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Showing posts with label <b>John Ashbery</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, August 03, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><img height="404" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/81tdoAp4k8Snn149e2guzDndIY7NTPCglHfV0M15evcrVuUp7Z0xQ8B_c5n9C8ohyJTZ6dU4dpanLGe5d-GsdGgQtZjn6XFy1nN32VN1ppY%3Ds0-d" width="260"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The only part of writing that is literally organic is the way in which the rhythms of production fit into the life of an author. This is something that can vary dramatically from poet to poet &#8211; was there ever a year in which Robert Kelly did <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not</i> write more than the entire collected works of Basil Bunting? &#8211; and it doesn&#8217;t seem to be anything that can be very readily dictated from the outside. Surely there is no right or wrong way with this, any more than there is to the color of our skin or our height or even sexual orientation. Any teacher in an MFA program will have the experience of watching one student struggle with creating a manuscript of acceptable length to qualify for the degree while for another student the real question is how best to whittle down from a stack of writing
hundreds of pages thick into something that makes sense as a short  book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This does not mean that a poet can&#8217;t change, <span class=GramE>nor</span> that poets don&#8217;t go through periods in their writing during which this process might be quite different. When I first began corresponding with Tom Meyer, he was still a student at Bard writing a massive, decidedly Poundian epic that he was tentatively calling <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Technographic Typography </i>(I published <a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/TOTTELS4/html/pictures/009.shtml"><span style='color:black'>two</span></a> <a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/TOTTELS6/html/pictures/012.shtml"><span style='color:black'>excerpts</span></a> of the 42<sup>nd</sup> &#8220;graph&#8221; in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tottel&#8217;s</i> in 1971). This isn&#8217;t who he turned out to be as a poet at all. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This question runs quite a bit deeper than the just the size and number of the poems someone writes. I&#8217;ve commented recently on my blog on the dramatic differences in the poetry of Edward Dorn, pre- and post-&#8216;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Slinger, </i>but Dorn was hardly the only member of the New American Poets to have had this experience. Amiri Baraka&#8217;s output and style changed drastically once he abandoned his persona as LeRoi Jones. Denise Levertov did likewise, tho not with such flair. Frank O&#8217;Hara hardly wrote anything during the last two years of his life. Ted Berrigan likewise. Robert Duncan&#8217;s production drops rapidly once he announces his 15-year &#8220;hiatus&#8221; from publishing &#8211; and some would argue that the work does as well. George Oppen, Carl Rakosi &amp; even Louis Zukofsky went through long silent periods. Pound has his pre-modernist period, when he wrote <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Persona, </i>often cited by our Quietist (and quietest) friends as evidence that they also like this 20<sup>th</sup> century innovator &#8211; it&#8217;s just the innovations they hate. With Stein, it&#8217;s just the other way around. From <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas </i>onward, she becomes a memoirist of the avant-garde more than an instance of it. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If you read Robert Creeley, you have to be struck with the degree to which his early work, through <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces, Mabel </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Day Book, </i>constantly pushes change. No two books are alike. As with Pound, there are poets who love the author of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces</i> and those who love the author of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love, </i>but it&#8217;s rare to meet someone who feels equally passionate about both volumes. Then around 1975, Creeley settles in &amp; moves gradually into what is now recognizable as his late style, which he continues pretty much without interruption for the next 30 years. I certainly know poets who insist that this is Creeley&#8217;s <span class=GramE>dotage, that</span> basically he&#8217;d given up. That&#8217;s not my perception, but the narrative of decline they impose on what turns out to be more than half of Creeley&#8217;s life&#8217;s work follows the same general path I&#8217;d suggest for Dorn (or, for that matter, Levertov). And there is no question that the two volumes of Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Poetry </i>are profoundly different reading experiences. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>John Ashbery, by comparison, presents a much more complicated situation. When <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>appears in 1972, he has already been publishing for 19 years, going back to <span class=SpellE>Tibor</span> de Nagy&#8217;s publication of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turandot and Other Poems. </i>Yet, including <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turandot, Three Poems </i>is only Ashbery&#8217;s sixth book. In the 35 years since, Ashbery has dramatically picked up his pace, issuing 19 additional volumes of new poetry. Let me put this in even more stark turns. In 1966, when Frank O&#8217;Hara died, John Ashbery had just published <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains, </i>his fourth book. Eighty-four percent of Ashbery&#8217;s career &#8211; to 2007 &#8211; had yet to be written. The writer whom FOH so affectionately dubs as Ashes basically had just begun to emerge. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Yet Ashbery was already quite famous, at least in the ways a poet might be. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Tennis Court Oath </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains </i>had assured that he would be one of the defining figures for an American avant-garde for the next 50 years. Yet <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Double Dream of Spring </i>had been a confusing work, extending what Ashbery had been doing in the juvenilia of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turandot </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees, </i>but really more consolidating this style of the pop-art surreal lyric that resists going anywhere. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream of Spring </i>is a fine book, maybe even a great one, but it was also the first book that Ashbery produced that did not in some fashion change poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Twenty books later, it becomes apparent that Ashbery was settling into what I take to be his mature rhythm as a poet: the steady production of books that are all, in one form or another, patterned upon <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream</i>, a collection of short lyrics &#8211; relatively few that are longer than a page or two, save for one longer piece &#8211; seldom adding to more than 110 pages in print, even with fairly sizeable type. These lyric collections are punctuated with a series of other books that are very different from one <span class=GramE>another,</span> and basically different from the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>series of volumes as well. These include<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The </span></i><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Tennis</span></i></st1:PlaceName><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><st1:PlaceType><i   style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Court</span></i></st1:PlaceType><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><st1:PlaceName><i   style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Oath</span></i></st1:PlaceName><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
 </span></i><st1:PlaceType><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Rivers</span></i></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> and Mountains<br>
Three Poems<br>
</span></i><st1:State><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Vermont</span></i></st1:place></st1:State><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Notebook<br>
</span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>possibly <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>As We Know<br>
