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 – was there ever a year in which Robert Kelly did not write more than the entire collected works of Basil Bunting? – and it doesn’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.

This does not mean that a poet can’t change, nor that poets don’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 A Technographic Typography (I published two excerpts of the 42^nd “graph” in Tottel’s in 1971). This isn’t who he turned out to be as a poet at all.

This question runs quite a bit deeper than the just the size and number of the poems someone writes. I’ve commented recently on my blog on the dramatic differences in the poetry of Edward Dorn, pre- and post-‘Slinger, but Dorn was hardly the only member of the New American Poets to have had this experience. Amiri Baraka’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’Hara hardly wrote anything during the last two years of his life. Ted Berrigan likewise. Robert Duncan’s production drops rapidly once he announces his 15-year “hiatus” from publishing – and some would argue that the work does as well. George Oppen, Carl Rakosi & even Louis Zukofsky went through long silent periods. Pound has his pre-modernist period, when he wrote Persona, often cited by our Quietist (and quietest) friends as evidence that they also like this 20^th century innovator – it’s just the innovations they hate. With Stein, it’s just the other way around. From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas onward, she becomes a memoirist of the avant-garde more than an instance of it.

If you read Robert Creeley, you have to be struck with the degree to which his early work, through Pieces, Mabel and A Day Book, constantly pushes change. No two books are alike. As with Pound, there are poets who love the author of Pieces and those who love the author of For Love, but it’s rare to meet someone who feels equally passionate about both volumes. Then around 1975, Creeley settles in & 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’s dotage, that basically he’d given up. That’s not my perception, but the narrative of decline they impose on what turns out to be more than half of Creeley’s life’s work follows the same general path I’d suggest for Dorn (or, for that matter, Levertov). And there is no question that the two volumes of Creeley’s Collected Poetry are profoundly different reading experiences.

John Ashbery, by comparison, presents a much more complicated situation. When Three Poems appears in 1972, he has already been publishing for 19 years, going back to Tibor de Nagy’s publication of Turandot and Other Poems. Yet, including Turandot, Three Poems is only Ashbery’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’Hara died, John Ashbery had just published Rivers and Mountains, his fourth book. Eighty-four percent of Ashbery’s career – to 2007 – had yet to be written. The writer whom FOH so affectionately dubs as Ashes basically had just begun to emerge.

Yet Ashbery was already quite famous, at least in the ways a poet might be. The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains had assured that he would be one of the defining figures for an American avant-garde for the next 50 years. Yet The Double Dream of Spring had been a confusing work, extending what Ashbery had been doing in the juvenilia of Turandot and Some Trees, but really more consolidating this style of the pop-art surreal lyric that resists going anywhere. Double Dream of Spring 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.

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 Double Dream, a collection of short lyrics – relatively few that are longer than a page or two, save for one longer piece – 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 another, and basically different from the Double Dream series of volumes as well. These include

The Tennis Court Oath
Rivers and Mountains
Three Poems
Vermont Notebook
possibly As We Know
Flow Chart
Girls on the Run

I use the word possibly with regards to As We Know because I think this is the one volume that genuinely deserves to be on both lists – it’s overall composition matches the Double Dream schema, but the long two-column poem ”Litany” warrants being placed in this second group. Unlike the Double Dream series, whose volumes blend rather seamlessly one into the other, the books in this second list are deliberately motley – you cannot generalize from any individual volume to the group as a whole. If I term the first group the Double Dream series, I think of this second set as the One Offs, unrepeated, potentially even unrepeatable projects.

I’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’s belong to this second list, that of the One Offs. Partly, this is the fate of any great innovator – the poems that change poetry, that become the most canonic, are (one could reasonably argue) “the most important,” are seldom the best, or the most polished of a given writer. People read, say, Stein’s Tender Buttons more than Stanzas in Meditation not because they are “easier” (if by easier we mean shorter), 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 Maximus poems one remembers of Olson’s most clearly, again because they changed poetry. Sonnets really is Ted Berrigan’s first work – it is still his most famous. So too The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains and Three Poems changed poetry, whereas Flow Chart 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 Spring & All, tho it is his first mature work. Or that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is certain to be read in 200 years, while his finest writing – “Wichita Vortex Sutra” or “Wales Visitation,” say – are much more up for grabs. One might say the same with Stanzas for Iris Lezak 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.

