Daniel Morris, The Brooklyn Rail, May 2005

Making It Monumental

When rabid reverend Jim Jones convinced over 900 of his brainwashed California proselytes to drink from a tub of Kool-Aid spiked with cyanide and tranquilizers, the mass suicide that resulted was probably more widely reported than anything else during late November 1978. As the story broke like a monstrous wave, newspaper headlines encapsulated the severity and strangeness of the events as best they could. John Ashbery thought poetry might do the job too, albeit a little differently. While teaching his poetry workshop at Brooklyn College that fall semester, Ashbery asked his MFA students to write a sestina that considered the kiddie drink and the far-from-childish turn of events--or at least to attempt one to that effect, anyway. My father, Peter Morris, one of the young poets in the class, described the writing assignment to me as simply the best ever. It was the only sestina he had to write in those days. (Allen Ginsberg taught poetry in the spring semester.) I think Ashbery has shown a number of poets, back then and today, how to confront the often twisted contours of our living world with a startling voice, rhythm, or realignment even, yet without mauling any of our messy moorings.

Reading his Selected Prose is, from what I can tell, just as edifying an experience as sitting in one of Ashbery's poetry workshops or tackling his Selected Poems. Maybe more so, actually, because in it you encounter not only the work of poets, big and small, who have influenced Ashbery's own poetry but also the aesthetic interests, along with the literary and cinematic pleasures, that have animated his other life as a critic. Eugene Richie, Ashbery's secretary from 1984 to 1994, took another ten years, between 1994 and 2004, to edit this extraordinary volume. True though it is that Selected Prose falls short of a full edition of Ashbery's criticism (such an edition, should it be published some day, would easily span thousands of pages and multiple volumes), Richie need not worry about remaining in arrears. He has done a masterful job of offering just the right mélange of personal essays and critical writings. What Ashbery addicts and acolytes will enjoy the most is all here. Prose pieces abound on Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, Elizabeth Bishop, Antonin Artaud, Jasper Johns, Fairfield Porter, Rudy Burckhardt, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Italo Calvino, among others.

Without realizing it at the time, Ashbery began his writing career the way William Carlos Williams did--with a paintbrush. A mere eight years old when he composed his first poem, "The Battle" (bunnies against snowflakes, doubtless doucement), Ashbery spent the next several years until he left for Harvard painting regularly in studio art classes in Rochester, all the while working to develop a surrealist sensibility. At age nine, he read an article in Life magazine about surrealism and modern art. It confirmed his boyish sense of purpose: "I think it was at that moment I realized I wanted to be a Surrealist, or rather that I already was one. It was nice to know I was something and to know what that something was." As he grew up, so did his works of art. His poems eclipsed his paintings.

That meant struggling to figure out who he was and what he was doing once he started writing original poetry in college. Ashbery's high school years, as formative and important as they were, don't really count as artistically productive. Like any teenager, he spent them engrossed in emulation. He was reading Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and especially W. H. Auden. And his poems, adorably, aped theirs. Still, it irked Ashbery to discover that others his age were getting published. In a gem of an anecdote (they gleam throughout), Ashbery recalls feeling frustrated after regularly seeing the work of one kid poet in particular: "My main ambition then was to a get a poem in Scholastic magazine; they kept publishing poems by a young high-school student named Richard Avedon, and I thought my stuff was as good as his, good though he was."
From that frustration followed not further upset but bigger ambitions. Avedon was soon forgotten (yet later remembered, of course, as much by Ashbery as by the photography and art world, for entirely different reasons). At his second year at Harvard, Ashbery met Kenneth Koch. A small but close two-man consolation crew, they became "a mutual admiration society," in Ashbery's words. They bolstered each other and their poetry in the face of all the impressive talent surrounding them during the late 1940s, including Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, and other soon-to-be luminaries. Ashbery and Koch went to many readings together, since the likes of T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore could usually be heard somewhere on campus. Those are a couple of the names conjured up by "Some Trees," Ashbery's first major poem, written in 1948 when his maladroit modernism and recalcitrant rhymes were on parade--which is to say, when he was 21. Soon after that, in 1949, he got to know Frank O'Hara. Ashbery credits O'Hara with introducing him to such "unknown" writers as Jean Rhys, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett (the dramatic days of waiting without end hadn't yet arrived). It was a few weeks before graduation. In the meantime, Ashbery devoted himself to learning lots from O'Hara, not just about literature but about contemporary music, art, and theater as well. Then it was time to go.

Already settled in New York City, Koch convinced Ashbery to move there in the summer of 1949. O'Hara joined them in 1951. For the next five years, until Ashbery left for Paris in 1956, the threesome thrived, quickly becoming part of a larger coterie of New York poets and artists. Their lives and work revolved around poets Barbara Guest and James Schuyler and artists Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Nell Blaine. John Myers, who owned a gallery, published pamphlets of their poetry, hoping to command the same cachet for New York poetry as he had for New York painting. He eventually dubbed Ashbery and poetic company the New York School of Poets in 1961. The cryptic authority that came to be associated with the appellation is something Ashbery has never ceased to caricature and criticize: "Of course, I am aware of the poets who are counted as belonging to the New York School, but I am not sure exactly what the name designates; I'm not even sure whether it's good or bad to belong to the New York School. I think on the whole I dislike the name because it seems to be trying to pin me down to something. That's the trouble with all these labels....If you start out writing haikus, man, then it's haikus from here on in sort of thing."

His first works of criticism emerged in the late 1950s. They continued to appear steadily--and still do--as catalog essays for art exhibits, as introductions to edited volumes of poetry, as reviews of new works of literary fiction in major and minor magazines. All these texts share a similar distrust of labels signifying movements, periods, and trends as a necessary or sufficient tool of criticism. Over the years, Ashbery has regularly practiced what academic and professional critics of art and literature from his generation only sometimes preached on their best days: an erudite evisceration of stock responses and value judgments in favor of more penetrating engagements with the things we want to see and read--engagements sometimes so penetrating that they demand an entirely different aesthetic or literary comportment toward those things than we had expected. To leave it at that, though, would be tendentious. After all, plenty of contemporary critics, particularly those who care about art, are just as consistently on the mark. The names that immediately come to mind: Arthur Danto, Wayne Koestenbaum, T.J. Clarke, Dave Hickey, Peter Schjeldahl. A few of them also happen to write poetry--none with the same astonishing prowess, sorry to say, as Ashbery. There you have the crucial difference on which everything turns. An amplified alchemy of prose and poetry enlivens all of Ashbery's writing. It makes his criticism and essays, like his poems, not just special or singular, but monumental.

One of Ashbery's favorite terms of praise for writers and artists is monumentality. I suspect I am not alone in finding his work characterized by such a quality too.