Flow Chart<br>Girls on the Run</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I use the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>possibly </i>with regards to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>As We Know </i>because I think this is the one volume that genuinely deserves to be on both lists &#8211; it&#8217;s overall composition matches the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>schema, but the long two-column poem &#8221;Litany&#8221; warrants being placed in this second group. Unlike the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>series, whose volumes blend rather seamlessly one into the other, the books in this second list are deliberately  motley &#8211; you cannot generalize from any individual volume to the group as a whole. If I term the first group the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>series, I think of this second set as the One Offs, unrepeated, potentially even unrepeatable projects. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;m prepared to argue than in a century, most of the poems we (or our grandchildren) will still be reading and learning of John Ashbery&#8217;s belong to this second list, that of the One Offs. Partly, this is the fate of any great innovator &#8211; the poems that change poetry, that become the most canonic, are (one could reasonably argue) &#8220;the most important,&#8221; are seldom the best, or the most polished of a given writer. People read, say, Stein&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons </i>more than <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stanzas in Meditation </i>not because they are &#8220;easier&#8221; (if by easier we mean shorter)<span class=GramE>,</span> tho that never hurts, but because they were the poems that first taught her audience how to read in a different fashion. Similarly, it is the very first <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus </i>poems one remembers of Olson&#8217;s most clearly, again because they changed poetry. <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sonnets </i>really is</span> Ted Berrigan&#8217;s first work &#8211; it is still his most famous. So too <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Tennis Court Oath </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>changed poetry<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>whereas <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Flow Chart </i>is a poem that exists in a world these earlier books made possible. One could similarly argue that William Carlos Williams never wrote better than in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All, </i>tho it is his first mature work. Or that Allen Ginsberg&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Howl </i>is certain to be read in 200 years, while his finest writing &#8211; &#8220;Wichita Vortex Sutra&#8221; or &#8220;Wales Visitation,&#8221; say &#8211; are much more up for grabs. One might say the same with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stanzas for Iris <span class=SpellE>Lezak</span> </i>and Jackson Mac Low, a work that seems almost brutal in its machinations compared with the subtle deft works he composed toward the end of his life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The history of poetry is always the history of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>change </i>in poetry, almost never the record of &#8220;all that is best.&#8221; One might, for example, argue that a study of the dramatic monolog ought to lead ineluctably to modern masters such as Richard Howard or Frank Bidart, capable of seeding the form with everything culled from a history of 20<sup>th</sup> century psychology, but the genre&#8217;s actual importance is that it was one of the three great innovations of the 19<sup>th</sup> century &#8211; along with the prose poem &amp; free verse. The fact that dramatic monolog has grown mostly more nuanced where the two other genres have transformed themselves several times over in the past 120 years or so &#8211; the one great exception to this would be <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus </i>&#8211; suggests that the monolog&#8217;s history is as the stunted genre of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, precisely because it was the one least dependent on form as such. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But what interests me most today is that, when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>first appeared in 1972, the rhythm of Ashbery&#8217;s work was not &#8211; at least as seen from the perspective of 2007 &#8211; yet apparent. Indeed, today we might see a steady drone &#8211; in the sense of a tanpura in Indian music, perhaps &#8211; of collections modeled on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream</i>. The foreground of the <span class=SpellE>tabla</span>, the great South Asian drum, which in this analogy would be the One Offs, has never been steady. This is consistent with the basic fact that each has been invented entirely anew. But in 1972, Ashbery had not yet established the regular rhythm of lyrics on the model of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>or (more likely) wasn&#8217;t releasing them to the world, leading readers to imagine a potentially infinite string of One Offs extending limitlessly into the future. That was, after all, the same general model Creeley was using, more or less (Creeley&#8217;s model of &#8220;the book&#8221; was never <span class=GramE>so</span> hard-edged as Ashbery&#8217;s in those early years), right through to, say, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>In </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>London</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>.</span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> In Creeley, it is as tho he reaches a point &amp; can go no further, but settles in to develop a poetry befitting a much more settled life than the one proposed by the young man with a rep as a drunken brawler &amp; seducer that was Creeley in the fifties &amp; sixties. For Ashbery, the One Offs, the poetics of deep change, has never turned off entirely, even if individual works come more slowly now. <span class=GramE>Even if they don&#8217;t change poetry now when they occur.</span> What appears in Creeley&#8217;s career as his &#8220;late style&#8221; is something that Ashbery has demonstrated as possible as early as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turandot </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees, </i>tho it doesn&#8217;t become a steady mode of production &#8211; or at least of publication &#8211; until <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream. </i>And even though it is the One Offs, especially &#8220;Europe&#8221; and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems, </i>that changed American poetry forever, there are now so many books on the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>model, some of them so fully feted with ribbons &amp; trophies, that what we now think of as &#8220;the Ashbery way&#8221; is precisely these <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>lyrics, effortless &amp; brilliant, subtle &amp; still campy, remarkably attentive to the nuances of daily life, that to understand the context &amp; importance of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems, </i>one has to imagine an Ashbery completely different from the one we have now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="347" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/qZ0CcZ4_AFWTbnKmmT6gU6cIKFcRT2-Sw6Ne1hRAF0HFP3Y0TDCmK1nyYZZdVtR6n82ukaTmhC15S3KiknO_%3Ds0-d" width="500"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Think about John Ashbery&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>from the perspective of readers in 1972 when it first appeared as a Viking Compass volume, a photo of a trim mustachioed Ashbery standing somewhere on a farm with movie-star good looks peering back at the reader. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Double Dream of Spring, </i>Ashbery&#8217;s 1970 collection,<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>had been<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>the first book about which any Ashbery fan of the period could justifiably complain, as some did, that it offered little that was formally new or different from his earlier work. Previously, the one thing that had appeared certain about Ashbery, who followed <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees </i>with<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> The Tennis Court Oath </i>and that in turn with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains, </i>was that you couldn&#8217;t predict what the next volume might look like based on whatever you thought about the most recent. One argument that I did hear made about <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>was that, well, you certainly couldn&#8217;t have predicted <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that.