The band ButterSprites
all wearing dirndls
What everybody notices about Larissa MacFarquhar’s “Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery,” the eleven-page profile of the poet that appeared in the November 7 edition of The New Yorker, is that it is written entirely in the third person, with no direct quotations from its subject, save from poems. What everyone will remember of MacFarquhar’s profile, five or ten years from now, those of us who will recall it at all, is its depiction of the poet, a man given to always leaving his drawers & cabinet doors open & ajar. We are given the poet working at his writing at a set hour each day, offered a chronicle of his major relationships, first with Pierre Martory in Paris, and, for the past 35 years, David Kermani, hear how Ashbery’s mother dealt with (or, more accurately, didn’t) his homosexuality, his emotional distance from his father, his brother’s death in adolescence, his use of psychoanalysis to combat depression, and learn the design differences between his (“bland, anonymous”) Chelsea apartment & (“ornate, turreted Colonial-revival”) weekend house upstate in Hudson, New York. The profile focuses in on a critical moment in Ashbery’s career, the composition of Three Poems, which MacFarquhar suggests (rightly) is his masterpiece, detailing not only the how of the writing, but revealing revisions Ashbery thought about & sometimes made, tho elsewhere we are informed that he in general revises very little & that, once done with his poems, seldom revisits them & has memorized virtually none. The responses I have seen to this piece from the blogging community have been all over the map, from “astounding” and “fascinating” to “homicidally dismal” & “failure.”(You can find a pirate PDF file of the article itself here.)
Given what The New Yorker is – the national magazine of dental office waiting rooms – and its decades long commitment to the School of Quietude, detectable not only in its choice of poems – which genre it puts into direct competition with cartoons for space, even as it demonstrates far more passion & commitment to the latter – but also in the journal’s occasional literary portraits, such as the not so distant hatchet job on a Gertrude Stein the author suggested had not been sufficiently anti-fascist whilst lying low in Vichy France during the Second World War (trying not to let the Nazis notice that she was a Jewish lesbian modernist with more than a little art work well worth stealing), given all that, I’m struck by the ingenuousness of the negative reactions by the likes of Jack Kimball & Tim Yu. Given what The New Yorker is, MacFarquhar’s profile may just be the most serious & fair portrait of contemporary poetry the journal has ever published, will ever publish.
Consider what it reveals. John Ashbery, the one living poet treated with serious respect as “one of theirs” by post-avant & School of Quietude aficionados alike, perhaps the closest thing to a poetic icon The New Yorker recognizes in this post-Robert Frost, post-Elizabeth Bishop universe, is shown very completely to be a New American poet in his practice & attitudes, in his reading strategies as well as his writing ones. He revises no more often than Allen (“first thought, best thought”) Ginsberg, his relationship to meaning is impressionistic & angled, he scans the poems of others quickly for a sense of what they are & only occasionally comes back to read more closely. Indeed, MacFarquhar’s portrayal of what reading means when Ashbery is doing it is very possibly the best such depiction I have ever read in the general media. If she does not pick up on the trickster who is at work within the placid, almost Midwestern presentation Ashbery sometimes gives, it’s a small price to pay for the value of what she brings forward.
I’m impressed that she is able to portray Ashbery’s relationship to psychoanalysis & doesn’t flinch from recounting the years in which he was fabled for his excessive public drinking. (Once, in the loft of Helene Aylon in Emeryville, I saw Ashbery pass out in the middle of his own reading.) She even reports on his translations of bad novels from the French, done under the not-quite-homophonic pseudonym of Jonas Berry, to which Ashbery, at the behest of his publisher, added some steamy scenes for its new market. And consider this paragraph:
This is how Ashbery reads. When he sits down with a books of poems by somebody else he goes through it quickly. He forms a first impression of a poem almost at once, and if he isn’t grabbed by it he’ll flip ahead and read something else. But if he’s caught up he’ll keep going, still reading quite fast, not making any attempt to understand what’s going on but feeling that on some other level something is clicking between him and the poem, something is working. He knows implicitly that he’s getting, thought he would find it difficult to say at this point what, exactly, he’s getting. It’s the sound of the poem, though not literally so – it’s not a mater of musicality or mellifluousness or anything like that, and he never reads poems aloud to himself – it’s something like the sound produced by meaning, which lets you know that there’s meaning there even though you don’t know what it is yet. Later, if he likes the poem, he will go back and read it more carefully, trying to get at its meaning in a more conventional way, but it’s really that first impression which counts. (He reads prose quite differently, particularly the sort of dense, baroque prose he loves, such as that of Proust or Henry James: extremely slowly, savoring every word.)
