JOHN ASHBERY ~

This Room

The room I entered was a dream of this room.

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.

The oval portrait

of a dog was me at an early age.

Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

We had macaroni for lunch every day

except Sunday, when a small quail was induced

to be served to us. Why do I tell you about these things?

You are not even here.

_____________________________

John Ashbery

SOMETHING CLOSE TO MUSIC `

 

No Longer Very Clear

It is true that I can no longer remember very well

the  time when we first began to know each other.

However, I do remember very well

the first time we met. You walked in sunlight,

holding a daisy. You said, "Children made unreliable witnesses."

Now, so long after that time,

I keep the spirit of it throbbing still.

The ideas are still the same, and they expand

to fill vast, antique cubes.

My daughter was reading one just the other day.

She said, " How like pellucid statues, Daddy. Or like a. . .

an engine."

In this house of blues the cold creeps stealthily upon us.

I do not dare to do what I fantasize doing.

With time the blue congeals into roomlike purple

that takes the shape of alcoves, landings. . .

Everything is like something else.

I should have waited before I learned this.

_________________________

Something Close to Music

John Ashbery

David Zwirner Books

2022

___________________________________________

If you can't stand Ashbery's work 

this is just the book for you —

impeccable poems (meaning: inventive,

crisp, word-saturated) diced with

square smart art criticism,

(there isn't a tired page)

and the price of this

handsome size book

is also ideal.

Take a bow

Jeffrey Lependorf.

(editor)

JOHN ASHBERY ~

 

L I S T E N

Ecco 2021

MEET JOHN ASHBERY ~

KENNETH KOCH & JOHN ASHBERY ~

JOAN MURRAY (1917-1942) ~

Vermont and the Hills and the Valleys



1

Tremendous are the ways of the simple people,

The hills speak with their mouths,

The sky laughs out the rims of their eyes,

The earth walks with the feet of the people

And the wind and the dead are their souls awake

And the sleep, that is theirs comes when the eye-lid

Slips down to meet the soiled slant of their cheeks.



2

Great are the mountain slopes curving along the line

Flanked by the river or the smooth-glint track of train:

A speed of smoke, a sprung-coil loosely heaped beyond the span of 

   steel.

Look to right — look to the left and the fields

That fit in languid patterns between trees,

Umber cornstalks, hay in warm-split stacks!



3

Tight is the hair of women who call cows to the milking,

Wrists and fingers playing out the movement of the udder-press.

White is the angle and the piss and splash of milk.



Let it be remembered, O, let it be remembered

That there are the women and the simple people!




4

The oxen plow and wagon the hay in its high dung-gold,

Making long horns shape and hold the moon,

The red of their sides squat.

The green of the trees spring in wide green waves to the wind,

To the fields and the wide-palmed spread of space.




5

The men are before the night:

With the cracks of their cheeks filled with dust,

And the hands heavy like listless takes swung down,

And the dirt and sweat on their lips,

And the rise and fall of their chests.



6

The women go from the milking to the pot without compunction.

Steps of men and women from the field to the home,

From the plow to the reaping in the deep high swell of wheat.



There are the simple people

Whose hands rest still on a Sabbath,

And great are the fields and the mountains,

And great are the slopes and the valleys.





—————————————

JOAN MURRAY
Drafts, Fragments, and Poems
The Complete Poetry
edited by Farnoosh Fathi
NYRB 2018




M O R E !

JOHN ASHBERY ~

( Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2017 )

This biography only makes this reader request

that there will be subsequent volumes —

perhaps three 

to peel all the good apple.

Highly recommend.

(I'm reading in early June before any

rush of first reviews)

R E A D      M O R E !

JOHN ASHBERY ~

Hillbilly Airs and Dances




The same ideas or different ones condense,

and you don't have to sleep again.

Garbage is necessary. That's another issue

that hasn't been talked about.



I hear what you're saying.

Now all together: Everyone is standing

outside some movement: French spenders,

my business train, millions

of irregular plurals. Like we were all

gone together at some point,

something one could understand.



to confront you with our country,

smoking cloud,



vintage treat, village street.

The other is all mind.

In world aesthetics, a bundle in the straw.



_________________________

JOHN ASHBERY
Commotion of the Birds
Ecco 2016

SUSAN HOWE ~

"For me there was no silence before armies.

I was born in Boston Massachusetts on June 10th, 1937, to an Irish

mother and an American father. My mother had come to Boston on a

short visit two years earlier. My father had never been to Europe. She is

a wit and he was a scholar. They met at a dinner party when her earring

dropped into his soup."

S U S A N     H O W E

 

N E W     D I R E C T I O N S     2 0 1 5

"She is our conscience, our voice, our song."  —  John Ashbery 

THE CROSSROADS ~

PIERRE MARTORY   ~  JOHN ASHBERY

PARIS 1957

T H E    C R O S S R O A D S



The rubble is still to come.
The exciting night sky was shining yesterday
On the usual fits of insomnia.
The young man decides to go away
Away from an obscure horoscope
In search of an obscure destiny
In the encouraging silence of the gods.

The intersecting routes the lost maps
The name drowned in foreign languages
His father and mother never knew.
The young man takes his sack and his stick,
Leaves it all to chance, to his good luck,
Spins around, and, far from his flocks
Walks toward his first meeting.