&#185; </i>In narrowly extending, consolidating really, aspects of Ashbery&#8217;s poetry that went all the way back to the early 1950s, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>seemed to want to demonstrate the effortless excellence of Ashbery&#8217;s craft as he moved into his forties. The implication, at least according to optimists, was that readers should be patient &#8211; the next book would be a <span class=SpellE>doozy</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s worth keeping in mind the role of the modern prose poem within American poetry in 1972. Hayden <span class=SpellE>Carruth&#8217;s</span> omnibus 1970 anthology, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Voice That Is Great Within Us, </i>containing 136 poets representing &#8220;American Poetry of the Twentieth Century,&#8221; 722 pages long, has exactly zero prose poems. It&#8217;s not that prose poems were not being written. Robert Bly and his fellow contributors in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sixties </i>had been actively pursuing the genre, as had George Hitchcock&#8217;s ancillary deep-image journal, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kayak. </i>At </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kayak </i>had already triggered a student-run imitation, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cloud Marauder. </i>None of this was visible in the Carruth anthology<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>even though Bly, James Wright and George Hitchcock are all included. One poet who does not appear is Gertrude Stein.&#178; Another who is not present is Russell Edson, whose first collection had been published in 1964. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If <span class=SpellE>Edson&#8217;s</span> model of the prose poem was the short fable of Kafka, <span class=SpellE>Bly&#8217;s</span> paradigm was borrowed from the work of French poet Max Jacob, author of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Dice Cup: </i>a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to &#8220;distract&#8221; the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem. Readers of modern French literature knew, of course, that there was much more to the prose poem than this, but until the very late 1960s, the only readily available alternative translated into English were the works of St.-John Perse. Perse had won the Nobel Prize in 1960, but had begun publishing over a half century earlier and with a style that has always reminded me of the art of Maxfield Parish. Here is the opening of the fifth section of &#8220;Strophe,&#8221; a part of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Seamarks, </i>translated here by Wallace <span class=SpellE>Fowlie</span>:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Language which was the Poetess:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8220;Bitterness, O <span class=SpellE>favour</span>!</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> Where now burns the aromatic herb? . . . The poppy seed buried, we turn at least towards you, sleepless Sea of the living. And you to us are something sleepless and grave, as is incest under the veil. And we say<span class=GramE>,</span> we have seen it, the Sea for women more beautiful than adversity. And now we know only you that are great and worthy of praise,<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>O Sea which swells in our dreams as in endless disparagement and in sacred malignancy, O you who weigh on our great childhood walls and our terraces like an obscene <span class=SpellE>tumour</span> and like a divine malady!</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Perse&#8217;s</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> overly humid prose seemed so far removed from the proliferating Jacob-Bly &amp; Kafka-Edson editions of the prose poem, predicated as those strains were upon brevity, that it&#8217;s not clear that anyone, at least in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, knew quite what to do with his work. Plus <span class=SpellE>Perse&#8217;s</span> translators, such as <span class=SpellE>Fowlie</span> &amp; T.S. Eliot, were hardly paragons of avant-garde practice. Robert Duncan may have been equally capable of elevated language, but there&#8217;s an inner decadence here &#8211; the sheer predictability of such <span class=SpellE>impossibles</span> as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sacred malignancy </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>divine malady</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8211; </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>that would have made  </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> shudder. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In 1969, however, </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Jonathan</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Cape</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> published Lane Dunlop&#8217;s translation Francis <span class=SpellE>Ponge&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Soap </i>while Unicorn Press in </span><st1:place><st1:City><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Santa Barbara</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>California</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, brought out Nathaniel Tarn&#8217;s edition of Victor <span class=SpellE>Segalen&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stelae.&#179; </i>From Japan, Cid Corman had already been publishing his own versions of Ponge in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Origin, </i>leading up to his selections, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Things, </i>which appeared in 1971. American readers were beginning to get hints of the broader landscape for poetic prose that Europeans had known already for several decades. John Ashbery, having spent roughly a decade in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Paris</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> from the middle 1950s onward, was perfectly positioned to know this. One might even say &#8220;to exploit this,&#8221; introducing into American poetry something that had not previously existed here: the prose poem as a serious &#8211; and extended &#8211; work of art. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoFootnoteText style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#185; </span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I  am not including Ashbery&#8217;s first <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Selected Poems, </i>which appeared between <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double  Dream.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoFootnoteText style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#178; </span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This was not atypical in 1970, a moment when perhaps only Robert Duncan &amp; Jerome Rothenberg were seriously arguing for her inclusion in any consideration of American poetry. Patricia <span class=SpellE>Meyerowitz</span>&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945, </i>the volume through which many poets of my generation first became aware of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons, </i>was originally published by Peter Owen in 1967, but not reissued in the Penguin edition that finally gave it broad U.S. distribution until 1971. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#179; </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Tarn</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> had worked at </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Cape</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, which was then undergoing a defensive merger with <span class=SpellE>Chatto</span>, and may well have produced the Segalen for the famous </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Cape</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Goliard</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> / Grossman series. </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Tarn</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> was the editor of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Soap.</i></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, January 26, 2003</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poetry of John Ashbery
is all about surfaces: the text glides, line by line, from image to image,
subject to subject, seldom permitting readers to go deeper into any envisioned
landscape. Other poets who have written texts with a high surface textuality &#8211;
think of Coolidge&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quartz Hearts </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maintains</i>, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Progress, </i>or
Peter Ganick&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Agoraphobia </i>&#8211; have
tended to focus on a high overall finish, a surface that maintains its texture,
its aesthetic consistency, regardless of what might transpire at other levels.