The history of poetry is always the history of change in poetry, almost never the record of “all that is best.” 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^th century psychology, but the genre’s actual importance is that it was one of the three great innovations of the 19^th century – along with the prose poem & 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 – the one great exception to this would be Maximus – suggests that the monolog’s history is as the stunted genre of the 19^th century, precisely because it was the one least dependent on form as such.

But what interests me most today is that, when Three Poems first appeared in 1972, the rhythm of Ashbery’s work was not – at least as seen from the perspective of 2007 – yet apparent. Indeed, today we might see a steady drone – in the sense of a tanpura in Indian music, perhaps – of collections modeled on Double Dream. The foreground of the tabla, 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 Double Dream or (more likely) wasn’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’s model of “the book” was never so hard-edged as Ashbery’s in those early years), right through to, say, In London. In Creeley, it is as tho he reaches a point & 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 & seducer that was Creeley in the fifties & sixties. For Ashbery, the One Offs, the poetics of deep change, has never turned off entirely, even if individual works come more slowly now. Even if they don’t change poetry now when they occur. What appears in Creeley’s career as his “late style” is something that Ashbery has demonstrated as possible as early as Turandot and Some Trees, tho it doesn’t become a steady mode of production – or at least of publication – until Double Dream. And even though it is the One Offs, especially “Europe” and Three Poems, that changed American poetry forever, there are now so many books on the Double Dream model, some of them so fully feted with ribbons & trophies, that what we now think of as “the Ashbery way” is precisely these Double Dream lyrics, effortless & brilliant, subtle & still campy, remarkably attentive to the nuances of daily life, that to understand the context & importance of Three Poems, one has to imagine an Ashbery completely different from the one we have now.

Think about John Ashbery’s Three Poems 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. The Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery’s 1970 collection, had been 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 Some Trees with The Tennis Court Oath and that in turn with Rivers and Mountains, was that you couldn’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 Double Dream was that, well, you certainly couldn’t have predicted that.¹ In narrowly extending, consolidating really, aspects of Ashbery’s poetry that went all the way back to the early 1950s, Double Dream seemed to want to demonstrate the effortless excellence of Ashbery’s craft as he moved into his forties. The implication, at least according to optimists, was that readers should be patient – the next book would be a doozy.

It’s worth keeping in mind the role of the modern prose poem within American poetry in 1972. Hayden Carruth’s omnibus 1970 anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, containing 136 poets representing “American Poetry of the Twentieth Century,” 722 pages long, has exactly zero prose poems. It’s not that prose poems were not being written. Robert Bly and his fellow contributors in The Sixties had been actively pursuing the genre, as had George Hitchcock’s ancillary deep-image journal, Kayak. At Berkeley, Kayak had already triggered a student-run imitation, Cloud Marauder. None of this was visible in the Carruth anthology, even though Bly, James Wright and George Hitchcock are all included. One poet who does not appear is Gertrude Stein.² Another who is not present is Russell Edson, whose first collection had been published in 1964.

If Edson’s model of the prose poem was the short fable of Kafka, Bly’s paradigm was borrowed from the work of French poet Max Jacob, author of The Dice Cup: a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to “distract” 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 “Strophe,” a part of Seamarks, translated here by Wallace Fowlie:

Language which was the Poetess:

“Bitterness, O favour! 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, 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 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 tumour and like a divine malady!

Perse’s overly humid prose seemed so far removed from the proliferating Jacob-Bly & Kafka-Edson editions of the prose poem, predicated as those strains were upon brevity, that it’s not clear that anyone, at least in America, knew quite what to do with his work. Plus Perse’s translators, such as Fowlie & T.S. Eliot, were hardly paragons of avant-garde practice. Robert Duncan may have been equally capable of elevated language, but there’s an inner decadence here – the sheer predictability of such impossibles as sacred malignancy or divine malady – that would have made Duncan shudder.

