It’s worth noting that the continual appearance of new books of John Ashbery’s short poems has not resulted in the same complaints that “he’s not doing anything new” or “he’s simply repeating past triumphs in comfortable forms” that used to greet the somewhat similar short books published by Robert Creeley toward the end of his life. My counter-argument here has been that it makes no sense to complain that somebody who has changed the world of poetry forever – something I believe both Ashbery & Creeley have done – doesn’t continue to forge such changes ad infinitum. Each wrote the poems he personally needed to have written & when the world of verse shifted to accommodate this new thing, each kept on writing the poems he personally needed.

One reason for the variance between the reception Creeley’s books got and the one that Ashbery is continuing to receive today, however, has little to do with either author directly, but rather is a register of their somewhat different audiences. Although John Ashbery has been a relentlessly innovative author, he has also long been a favorite of Quietist critics (and to some degree of Quietist poets), especially championed by Harold Bloom, the great white whale of the academy. These more conservative readers value Ashbery, but they don’t especially value the new. In this way, they actually avoid the little trap that post-avants sometimes fell into with regards to Creeley, but their own position is as contradictory as any, a problematic that was crowned when Ashbery was given all the Official Verse Culture awards in 1975 for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a work that can only be described as a vicious satire of the very people who celebrated it. So the question remains: what is it you value in reading John Ashbery, if in fact you don’t value the new?

That’s a thought that has been haunting my reading of Ashbery’s latest book, the beautiful but slender A Worldly Country, just out from Ecco, reduced these days into being an imprint of HarperCollins. Just 76 pages of poetry with a detail from a Jane Freilicher painting for its cover, A Worldly Country could hardly be more beautiful, nor the poetry it contains more accomplished. John Ashbery may turn 80 this year, but there is no sign that he’s lost any of his inventiveness or wit, or that the ear has gone flat or any of the other possible maladies that can – and too often do – beset older poets.

One possible suggestion towards an answer comes, it would seem, from Ashbery himself, in a poem that occurs late in A Worldly Country, entitled “So Long, Santa”:

You were good to us,
but we’ve got to think these things
out for ourselves, check in with you
later – why did I say that?
Not everything has to be
as big and full as earth.

After he found a million dollars in a slot
the boy persisted, dying without uncovering a lot.
It’s good to be painful
because it will come round again
and we won’t be ready:
Barbara Allen’s cruelty, the night wind
biting at scarves, pedestrians hurrying along.

And if I so longed for you as
to make the original millennial blush go away,
us back to our pets, things we had
to learn at school,
I’d be ashamed of my distance
from you, for being indispensable
at times and cures –
just getting the right thing right, for once.

After finishing everything up
I pay a formal call to the broker.
Sherry is drunk
and it will soon be time to think of the next set of circumstances.
Oh hell everything is that way,
this way, that way, twisted in the sun
of endurance –
the back way in then,
the assertion of formality without
a celebration next time.
That’s all any of us gets,
why I am happy with you, alone, just us.

Even here, there’s not a lot of form to this “assertion of formality,” the mere echo of a failed rhyme from circumstances to endurance (and before either, distance), the deliberate clumsiness of slot and lot. It’s good to be painful / because it will come around again / and we won’t be ready may be as good a rationale as any for the reiteration at the heart of structure, but it is worth noting what is being characterized here as formal: a call to the broker. The “real” world, it would seem, is just the opposite: everything is that way, / this way, that way, twisted in the sun / of endurance.

Contrast this with the book’s one moment of high form, the title poem literally on page 1:

Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square,
the scent of manure in the municipal parterre,
not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,
not the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occurred
in real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel
that was OK too. From palace and hovel
the great parade flooded avenue and byway
and turnip fields became just another highway.
Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens
and geese, who squawked like the very dickens.
There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet
or the banks, where no one came to make a deposit.
In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon.
By evening all was calm again. A crescent moon
hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch.
Departing guests smiled and called, "See you in church!"
For night, as usual, knew what it was doing,
providing sleep to offset the great ungluing
that tomorrow again would surely bring.
As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing
puzzled me: What had happened, and why?
One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness,
and the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness.

So often it happens that the time we turn around in
soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in.
And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.