It&#8217;s almost the verbal equivalent of a highly polished metal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Not so Ashbery. Reading his
poetry is like finding cotton balls, children&#8217;s toys &amp; shards of glass in
your oatmeal. One proceeds with caution, an anticipatory anxiety all the more
curious given just how affable almost everyone you&#8217;ll meet along the way will
turn out to be. A really good case in point is &#8220;</span><st1:street><st1:address><span style="font-family: Arial;">A Sweet Place</span></st1:address></st1:street><span style="font-family: Arial;">,&#8221; which might just be the finest single poem in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/FSG/search/SearchBookDisplay.asp?BookKey=660398">Chinese
Whispers</a>. <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poem begins with one of
the most extended schemas in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chinese
Whispers,</i> the image atop of a cocoa tin:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">How
happy are the girls on the cocoa tin,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">as</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> though there could be nothing in the world but
chocolate!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">As
though, to confirm this, a wall stood nearby,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">displaying</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> gold medals from various expositions &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Groningen</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> 1893, </span><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Anvers</span></span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> 1887 &#8211; whose judges had had
the good sense<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">to</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> reward the noble chocolatiers. All love&#8217;s
bright-bad sweetness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">gleams</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> in those glorious pastilles</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ashbery here employs a
cinematic trope, starting with the static image, <span class="GramE">then</span>
entering into it. All is literal sweetness &amp; light, although the careful
reader will already have picked up on the set up the parallels &#8220;as though&#8230;/ As
though,&#8221; sending, as these phrases do, shivers of foreboding through the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t, reaching all the way to that curious last word, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pastilles,</i> literally flavored or
medicated tablets. Whether the reader attaches that term to the gold medals or
to the chocolates hidden within the tin itself, the word itself is far enough
askew from any possibility to torque the entire tableaux. Which I suspect is
exactly the point. The word all but rings a bell to announce the shift that
arrives in the next to sentences, accented by having the text continue to the
right of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pastilles,</i> but one line
down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.75in; text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">But the
empathy&#8217;s valve&#8217;s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">shut</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> by someone &#8211; a fibrous mist<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">invades</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> their stubborn cheeks and flaxen hair.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Time for the next audition.</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">At one level, the cinematic
trope is carried further &amp; trumped as the reader recognizes that &#8220;the girls
on the cocoa tin&#8221; are little more than models or aspiring actresses, shuttling
about from shoot to shoot. At a second level, the language in that first sentence
is positively bizarre &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">empathy</i>
itself is alienated by having it capped with the article <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the;</i> an impossible image is offered, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fibrous mist</i>, followed by a curiously awkward one, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">stubborn cheeks.</i> This sentence
demonstrates exactly what I mean about Ashbery&#8217;s surfaces &#8211; if he wanted to
carry the trope through with flair, all the deliberate <span class="SpellE">awkwardnesses</span>
here, as though the writer himself has suddenly discovered English to be a
second language, work against the intention. But that in fact is this sentence&#8217;s
very purpose, sabotaging the very schema within which it finds itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The next stanza, a mere
couplet, changes the frame, perhaps:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Who to watch? What new celeb&#8217;s <span class="GramE">dithering</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">is</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> this,
commemorated in blazing script?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Does Ashbery intend for us
to continue the cinematic trope beyond the stanza break, to see the portrait on
the chocolate box as a mere incident in a celebrity bio, the latest <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E! <span class="GramE">True </span></i></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Hollywood</span></i></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Story</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">?</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Or
does he intend us to hear that level merely as an echo, distanced precisely by
the cocoa tin&#8217;s retro nature contrasted against the abbreviated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">celeb&#8217;s</i> ultra-courant </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">fla</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">ir? My own interpretation is the latter, although I
suspect a frenzied grad student, desperate for coherence, might prefer an
alternate verdict. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If this couplet has been the
shard of glass in the oatmeal, the next stanza offers the whole toy store.