In 1969, however, Jonathan Cape published Lane Dunlop’s translation Francis Ponge’s Soap while Unicorn Press in Santa Barbara, California, brought out Nathaniel Tarn’s edition of Victor Segalen’s Stelae.³ From Japan, Cid Corman had already been publishing his own versions of Ponge in Origin, leading up to his selections, Things, 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 Paris from the middle 1950s onward, was perfectly positioned to know this. One might even say “to exploit this,” introducing into American poetry something that had not previously existed here: the prose poem as a serious – and extended – work of art.

 

¹ I am not including Ashbery’s first Selected Poems, which appeared between Rivers and Mountains and Double Dream.

² This was not atypical in 1970, a moment when perhaps only Robert Duncan & Jerome Rothenberg were seriously arguing for her inclusion in any consideration of American poetry. Patricia Meyerowitz’ Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945, the volume through which many poets of my generation first became aware of Tender Buttons, 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.

³ Tarn had worked at Cape, which was then undergoing a defensive merger with Chatto, and may well have produced the Segalen for the famous Cape Goliard / Grossman series. Tarn was the editor of Soap.

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 – think of Coolidge’s Quartz Hearts or The Maintains, Barrett Watten’s Progress, or Peter Ganick’s Agoraphobia – 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’s almost the verbal equivalent of a highly polished metal.

Not so Ashbery. Reading his poetry is like finding cotton balls, children’s toys & shards of glass in your oatmeal. One proceeds with caution, an anticipatory anxiety all the more curious given just how affable almost everyone you’ll meet along the way will turn out to be. A really good case in point is “A Sweet Place,” which might just be the finest single poem in Chinese Whispers.

The poem begins with one of the most extended schemas in Chinese Whispers, the image atop of a cocoa tin:

How happy are the girls on the cocoa tin,

as though there could be nothing in the world but chocolate!

As though, to confirm this, a wall stood nearby,

displaying gold medals from various expositions –

Groningen 1893, Anvers 1887 – whose judges had had the good sense

to reward the noble chocolatiers. All love’s bright-bad sweetness

gleams in those glorious pastilles.

Ashbery here employs a cinematic trope, starting with the static image, then entering into it. All is literal sweetness & light, although the careful reader will already have picked up on the set up the parallels “as though…/ As though,” sending, as these phrases do, shivers of foreboding through the text, reaching all the way to that curious last word, pastilles, 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 pastilles, but one line down.

But the empathy’s valve’s

shut by someone – a fibrous mist

invades their stubborn cheeks and flaxen hair.

Time for the next audition.

At one level, the cinematic trope is carried further & trumped as the reader recognizes that “the girls on the cocoa tin” 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 – empathy itself is alienated by having it capped with the article the; an impossible image is offered, fibrous mist, followed by a curiously awkward one, stubborn cheeks. This sentence demonstrates exactly what I mean about Ashbery’s surfaces – if he wanted to carry the trope through with flair, all the deliberate awkwardnesses 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’s very purpose, sabotaging the very schema within which it finds itself.

The next stanza, a mere couplet, changes the frame, perhaps:

Who to watch? What new celeb’s dithering

is this, commemorated in blazing script?

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 E! True Hollywood Story? Or does he intend us to hear that level merely as an echo, distanced precisely by the cocoa tin’s retro nature contrasted against the abbreviated celeb’s ultra-courant flair? My own interpretation is the latter, although I suspect a frenzied grad student, desperate for coherence, might prefer an alternate verdict.

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.

The torches are extinguished in marl.

Were there torches in that initial cocoa tin image? Not impossible, but . . . .

I live in a house in the middle of the road,

it says here. No shit!

It says here could in fact take us back to the celeb’s dithering in blazing script. But it’s a link that goes nowhere, precisely as intended. With the expletive, the focus now shifts onto the speaker, where it continues.

What did I do to deserve this? Who controls

this anger management seminar? They’ve had their way with me;

I am as I was before. Thank heaven! If I could but remember

how that was.

This is classic Ashberyan technique: sentence after sentence undercuts what has just gone before. All that coheres is the presence of a speaker, however comically crazed he might appear.

This passage is followed immediately by a long sentence in italics.

Always, it’s nightfall

in a wood, some paths are descended,

and looking out over the ropy landscape, one sees

a necessity that was at the beginning.

