Somebody not long ago – possibly on a blog or perhaps the Poetics List – suggested that John Ashbery wrote relatively quickly and without much revision. Whether or not that’s accurate – I have no way of knowing – I found it a liberating way to think about his poetry. It reminded me of a similar situation, at least a quarter of a century ago, when I heard another person, someone involved in the visual arts as I recall, who said that they were unable to appreciate the paintings of Mark Rothko until they realized how very quickly most of them were painted & that, far being from the somber & ponderous works of brooding imagination that some of Rothko’s advocates had made them out to be, were almost sketchlike in their qualities.

 

Whether or not in either instance this should turn out to be the case seems to me far less important than my imaginative ability to conceive of these works in such terms. I can recall, albeit with increasing difficulty over the years, how I envisioned the texts of Larry Eigner’s on first reading them as a teenager – all that white space between words & lines made the text appear to me as “airy,” almost feathery – and it seemed immediately & completely self-evident that his choices, both in phrasing & linebreaks, reflected a language that was spoken. Long before I met Bob Grenier, David Gitin had warned me about what Larry used to call his “poor speech,” but I never really “got” it until, after Eigner moved to Berkeley sometime around 1978, when I first reached out to him by calling him on the telephone. I was completely unprepared for Larry’s difficult cerebral palsy impaired accent – it was as if I had somehow called one of the lions of Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras on the phone & I was suddenly realizing that Wittgenstein’s admonition was literally true.

 

When I took the bus across the Bay to the board-and-care facility Larry was living in at the time, I met a tiny man with very limited physical abilities – really only full use of one hand, plus the ability to grasp with the other. His speech was only marginally better in person – it would in fact improve markedly over his years in Berkeley, simply because he had so many occasions to try & communicate with different people – but our ability that first afternoon to make eye contact enabled us to take full advantage of body language and extra-linguistic clues to flesh out the conversation. I couldn’t have gotten through it otherwise.

 

Because the original desk that had been obtained for Eigner had its drawers on the left, and because Larry could not move to the right in his wheelchair, the act of taking a piece of paper & inserting it in the typewriter entailed grabbing it with his left hand, then turning his wheelchair 360 degrees to the left in order to rearrive at the machine. Inserting the paper was no less complicated & the whole idea of a carriage return suddenly made it apparent to me that, even if there were a formal logic in Larry’s poems as to why the poem ought to gradually drift across the page, with lines starting further & further to the right as they proceeded down, there was a physical rationale for the device as well. I never saw any poem of Eigner’s as “airy” or “feathery” again – in fact, no poet ever worked harder to get his words down so exactly on the page. I often wondered as to the degree that Larry’s physical challenges caused him to think so intently on such questions – the very things that were so hard for him were related to issues in writing, like the physical placement of the word & line on the paper, at which he had no peer.

 

Another, very different text towards which I have a radically different relationship than most people, I suspect, is Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os. When I first met Johnson in 1973, during a period when we both happened to live on Sacramento Street in San Francisco, Johnson made a point of showing me his working copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, from which he was then extracting the poem by drawing thick lines with a black felt tip pen through the text. The result, in the original, looked like something far closer to Tom Phillips’ A Humument than to the Johnson text as finally printed by Sand Dollar press. As with Eigner, what may seem like an “airy” & even light text strikes me very differently. Thus, when Brad Haas characterizes Johnson’s process of composition as “excising words from an 1892 printing of Paradise Lost,” I cringe, not because Haas is wrong in the literal sense, but because excising so completely fails to capture the physicality of these words amid the rows of black ink. Instead, words that remained looked more like the first cabbages to sprout amid a well-ploughed field. What was being “excised” through this process was thus not words, but rather the entire poem. It was the poem that Johnson saw, not clusters of words.

 

Reading Ashbery as though his poems were, say, written quickly & sans much editing suggests a very different relationship between Ashbery and the “D word.” Consider, for perverse example, the opening to “This Deuced Cleverness,” from Chinese Whispers, whose textual body’s first line continues its title:

 

is what’s the matter. Can’t see without it.

Or was it, over the years of arrears,

swathed in a hoydenish privacy? No.

It’s ours to deal.

 

What might it mean for a “deuced cleverness” to be swathed in a hoydenish privacy? If I read this poem as though it were layered & worked over for days, weeks or even years, I might come to a very different sense of those phrases & their implications, especially the latter one which, if perceived as the product of quickness, might be read instead as taking pure pleasure in its overly lush, slightly exotic vocabulary. Similarly, the sound of “years of arrears” would now loom more important, signaling the onset of this surfeit of linguistic overload.

 

Read as jotted rather than sweated, Ashbery turns into a far more ludic poet, much lighter & far less difficult, capital D – though I’m not much of a believer in difficulty, period – much closer to Frank O’Hara than he might otherwise appear. Certainly far closer to O’Hara than to Merrill or Warren, the other poets with whom Harold Bloom loves to group the poor man. Thus the presumption alone, that setting of expectation, changes the poem itself.

 

Ironically enough, what this reminds me more than anything is the deflation of T.S. Eliot’s reputation once it became clear that the sharp shifts & hard-edged edits of The Waste Land were all entirely Ezra Pound’s doing & that, left to his own devices, Eliot’s manuscript would have headed in the drowsy direction that later drugged The Four Quartets. I don’t think Ashbery need worry about his reputation – though frankly I think Bloom has done it no good – his work reads very well sans the critic’s furrowed brow.