Notice how, in these opening lines, Ashbery offers the reader possible
connectors to the rapidly receding schemas that have come before.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The
torches are extinguished in marl.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Were there torches in that
initial cocoa tin image? Not impossible, but . . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">I live
in a house in the middle of the road,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">it</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> says here. No shit!<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">It says here</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">
could in fact take us back to the celeb&#8217;s dithering in blazing script. But it&#8217;s
a link that goes nowhere, precisely as intended. With the expletive, the focus
now shifts onto the speaker, where it continues.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">What
did I do to deserve this? Who controls<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">this</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> anger management seminar? They&#8217;ve had their way
with me;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">I am as
I was before. Thank heaven! If I could but remember<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">how</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> that was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is classic <span class="SpellE">Ashberyan</span> technique: sentence after sentence undercuts what
has just gone before. All that coheres is the presence of a <span class="GramE">speaker,</span>
however comically crazed he might appear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This passage is followed
immediately by a long sentence in italics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.25in; text-indent: .25in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Always, it&#8217;s nightfall<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">in</span></i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> a wood, some paths are descended,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">and</span></i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> looking out over the ropy landscape, one
sees<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">a</span></i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> necessity that was at the beginning.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This sentence also has an
antecedent, although only rhetorically. It&#8217;s the passage about the empathy&#8217;s
valve toward the end of the first stanza. As before, awkwardness is its own
virtue, the use of commas where others might have employed periods, the &#8220;ropy
landscape,&#8221; the vast generalization of the last line. All of it in an
italicization that will depart as abruptly as it arrived.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When the stanza continues,
reverting to roman &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Further up there is fog</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8211; <span class="GramE">we</span>
have no means of locating this positional statement. Are we figuratively in the
wood, in the middle of the road, back on the cocoa tin? There is no way to
tell. We have arrived, as we almost invariably do in Ashbery&#8217;s poems, in a
landscape that is filled with character, yet indescribably abstract.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ashbery now <span class="SpellE">reinvokes</span>
the presence of a speaker, acknowledging the listener for the first time:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">But it&#8217;s nice being standing:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">We
should be home soon,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">dearest</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">, a dry heath awaits us, and the indulgence of
sleep. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">What if
I really was a <span class="GramE">drifter,</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">would</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> you still like me? Would you <span class="GramE">vote</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">for</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> me in the straw polls of November, wait for me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">in</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> the anteroom of December, embrace the turbulent,
glittering skies<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">the</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> New Year brings? Lie down with me once and for
all?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">As with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pastilles</i> above, the instant at which Ashbery starts to undermine
the intimacy of this discourse is marked as sharply as if a bell were being
rung, in this instance with the terminal word of the fifth line, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vote. </i>The rhetorical questions continue,
only blown up to comic proportions. Even before <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vote,</i> the use of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dearest</i>
suggests a degree of privacy in this communication that Ashbery has already
long given away. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We pass now over the gulf of
the book&#8217;s binding to the next page, to what may in fact be a new stanza (both
tone &amp; shorter line lengths suggest as much):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The
radio is silent, fretful; it bides its time<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">and</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> the world forgets to consider. There is room to
tabulate<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">the</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> wonders of its sesquicentennials,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">but</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> the aftermath&#8217;s unremarkable, picked<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">clean</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> by a snarky wind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Again, this passage is
entirely about surface tone &#8211; the poem is coming to its conclusion, even as it
has become impossible to discern what that conclusion might be. Instead of
action, we get aftermath, forgetfulness, silence. Everything but that irritable
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">snarky</i> suggests closure &#8211; and it is <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">snarky&#8217;s</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>task precisely to undercut the gesture.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But the poem isn&#8217;t over yet.
It has one more one-line stanza, all in italics:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Then I
became as one who followed.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Because we have had the
figured speaker before, the return of &#8220;I&#8221; is plausible. The line itself
suggests an event that has thus prefigured a change, but events are precisely
what we have not found in this poem, only tone &amp; attitude. The most
important word in this last line turns out to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as</i>, which both qualifies the assertion &#8211; he&#8217;s not saying that he&#8217;s
one who follows, only &#8220;as one&#8221; &#8211; and harks back for the first time since the
opening stanza to the parallel uses of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as</i>
in its second and third lines. <span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">As</i> turns out to be what finally &#8220;holds the poem together,&#8221; to the
degree that anything here might.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ashbery&#8217;s poem is thus
significant moment to moment &amp; formally very cagey, yet overall it&#8217;s a
self-canceling (not to say self-devouring) artifact, all superstructure &amp;
no base as old retro Stalinoids might put it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s intriguing, perhaps
even shocking, that Ashbery should turn out to be the great cross-over hit of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> poetry, the one New American beloved by the schools
of quietude. His work consistently parodies such modes, sometimes (as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Self-Portrait in a Convex </i>Mirror) with a
viciousness that makes you question just why Ashbery puts so much energy into
mocking a poetics he so evidently despises, as if somehow he believes (fears)
that the realm of the <span class="SpellE">Howards</span> &amp; Hollanders, of
the Blooms &amp; <span class="SpellE">Vendlers</span>, were all that was the
case. It&#8217;s the ultimate Ashberyesque nightmare: doomed forever to entertain
monsters, he&#8217;s chosen to serve them this tray of perfect vomit-filled crepes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, January 25, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Last Wednesday would have
been my father&#8217;s 76<sup>th</sup> birthday. It&#8217;s been 38 years since he died
from burns suffered in a plant explosion while working at a Westvaco paper