MacFarquhar presents essentially this same theory of meaning as holistic & impressionistic three times during the piece – once in her portrayal of Ashbery writing, here in his own private reading habits, and again in what students & listeners have to go through hearing him read his work aloud to them. Indeed, this real-time phenomenological approach to meaning is, I would argue, MacFarquhar’s key insight. Not that this is new to poets, necessarily, but to a general magazine audience brought up on a thematically centered concept of reading Serious Literature, this borders on revolutionary.
Does this explain the whole of Ashbery? Hardly. But in fact it may do more to popularize appropriate (as distinct from “English department”) reading strategies when confronting contemporary poetry than anything comparable in recent years. MacFarquhar’s insistence that, with Ashbery, what you see is what you hear & get, also opens up just a little what I think must be the largest gap in Ashbery’s writing, his alleged difficulty:
People often tell him that they never understood his poems, or never understood them so well, until they heard him read them out loud. This puzzles him, because he can’t detect any particular quality in his voice or way of speaking that would produce that effect. He guesses that maybe because he is familiar with his poems, when he reads them they sound more like regular talking. It is more likely, though, that a person might understand them better in readings because he (sic!) is forced to listen to them in real time. He can’t go back and try to make sense of this line or that, as he could if he were reading it in a book: if something sounds odd he must simply accept it and continue to listen, letting his mind catch on one phrase or another. And if he finds himself suddenly jolting back to attention after a minute or two of wondering whether he remembered to lock his apartment, or whether a crack in the ceiling looks more like a fried egg or France, or whether he should have a hamburger for dinner, he must accept that he has missed a bit of the poem, there is no retrieving it, and just enjoy what is left without worrying too much about how it all fits together.
Yet it is precisely this single voice in real time that Ashbery himself seldom if ever confronts, reading his own work. Multisourcing every sentence, if not every phrase, Ashbery’s poems characteristically present a polyvocalic gumbo of tones, sounds, terms. Flattening it out into the single voice of a reader, any reader, generates an experience where the listener never quite can tell where one source or voice begins & another fades. Nor always calculate what the shifts in register should approximate. Ashbery, I would wager, if he is anything like any other contemporary poet, hears not only his own words as he voices them, but also recalls every source as it flickers past. To his ear, the shifting time signatures & other aural aspects active within every line, conceivably every syllable, are all but “natural” – precisely because he senses the sources, not simply the allover surface that results. To some modest degree, he may in fact give voice to that in his reading choices, that emphasis here, a longer pause there, but even if he did not the impact would remain: he alone knows how it is supposed to sound. Any other reader has several microdecisions to negotiate during the course of even the simplest text, such as this poem, printed as one of three such “illustrations” accompanying the New Yorker profile:
Thrill of a Romance
It's different when you have hiccups.
Everything is — so many glad hands competing
for your attention, a scarf, a puff of soot,
or just a blast of silence from a radio.
What is it? That's for you to learn
to your dismay when, at the end of a long queue
in the cafeteria, tray in hand, they tell you the gate closed down
after the Second World War.
of a nation in malaise, but the directorate
had other, hidden goals. To proclaim logic
a casualty of truth was one.
Everyone's solitude (and resulting promiscuity)
perfumed the byways of villages we had thought civilized.
I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward.
Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts
sail round a table too fair laid out — why, the consequences
are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories
are just that. So I channel whatever
into my contingency, a vein of mercury
that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time
every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers,
worn in the city again, promote open discussion.
Here there are multiple decision points that could throw a reader – the tone of the sentence about
If MacFarquhar doesn’t answer these questions, she at least renders them visible to even the most clueless reader. In these days of Garrison Keillor & Ted Kooser, this is a service worth acknowledging.
