If you listen to Bebop jazz today, it’s sometimes hard to hear how radical it was when it first came out in the 1940s. This is absolutely not the case when reading the early poetry of John Ashbery. His first book, Some Trees, was awarded the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize from W.H. Auden in 1956. Delightful poems. But after his second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1963) was issued, which stepped into much less familiar territory, Ashbery was sure his career was over and he’d never have another book published in his lifetime.
The poetry in that book was, and still is, as innovative and unfamiliar as any in the English language. Ashbery accepted the fact that, from then on, he would only write poetry for himself, convinced he would never have an audience. This commitment on his part—to continue no matter what—is almost as important to me as his poetry. Suffice to say, he had a long “career” and published many more books, winning the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and being one of the very few truly innovative poets to be published regularly in the pages of the New Yorker.
A couple of years ago, a young poet and friend of mine who was then working on his MFA in creative writing at Vanderbilt, after handing in a paper on John Ashbery, was told by the head of the program that only a few years ago a paper on John Ashbery would not have been acceptable. That’s how controversial his work still is among more conservative academic poetry circles.
I’m telling you all this to help you understand how vibrant and alive and, at some times, even threateningly so, this poetry is, and point towards how impactful it has been over the last last almost-sixty years. Here’s a relatively short (for Ashbery) poem to give you a small taste of some of his work. It’s from his Selected Poems (1986):
Instead of Leaving
Anyone, growing up in a space you hadn't used yet
would've done the same: bother the family's bickering
to head straight into the channel. My, those times
crackled near about us, from sickly melodrama
instead of losing, and the odd confusion...confusion.
I thought of it then, and in the mountains.
During the day we perforated the eponymous city limits
and then some. No one knew all about us
but some knew plenty. It was time to leave that town
for an empty drawer
into which they sailed. Some of the eleven thousand
virgins were getting queasy. I say, stop the ship!
No can do. Here come the bald arbiters
with their eyes on chains, just so, like glasses.
Heck, it's only a muskrat
that's seen better years, when things were medieval
and gold...
So you people in the front,
leave. You see them. And you understand it all.
It doesn't end, night's sorcery notwithstanding.
Would you have preferred to be a grownup in earlier times
than the child can contain or imagine?
Or is right now the answer—you know, the radio
we heard news on late at night,
our checkered fortunes so pretty.
Here's your ton of plumes, and your Red Seal Records.
The whole embrace.
I’m not going to try to explain this poem—or any poem, for that matter. As Ashbery himself wrote: "I’m not very good at explaining my work... I'm unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled." (From John Ashbery, published by the Library of America.)
I see Ashbery as a vital bridge between the poetry that had been happening in Europe—especially France—in the first half of the twentieth century and that which had happened in Great Britain and the US. Ashbery, in my opinion, influenced every important American poet over the second half of the twentieth century, and well into the twenty-first.
A young John Ashbery
Also, as Baudelaire did a hundred years earlier, Ashbery has written some of the most useful art criticism of his era, which is collected in the book Reported Sightings, a book I continue to re-read. His former student, the poet John Yau, now carries on this tradition in writings for Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail web sites.
It is fortunate for all of us, no matter how much I prefer to have single copies of his every book, that the Library of America has issued his collected poems from 1956 to 1987 in one volume, which covers much of his output. This book allows you to sample his first poems, jump into the unsettling delights of The Tennis Court Oath, then skip over to his later, some might say more accessible, work, for a taste of his depth and range.
Again, the purpose of these blog posts is not to fully explore the poets I recommend, but to only point in their direction. Please consider this as emphatic a pointing as I can muster.
For more info about his life, and to read some of his poems, check out https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-ashbery.