recycling operation in </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">Charleston</span></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">South Carolina</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">. It&#8217;s been 45 years since I last saw him. I tend to
think of those days as being the very distant past, but then I pick up a book
like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/FSG/search/SearchBookDisplay.asp?BookKey=660398">Chinese
Whispers</a></i> by John Ashbery, a poet born the same year as my father. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ashbery is one of <span class="GramE">just a half dozen or so poets</span> from the </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ald Allen <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/7045.html">New American Poetry</a></i>
who are still actively publishing new poetry on a regular basis. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chinese Whispers</i> is at least the fifth
book by Ashbery since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flow Chart</i> to
gather Ashbery&#8217;s short poems into a relatively slim volume &amp; the 16<sup>th</sup>
such volume in his career. It&#8217;s a form &amp; format that has stood Ashbery
well. When I first recognized it as such, which was absolutely by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rivers and Mountains</i> if not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tennis Court Oath,</i> I was convinced
that the model was one adopted in the 1960s by Wesleyan University Press &#8211;
original publishers of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The </i></span><st1:street><st1:address><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Tennis
  Court</span></i></st1:address></st1:street><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Oath </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8211; and functionally, even subliminally, defined the
&#8220;academic&#8221; book of poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Wesleyan roster, from
the founding of the Wesleyan Poetry Program in 1959, through 1970 is worth
thinking about. The press published the following books of verse: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="square">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Barbara <span class="SpellE">Howes</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light and Dark</i>, 1959<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span class="SpellE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Hyam</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <span class="SpellE">Plutzik</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Apples
     from </i></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Shinar</span></i></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">, </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1959<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Louis Simpson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Dream of Governors,</i> 1959<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">James Wright, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saint Judas, </i>1959<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">David Ferry, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Way to the </i></span><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Island</span></i></st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">,</span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">
     1960<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Robert Francis, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Orb Weaver, </i>1960<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ald
     Justice, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Summer Anniversaries, </i>1960<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Vassar Miller, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wage War on Silence, </i>1960<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Alan <span class="SpellE">Ansen</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Disorderly Houses, </i>1961<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Robert <span class="SpellE">Bagg</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Madonna of the Cello, </i>1961<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ald
     Davie, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New and Selected Poems, </i>1961<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">David Ignatow, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Say Pardon, </i>1961<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">John Ashbery, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The </i></span><st1:street><st1:address><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Tennis Court</span></i></st1:address></st1:street><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> Oath</span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">,
     1962<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Robert Bly, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Silence in the Snowy Field,</i> 1962<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">James Dickey, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drowning with Others, </i>1962<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Richard Howard, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quantities,</i> 1962<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Chester</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <span class="SpellE">Kallman</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Absent
     and Present, </i>1963<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Vassar Miller, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Bones Being Wiser, </i>1963<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Louis Simpson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">At the End of the </i></span><st1:street><st1:address><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Open Road</span></i></st1:address></st1:street><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">, </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1963<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">James Wright, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Branch Will Not Break</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1963</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">James Dickey, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Helmets,</i> 1964<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">David Ignatow, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Figures of the Human, </i>1964<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ald
     Petersen, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Spectral Boy, </i>1964<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Vern <span class="SpellE">Rutsala</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Windows, </i>1964<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Tram Combs, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">saint
       <span class="SpellE">thomas</span></span></i></span></st1:place></st1:city><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">. <span class="GramE">poems</span>.
     </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1965<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ald
     Davie, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Events and Wisdoms, </i>1965<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">James Dickey, <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Buckdancer&#8217;s</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Choice,</i> 1965<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">W. R. Moses, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Identities, </i>1965<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Turner <span class="SpellE">Cassity</span>, <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchboy</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, What of the Night? </i>1966<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">John Haines, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winter News, </i>1966<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Harvey Shapiro, </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Battle</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> Report, </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1966<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Jon <span class="SpellE">Silkin</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poems New and Selected, </i>1966<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Richard Howard, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Damages, </i>1967<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ald
     Justice, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Night Light, </i>1967<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Lou <span class="SpellE">Lipsitz</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cold Water, </i>1967<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">David Ignatow, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rescue the Dead, </i>1968<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Michael <span class="SpellE">Benedikt</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Body, </i>1968<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">James Dickey, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poems 1957-1967, </i>1968<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Edwin <span class="SpellE">Honig</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spring Journal, </i>1968<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Philip Levine, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Not This Pig, </i>1968<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Vassar Miller, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Onions and Roses, </i>1968<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Marge <span class="SpellE">Piercy</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Breaking Camp, </i>1968<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">James Wright, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shall We Gather at the River, </i>1968</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Gray Burr, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