This sentence also has an antecedent, although only rhetorically. It’s the passage about the empathy’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 “ropy landscape,” the vast generalization of the last line. All of it in an italicization that will depart as abruptly as it arrived.

When the stanza continues, reverting to roman –

Further up there is fog.

– we 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’s poems, in a landscape that is filled with character, yet indescribably abstract.  Ashbery now reinvokes the presence of a speaker, acknowledging the listener for the first time:

But it’s nice being standing:

We should be home soon,

dearest, a dry heath awaits us, and the indulgence of sleep.

What if I really was a drifter,

would you still like me? Would you vote

for me in the straw polls of November, wait for me

in the anteroom of December, embrace the turbulent, glittering skies

the New Year brings? Lie down with me once and for all?

As with pastilles 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, vote. The rhetorical questions continue, only blown up to comic proportions. Even before vote, the use of dearest suggests a degree of privacy in this communication that Ashbery has already long given away.

We pass now over the gulf of the book’s binding to the next page, to what may in fact be a new stanza (both tone & shorter line lengths suggest as much):

The radio is silent, fretful; it bides its time

and the world forgets to consider. There is room to tabulate

the wonders of its sesquicentennials,

but the aftermath’s unremarkable, picked

clean by a snarky wind.

Again, this passage is entirely about surface tone – 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 snarky suggests closure – and it is snarky’s task precisely to undercut the gesture.

But the poem isn’t over yet. It has one more one-line stanza, all in italics:

Then I became as one who followed.

Because we have had the figured speaker before, the return of “I” 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 & attitude. The most important word in this last line turns out to be as, which both qualifies the assertion – he’s not saying that he’s one who follows, only “as one” – and harks back for the first time since the opening stanza to the parallel uses of as in its second and third lines. As turns out to be what finally “holds the poem together,” to the degree that anything here might.

Ashbery’s poem is thus significant moment to moment & formally very cagey, yet overall it’s a self-canceling (not to say self-devouring) artifact, all superstructure & no base as old retro Stalinoids might put it.

It’s intriguing, perhaps even shocking, that Ashbery should turn out to be the great cross-over hit of U.S. poetry, the one New American beloved by the schools of quietude. His work consistently parodies such modes, sometimes (as in Self-Portrait in a Convex 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 Howards & Hollanders, of the Blooms & Vendlers, were all that was the case. It’s the ultimate Ashberyesque nightmare: doomed forever to entertain monsters, he’s chosen to serve them this tray of perfect vomit-filled crepes.

Last Wednesday would have been my father’s 76^th birthday. It’s been 38 years since he died from burns suffered in a plant explosion while working at a Westvaco paper recycling operation in Charleston, South Carolina. It’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 Chinese Whispers by John Ashbery, a poet born the same year as my father.

Ashbery is one of just a half dozen or so poets from the Donald Allen New American Poetry who are still actively publishing new poetry on a regular basis. Chinese Whispers is at least the fifth book by Ashbery since Flow Chart to gather Ashbery’s short poems into a relatively slim volume & the 16^th such volume in his career. It’s a form & format that has stood Ashbery well. When I first recognized it as such, which was absolutely by Rivers and Mountains if not The Tennis Court Oath, I was convinced that the model was one adopted in the 1960s by Wesleyan University Press – original publishers of The Tennis Court Oath – and functionally, even subliminally, defined the “academic” book of poetry.

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:

• Barbara Howes, Light and Dark, 1959
• Hyam Plutzik, Apples from Shinar, 1959
• Louis Simpson, A Dream of Governors, 1959
• James Wright, Saint Judas, 1959
• David Ferry, On the Way to the Island, 1960
• Robert Francis, The Orb Weaver, 1960
• Donald Justice, The Summer Anniversaries, 1960
• Vassar Miller, Wage War on Silence, 1960
• Alan Ansen, Disorderly Houses, 1961
• Robert Bagg, Madonna of the Cello, 1961
• Donald Davie, New and Selected Poems, 1961
• David Ignatow, Say Pardon, 1961
• John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath, 1962
• Robert Bly, Silence in the Snowy Field, 1962
• James Dickey, Drowning with Others, 1962
• Richard Howard, Quantities, 1962
• Chester Kallman, Absent and Present, 1963
• Vassar Miller, My Bones Being Wiser, 1963
• Louis Simpson, At the End of the Open Road, 1963
• James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break, 1963
• James Dickey, Helmets, 1964
• David Ignatow, Figures of the Human, 1964
• Donald Petersen, The Spectral Boy, 1964
• Vern Rutsala, The Windows, 1964
• Tram Combs, saint thomas. poems. 1965
• Donald Davie, Events and Wisdoms, 1965
• James Dickey, Buckdancer’s Choice, 1965
• W. R. Moses, Identities, 1965
• Turner Cassity, Watchboy, What of the Night? 1966
• John Haines, Winter News, 1966
• Harvey Shapiro, Battle Report, 1966
• Jon Silkin, Poems New and Selected, 1966
• Richard Howard, The Damages, 1967
• Donald Justice, Night Light, 1967
• Lou Lipsitz, Cold Water, 1967
• David Ignatow, Rescue the Dead, 1968
• Michael Benedikt, The Body, 1968
• James Dickey, Poems 1957-1967, 1968
• Edwin Honig, Spring Journal, 1968
• Philip Levine, Not This Pig, 1968
• Vassar Miller, Onions and Roses, 1968
• Marge Piercy, Breaking Camp, 1968
• James Wright, Shall We Gather at the River, 1968
• Gray Burr, A Choice of Attitudes, 1969
• Leonard Nathan, The Day the Perfect Speakers Left, 1969
• Marge Piercy, Hard Loving, 1969
• Anne Stevenson, Reversals, 1969
• Richard Tillinghast, Sleep Watch, 1969
• Michael Benedikt, Sky, 1970
• William Harmon, Treasury Holiday: Thirty-Four Fits for the Opening of Fiscal Year 1968, 1970
• David Ignatow, Poems 1934-1969, 1970
• Charles Levendosky, Perimeter Poems, 1970
• Clarence Major, Swallow the Lake, 1970
• James Seay, Let Not Your Heart, 1970
• Charles Wright, The Grave of the Right Hand, 1970*

The form was relatively simple – maybe one “major” poem of as much as twelve pages, surrounded by a series of one-page pieces, coming to anywhere between 60 & 100 pages total &, if you were part of the “core” group, one such book every three or so years.

Laughable as it might seem today, those of us of a certain age will remember when this modest list – usually just four slim books per year – was the closest thing to a hegemon as existed in American poetry. Simpson won the Pulitzer in 1964 for Open Road, Dickey won the 1966 National Book Award for Buckdancer’s Choice, Justice’s 1960 volume was a Lamont Poetry Selection. There are, of course, some decent books here – Wright’s later two volumes, the two by Ignatow, Harvey Shapiro’s book**, Justice’s ’67 volume, Michael Benedikt as seriously out of place as Ashbery. If you follow the dates, you can see that part of the program’s success lay in its relatively cohesive aesthetic approach up through 1967 – the sense of shape & scene is as important for conservatives as it is for the post-avant world – at which point the social impact of the 1960s in general appears to have intervened, with leftists both real (Piercy) & nominal (Lipshutz, Levine, Levendosky, the poet laureate of Wyoming) suddenly showing up as well as a writer of color, Clarence Major. By 1970, the Wesleyan “moment” had passed.

But the great irony of Ashbery’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’s neocon New Criterion, the one overtly rightwing cultural journal in America***, 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 “sillimanning” (“rescuing from literary oblivion in great, painstaking detail”­). But overall, a list like the one above exists as “the unmarked case,” the normative median against which the interesting work of that decade was written – with the notable exception of Ashbery.

I’ve heard the complaint more than once that Ashbery’s books have become too predictable & that he hasn’t evolved in any particular direction in nearly 30 years, writing the same colorful, not quite surreal poems again & again. I’ve heard similar complaints about Robert Creeley. Frankly, I could continue reading both gentlemen with great pleasure for the rest of my days even if they waver 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 & a misplaced expectation that, having changed poetry to some degree in their own image in the past, these writers shall – or should – continue to do so in the future. I think such an expectation misjudges what it was that they actually accomplished, and what writers can & do achieve when they exert a serious impact on their peers & descendants.

