fugitive. / They made me a criminal.” These lines add up to an implicit critique of the California proposition, now overturned. Is the poem political, didactic? Implicitly, yes, I would say, but not without losing its sense of free play and pleasure, which I still take in reading it. Anyway, well done. Let me know when you find a publisher. John (Shoptaw), Professor, English, UC Berkeley

Review of Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life

Chicago Review, 2018

When The Songs We Know Best-Karin Roffman' s careful, caring account of John Ashbery' s first twenty-eight years-found its first readers, its subject was not only alive but immortal, fresh off his twenty-seventh collection, a monument in American poetry who outlasted all the moments and movements he supposedly defined. A month and change after its publication, Ashbery turned ninety; another month and change later, he passed away. † Roffman did not set out to write an obituary, nor to condense an entire life or career, but her book may be the most instructive guide yet on reading Ashbery autobiographically, a rarely-chosen approach to this poet who invites and deflects all approaches. It' s no secret that Ashbery had a life-it' s there in "The Skaters " (1966), with spots of time bubbling up to its surface; Flow Chart (1991), the hundred-page poem written into the vacancy left by his mother' s death; "The History of My Life " (1999), an elegy for his younger brother and a fairytale-neat childhood: "Once upon a time there were two brothers. / Then there was only one: myself. " But for every dispatch from his life, Ashbery' s poetry provides hundreds of red herrings, set changes, inattentive wanderings away from self-absorption. "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name, " from Houseboat Days (1977), flings confessionalism down with a splat-self-indulging for a few whiny lines, Ashbery moves on: So much for self-analysis. Now, About what to put in your poem-painting: Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium. Names of boys you once knew and their sleds, Skyrockets are good-do they still exist?

Laughter and Uncertainty: John Ashbery's Low-Key Camp

Contemporary Literary Criticism 221 (Thomson Gale, 2006)

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Poetry: The 1940s to the Present

American Literary Scholarship, 2002

Cultural studies of poetry and poetics are burgeoning. When the White House orchestrated a gathering of American poets laureate Rita Dove, Robert Hass, and Robert Pinsky for a celebration of American poetry, the event was not complete without a presidential recitation of Octavio Paz. The year began with one of the most inclusive representations of small press publishing in the 20th century, an exhibition arranged by the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and the year ends with the publication of a massive Volume II: From Postwar to Millennium of Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, ed. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg (Calif.), which is resolutely transnational in focus. Poetry's ''eventfulness''-its ability to make things happen and its intersections with performance theory and media studies-is widely in evidence. Environmental criticism and anthological criticism also make a contribution, along with more traditional biographical criticism, new and traditional genre studies, queer theory, and feminist approaches. i General Studies: from Avant-Garde to New Formalism A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (NYPL), a book by Stephen Clay and Rodney Phillips about the mimeo revolution and its e√ects on poetry, has been published in conjunction with the New York Public Library exhibition. One of this year's most striking and undoubtedly most amply illustrated histories of poetry and poetics, it features more than 200 black-and-white photographs, meticulous chronologies, and checklists of publications and of the poets appearing in them. Jerome Rothenberg's ''Pre-Face'' takes the exuberant view: the ''mainstream of [contemporary] American poetry has always been in