     Choice of Attitudes, </i>1969<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Leonard Nathan, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Day the Perfect Speakers Left, </i>1969<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Marge <span class="SpellE">Piercy</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hard Loving, </i>1969<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Anne Stevenson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reversals, </i>1969<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Richard Tillinghast, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sleep Watch, </i>1969<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Michael <span class="SpellE">Benedikt</span>,
     Sky, 1970<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">William Harmon, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Treasury </i></span><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Holiday</span></i></st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">: Thirty-Four Fits for the
     Opening of Fiscal Year 1968, </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1970<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">David Ignatow, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poems 1934-1969</i>, 1970<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Charles <span class="SpellE">Levendosky</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perimeter Poems, </i>1970<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Clarence Major, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Swallow the </i></span><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Lake</span></i></st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">, </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1970<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">James <span class="SpellE">Seay</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let Not Your Heart, </i>1970<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Charles Wright, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Grave of the Right Hand, </i>1970*<o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The form was relatively
simple &#8211; maybe one &#8220;major&#8221; poem of as much as twelve pages, surrounded by a
series of one-page pieces, coming to anywhere between 60 &amp; 100 pages total
&amp;, if you were part of the &#8220;core&#8221; group, one such book every three or so
years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Laughable as it might seem <span class="GramE">today,</span> those of us of a certain age will remember when this
modest list &#8211; usually just four slim books per year &#8211; was the closest thing to
a hegemon as existed in American poetry. Simpson won the Pulitzer in 1964 for </span><st1:street><st1:address><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Open <span class="GramE">Road</span></span></i></st1:address></st1:street><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">,</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Dickey won the 1966
National Book Award for <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Buckdancer&#8217;s</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Choice</i>, Justice&#8217;s 1960 volume was a Lamont
Poetry Selection. There are, of course, some decent books here &#8211; Wright&#8217;s later
two volumes, the two by Ignatow, Harvey Shapiro&#8217;s book**, Justice&#8217;s &#8217;67 volume,
Michael <span class="SpellE">Benedikt</span> as seriously out of place as
Ashbery. If you follow the dates, you can see that part of the program&#8217;s
success lay in its relatively cohesive aesthetic approach up through 1967 &#8211; the
sense of shape &amp; scene is as important for conservatives as it is for the
post-avant world &#8211; at which point the social impact of the 1960s in general
appears to have intervened, with leftists both real (<span class="SpellE">Piercy</span>)
&amp; nominal (<span class="SpellE">Lipshutz</span>, Levine, <span class="SpellE">Levendosky</span>,
the poet laureate of Wyoming) suddenly showing up as well as a writer of color,
Clarence Major. By 1970, the Wesleyan &#8220;moment&#8221; had passed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But the great irony of
Ashbery&#8217;s parody of the Wesleyan form (and it had more than a few counterparts
among other presses during that period), nearly four decades hence, is that, of
all these books, his is perhaps the only volume that will still be remembered
distinctly forty years from now. Indeed, unless one is an avid (or masochistic)
reader of Hilton Kramer&#8217;s neocon <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/">New Criterion</a></i>, the one overtly
rightwing cultural journal in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">***, most of these names have already receded from
general public awareness. Indeed, Tram Combs would be a plausible candidate for
what Jonathan Mayhew once referred to as &#8220;<a href="http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_jonathanmayhew_archive.html#90077978"><span class="SpellE">sillimanning</span></a>&#8221; (&#8220;<span style="color: black;">rescuing from
literary oblivion in great, painstaking detail&#8221;&#173;). But overall, a list like the
one above exists as &#8220;the unmarked case,&#8221; the normative median against which the
interesting work of that decade was written &#8211; with the notable exception of
Ashbery. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve heard the complaint
more than once that Ashbery&#8217;s books have become too predictable &amp; that he
hasn&#8217;t evolved in any particular direction in nearly 30 years, writing the same
colorful, not quite surreal poems again &amp; again. I&#8217;ve heard similar
complaints about </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Robert
 Creeley</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">. Frankly, I
could continue reading both gentlemen with great pleasure for the rest of my
days even if they <span class="GramE">waver</span> not a single iota for the
remainder of their careers. In part, I think such complaints reflect the enormous
impact each has had on contemporary poetry &amp; a misplaced expectation that,
having changed poetry to some degree in their own image in the past, these
writers shall &#8211; or should &#8211; continue to do so in the future. I think such an
expectation misjudges what it was that they actually accomplished, and what
writers can &amp; do achieve when they exert a serious impact on their peers
&amp; descendants. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">If, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Some Trees</i> through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flow Chart,</i> John Ashbery&#8217;s work evolved in directions that would
expand the terrain of the possible for poetry, it was not, I suspect, out of
any sense of historical mission that he worked. Rather, like any poet (you
included), he wrote the poems <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he needed</i>,
and having arrived at a scope that gives him ample room in which to work, he to
some degree has settled in. One can see this exact same process at work in
Creeley as well, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Whip</i></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">&amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For
Love </i>through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Day Book</i>. If the
work since then has operated within that territory each poet articulated over
decades, it is hardly a failure of the poets themselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* This list
is taken from the back matter of the second printing of Ashbery&#8217;s book, issued
in &#8217;67, then supplemented for later years through <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/">Abebooks</a>, although I have much less
confidence in the year of publication for the latter source. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Even if
it was published primarily to ensure that the rest of the series would be
reviewed in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times Book
Review</i>, which Shapiro edited for many a year with absolutely no hint of
aesthetic shape.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*** <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/">The
Atlantic</a></i> is still politically in the closet, though <span class="GramE">editor</span>
Michael Kelly seems determined to catch up with Kramer &amp; poetry editor Peter
Davison will have no trouble obliging Kelly&#8217;s new order with a musty formalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, November 19, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of all the New American Poets,
just two proceed as though the language of poetry were primarily a process of