If, from Some Trees through Flow Chart, John Ashbery’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 he needed, 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 The Whip & For Love through A Day Book. If the work since then has operated within that territory each poet articulated over decades, it is hardly a failure of the poets themselves.

* This list is taken from the back matter of the second printing of Ashbery’s book, issued in ’67, then supplemented for later years through Abebooks, although I have much less confidence in the year of publication for the latter source.

** Even if it was published primarily to ensure that the rest of the series would be reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, which Shapiro edited for many a year with absolutely no hint of aesthetic shape.

*** The Atlantic is still politically in the closet, though editor Michael Kelly seems determined to catch up with Kramer & poetry editor Peter Davison will have no trouble obliging Kelly’s new order with a musty formalism.

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 & Jack Spicer. I literally had this thought while taking a shower this morning, the cleanest thinking I’ve done on the subject.

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’s case, it’s a process of perpetual, even compulsive, contradiction*, lines & 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:

Get those words out of your mouth and into your heart. If there isn’t

A God don’t believe in Him. “Credo

Quia absurdum,” creates wars and pointless loves and was even in Tertullian’s time a heresy. I see him like a tortoise creeping through a vast desert of unbelief.

“The shadows of love are not the shadows of God.”

This is the second heresy created by the first Piltdown man in Plato’s cave. Either

The fire casts a shadow or it doesn’t.

Red balloons, orange balloons, purple balloons all cast off together into a raining sky.

The sky where men weep for men. And above the sky a moon or an astronaut smiles on television. Love

For God or man transformed to distance.

This is the third heresy. Dante

Was the first writer of science fiction. Beatrice

Shimmering in infinite space.

Joining war to love is a typical Spicerian strategy. But look at the length of that third line or Spicer’s use, here as well as elsewhere, of starting a sentence with a single word on one line – the enjambment is felt, but for emphasis – with the remainder on the next. Plus Spicer capitalizes Him precisely at the point where the poet suggests that He might not exist.**

I’ve suggested elsewhere that Spicer’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 – you can see it in people as diverse as Frank O’Hara, Paul Carroll or Lew Welch. & 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.

It is one thing to note that speech is not the model Ashbery relies on in the disruptive texts of The Tennis Court Oath such as “Europe” or “Leaving the Atocha Station”:

The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness

And pulling us out of there experiencing it

he meanwhile . . .   And the fried bats they sell there

dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . .

Other people . . .               flash

the garden you are boning

and defunct covering . . .***

That first line is virtually a linguist’s example of “impossible language.”+ But what about this text from that same volume, its famous title also the first line?

How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher

Of life, my great love? Do dolphins plunge bottomward

To find the light? Or is it rock

That is searched? Unrelentingly? Huh. And if some day

Men with orange shovels come to break open the rock

Which encases me, what about the light that comes in then?

What about  the smell of light?

What about the moss?

In pilgrim times he wounded me

Since then I only lie

My bed of light is a furnace choking me

With hell (and sometimes I hear salt water dripping).

I mean it – because I’m one of the few

To have held my breath under the house. I’ll trade

One red sucker for two blue ones. I’m

Named Tom. The

I’ll break here mid-sentence just to note use of the first-word-at-line’s-end tactic deployed here pointedly mocks the possibility of such positionality lending extra emphasis for the sake of meaning.

Because Spicer & Ashbery both use address – the language of the dramatic monolog – 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’s logic is one of constant undercutting, Ashbery’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 light & rock are used in the passage above. It is also apt to stop and go into an entirely different mode of address – Huh – such as the metalanguage that stops mid-thought to suggest an exchange of lollipops.

There are, of course, other New American Poets who show disinterest in fetishizing speech through poetic form – Jimmy Schuyler for one. But Schuyler is principally a poet of sublime description. It is only in Spicer & Ashbery that you find logic raised – though hardly as one might find it in a philosophy or rhetoric program – to function as the actual engine of verse. What amazes me is that, having read each of them for some 35 years, I’ve only just now noticed.

* The “Not this. / What then?” structure of Tjanting comes right out of my reading of Spicer.

** Spicer’s god might be terrible & terrifying, but any other than  a brand new reader of Spicer’s will realize that this poet was deeply a believer.

*** Ellipses in the original.

+ Although, thanks to the parsimony principle, perfectly readable.