On the one hand, that of “So Long, Santa,” we see the formalism of the Quiet world proposed as a mode of solace, an ointment against pain. But in the title poem, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird shows up right before a reference to U.S. troops, an almost sadistic view of the human slaughter our president thinks of as “spreading democracy” – the scent of manure indeed!

The cyclical imbalance between the forces posed in the book’s title poem is on target: Ashbery has benefited from keeping readers off balance & on guard in this manner for half a century. It’s the bad cop (here in the form of Tweety Bird) that makes his good cop seem so very sweet, yet without this malevolent twin, it might all be enough to cause some sort of insulin shock, or at least the nausea a child could get from licking all the frosting from a cake. The little parody of the departure scene at the end of “The Game of Chess” in The Waste Land is hardly accidental. And here also we see the cyclical (night, as usual) proposed as a balm to soothe the great ungluing of day.

The final four lines here are worth noting, first for the way the calculatedly bad grammar of the first couplet reinforces just how pathetic our skiff really is. Secondly for the dire pessimism that it all must all end in the shallows.

I’ll leave it to the more clinically minded as to whether or not Ashbery is intentional in his associations of form itself with depression, at least in its reiterative Quietest conception, tho that certainly is one possible reading. My own interest is in how well – and for how many decades now – John Ashbery has been able to manage this balancing act between two universes of readers who come to him with very different interests and needs.

Photo by John Tranter

It strikes me as bizarre that John Ashbery, of all people, never has received a National Medal for the Arts. The medal has been given out now for 21 years to 8 to 10 recipients per year, including both individuals and organizations. Of the more than 200 medal recipients, the entire list of poets ever to have received this honor is:

Anthony Hecht, 2004
Maya Angelou, 2000
Gwendolyn Brooks, 1995
Richard Wilbur, 1994
Stanley Kunitz, 1993
Robert Penn Warren, 1987

Need I say just how pathetic that list is? Gwendolyn Brooks and the Five Dwarves represents the whole of poetry over, say, the last half century? It’s high time we rectify this nonsense.

The National Medal doesn’t need only to go to graybeards – Robert Duvall, Dolly Parton, Twyla Tharp, Ron (The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, The Da Vinci Code) Howard & Yo-Yo Ma have all received this acknowledgment of their lifetime achievement in recent years. Nor does it have to be only the most sclerotic practitioners – Wynton Marsalis has received one, tho Miles Davis never did. Nor did Anthony Braxton or Steve Lacy or Cecil Taylor. John Cage never received a medal, nor did Stan Brakhage, nor even Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. Nor, to come back to poetry, did Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Carl Rakosi or Robert Creeley. But Austin City Limits, Ralph Stanley, Buddy Guy, Rudolfo Anaya & Trisha Brown have all been named. Gregory Rabassa, the translator of Julio Cortázar, the great Oulipo fictioneer, was on the list in 2006. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott received one in 1998 in what was perhaps the medal’s single most interesting year, going also to Fats Domino, Agnes Martin, Frank Gehry, Philip Roth, Gregory Peck, Gwen Verdon, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and … Sara Lee Corporation (for its role as patron).

I believe that Ashbery would be among the first to acknowledge the hollowness of honors, as such, and there was a time – say, ten years ago when both Ginsberg & Creeley were still alive – when one could have had a rousing argument as to whom might be the most deserving of the New Americans to be the first to receive such an award. But time has settled that argument, and the social value of having any member of the New Americans – the single most significant generation of poets we have had over the past half century – acknowledged should not be under-estimated.

It may be worth noting that two-thirds of the poets named to date were chosen by Bill – “I had poets at both my inaugurals” – Clinton. Hecht’s appointment by George W. may seem pretty lame, but George H.W. managed to name exactly none.

All of the Objectivists are gone. There are at most a dozen of the 44 poets included in The New American Poetry still alive, half of whom one could argue are at least as deserving as any of the poets who have thus far received the medal. (Personally, I would love to see George Bush and Amiri Baraka together, but maybe that one’s not going to happen.) Poets from the generation after the New Americans – Joanne Kyger, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg – are now hitting their seventies. Recognition of America’s major literary tradition, the one that can trace its roots legitimately back not just to Pound but to Whitman, is overdue. Awarding John Ashbery this medal is an obvious first step. It’s long past time. Mr. Gioia, tear down this wall.