logic and not of speech: John Ashbery &amp; Jack Spicer. I literally had this
thought while taking a shower this morning, the cleanest thinking I&#8217;ve done on
the subject.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I never join Spicer in my
imagination to Ashbery. Their sense of what that logic might be or might mean
is so very different. In Spicer&#8217;s case, it&#8217;s a process of perpetual, even
compulsive, contradiction*, lines &amp; ideas constantly undercutting one
another until the final result cannot possibly be added up to a single idea,
but rather a pulsing, resonating core of contrasting impulses:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Get those words out of your mouth and into your
heart. If there isn&#8217;t <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A God don&#8217;t believe in Him. &#8220;Credo<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="SpellE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Quia</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
absurdum,&#8221; creates wars and pointless loves and was even in Tertullian&#8217;s time a
heresy. I see him like a tortoise creeping through a vast desert of unbelief.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8220;The shadows of love are not the shadows of God.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is the second heresy created by the first
Piltdown man in Plato&#8217;s cave. Either<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The fire casts a shadow or it doesn&#8217;t.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Red balloons, orange balloons, purple balloons all
cast off together into a raining sky.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The sky where men weep for men.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> And above the sky a moon or an astronaut smiles on
television. Love<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For God or man transformed to distance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is the third heresy. Dante<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Was the first writer of science <span class="GramE">fiction.</span>
Beatrice<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Shimmering in infinite space.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Joining war to love is a
typical Spicerian strategy. But look at the length of that third line or
Spicer&#8217;s use, here as well as elsewhere, of starting a sentence with a single
word on one line &#8211; the enjambment is felt, but for emphasis &#8211; with the
remainder on the next. Plus Spicer capitalizes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Him</i> precisely at the point where the poet suggests that He might
not exist<span class="GramE">.*</span>* <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve suggested elsewhere
that Spicer&#8217;s formal training as a linguist is what inoculated him from the
mystifications of speech that accompanied the most extreme Projectivist
pronouncements. But virtually all of the New Americans bought into speech as a
model for directness in their poetry &#8211; you can see it in people as diverse as
Frank O&#8217;Hara, Paul Carroll or Lew Welch. &amp; some, like Paul Blackburn, went
to even greater lengths than Charles Olson to demonstrate how transcription
might be utilized to represent various aural aspects of the spoken.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is one thing to note that
speech is not the model Ashbery relies on in the disruptive texts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tennis Court Oath </i>such as &#8220;</span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Europe</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8221; or &#8220;Leaving the <span class="SpellE">Atocha</span> Station&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing
darkness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And pulling us out of there experiencing it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">he</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
meanwhile . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>And the fried bats they
sell there<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">dropping</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Other people . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">fla</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">sh<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">the</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
garden you are boning<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">and</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
defunct covering . . .***<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That first line is virtually
a linguist&#8217;s example of &#8220;impossible language.&#8221;+ But what about <span class="GramE">this text from that same volume, its famous title</span> also the
first line?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine <span class="GramE">sepulcher</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of life, my great love? Do dolphins plunge <span class="GramE">bottomward</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">To find the light?</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Or is it rock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That is searched? <span class="GramE">Unrelentingly?</span>
Huh. And if some day<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Men with orange shovels come to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">brea</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">k open the rock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Which encases me, what about the light that comes in
then?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What <span class="GramE">about<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>the</span> smell of light?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What about the moss?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In pilgrim times he wounded me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Since then I only lie<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My bed of light is a furnace choking me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">With hell (and sometimes I hear salt water dripping).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I mean it &#8211; because I&#8217;m one of the few<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">To have held my </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">brea</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">th under the house.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> I&#8217;ll trade<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">One red sucker for two blue ones.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> I&#8217;m<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Named Tom.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> The<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ll break here mid-sentence
just to note use of the first-word-at-line&#8217;s-end tactic deployed here pointedly
mocks the possibility of such positionality lending extra emphasis for the sake
of meaning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Because Spicer &amp; Ashbery
both use address &#8211; the language of the dramatic monolog &#8211; as the exoskeletal
structure of their poems, we generally do feel spoken to as we read them. But
neither ever uses line breaks to approximate any element of breathing, a la
Olson, Creeley or even Ginsberg. And while Spicer&#8217;s logic is one of constant
undercutting, Ashbery&#8217;s is more faceted. The next sentence is apt to take one
term of the previous one and take it into a different direction, the way <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">light</i> &amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rock</i> are used in the passage above. It is also apt to stop and go
into an entirely different mode of address &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Huh</i> &#8211; such as the metalanguage that stops mid-thought to suggest an
exchange of lollipops. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are, of course, other
New American Poets who show disinterest in fetishizing speech through poetic
form &#8211; Jimmy Schuyler for one. But Schuyler is principally a poet of sublime
description. It is only in Spicer &amp; Ashbery that you find logic raised &#8211;
though hardly as one might find it in a philosophy or rhetoric program &#8211; to
function as the actual engine of verse. What amazes me is that, having read
each of them for some 35 years, I&#8217;ve only just now noticed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* The &#8220;Not
this. / <span class="GramE">What</span> then?&#8221; structure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tjanting </i>comes right out of my reading of Spicer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Spicer&#8217;s
god might be terrible &amp; terrifying, but any <span class="GramE">other than<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a</span> brand new reader of Spicer&#8217;s will
realize that this poet was deeply a believer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">***
Ellipses in the original. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">+ Although,
thanks to the parsimony principle, perfectly readable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='title'>Ketjak</h2>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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