It's a woman and it's a dog
She smiles and she yaps
Singing amid the scattered bones
Something resembling the absurd question
The young man has never asked himself
Which he answers without thinking.
The sky falls like a night on his shoulders
The dog-woman dies inside a long howl.

And when he tries to return, yesterday is tangled.
There is no more tree or star or bed
Or woman or question or horoscope.
The crossroads is only a line without risk.
Nothing moves, a thread stands out, red
Against the sun. The rubble
Starts to smoke as in the past never.





____________________ 

PIERRE MARTORY
translated by John Ashbery
The Landscapist, selected poems
The Sheep Meadow Press, 2008


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/pierre-martory

RURAL LIFE AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD (BERKSHIRES) ~

Summertime

Thinking over the past week, which then takes me further back, as it always does —


Robin Williams could have been capable of striving deeply into acting and the cinema world but my hunch is he couldn't control his vices, so the comedy masqueraded much of his madness. He was as mad as depressed. If you watch him in his earlier films, you see deep potential and scale. Then he got lazy with fame, fortune and needing the audience to respond to him. Thus the standup and the constant tv work on talk shows where he couldn't resist but to go into his scheme, which I loved of course, since it was channeling my own humor and madness but I'll let him do it for me. With that relief, I can stick to the real world. We use our comedians and they know it. The two rarest ones: Keaton and Chaplin made more than comedy. It was drama. I feel terrible for Williams since he had powerhouse abilities and now he's sunk by his own hand. Hunter Thompson raising a big revolver at his kitchen stool, son and family in the other room, blows his brains out. No warning. Another one who worked masterpieces, gone. In the meantime we have the likes of Kissinger and the whole Bush family moving around us doing just fine. Accepted or ignored in a benign way. We lose the Masters. It's always been this way. Thompson and Williams ended up believing, somehow, that they were shunned.


Now look at the comedians of old — George Burns, Milton Berle, Sid Cesar, Bob Hope, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, Lucille Ball, Jerry Lewis, Don Rickles, Carol Burnett, many many more, all lived and some are still living, deep into old age. What did they have, despite the comedy, the tragedy, the acceptance and the shunning? They have and had a classical bent. Very different from the 60s icons and troubled souls, although Dylan may get there. They all had a poise and an elegance for style and demeanor, and an almost balance with patience and timing, and they listened as well as any wild animal since they drew their work from the public and privacy of life. They took care of business.

Susan and I have just put down one half of the chapel roof, or is it a garage or is it a small barn, that may one day also become part bookshop, or even a lending library? You dream when you build if you're really building. Build in a routine and you're sure to get a routine. Today we take a rare lunch break since the work has driven us ravenous. We'll go out and start on the other side of the roof so we can finish it all by tomorrow afternoon and then take off Sunday and travel, frolic, hike, search out the bookshops, byways, even strangers, and say "hello." We give ourselves, if we're lucky, one day off a week.

Yesterday -

Changed horses at the last minute yesterday morning - 4AM - and took the new Tacoma pickup, which I call the Bronco.  We were gone by 5 and in the Berkshires, southern level, Stockbridge town to be exact (where Alice's Restaurant was, sung by Arlo Guthrie, I ate there once upon a leafy time), where I used to see Norman Rockwell cross the quiet streets very early in the morning on my way as a teenager to work the family lumberyards with a roving manager. I was his roving sidekick. 5 lumberyards, one a day for us, quite a mutt & jeff team. Rockwell with his pipe, debonair hat, and the New York Times under his arm. That's what he was walking for. A classic gentleman. It's 7:30 and chilly when we arrive in the town.

Now the town is summer-tourist crazy, bustling, loud, way too much traffic storming through for a town its size. Susan used the bathroom she likes from the fanciful Red Lion Inn (50 years ago my father was flagged down for a speeding ticket right at this corner, four kids in the backseat) while I got the bicycles out from the back of the short pickup. They fit like sardines, but they fit. And we rode for a good hour around all the side street neighborhoods with good homes, none too fancy, and then a deeper ride through the back gardens of Austin Riggs, the expensive mental institution. James Taylor was stationed there when I was that boy passing through. The rumor at the time was his heroin addiction, who knows? When he got out he played a concert, large as jesus, up the road in Lenox and I was there for Sweet Baby James.

By 9 we were at the used book shop we love, and its owner a real tireless book lover out of Manhattan long ago, in her 70s, with a classic eye and so many books I need to be there almost all of a day. So we were. The owner says, and she has a sweet way of saying it, "I love you visiting, but you take my best books." I smile back to this Londoner (native home) and say, "Well, I can't very well take your worse books." She laughs and agrees. Susan worked finding books and I also asked her to just sit out in the sun and partake there. No complaints. I worked the premises. Good stuff. Nuts in the cheeks. Winter fuel. It will also appease us from any appetite to head back down to the Berkshires in a week to a library book sale we hardly ever miss in Lenox. This year we'll miss it, having spent our wad here, and work instead in buttoning up the chapel construction. I have stone work to get to.

So while I'm finishing up, Susan in the sun, and this place is off the beaten track 5 miles from a tar road, the outer Berkshires, I see a very old fellow and know who it is instantaneously, hobbled horribly and being helped from his silver Honda by his male companion, a good and patient man, holding the old fellow up, with his cane, soft comfortable shoes, who looks at me square in the face as I approach and I look at him squarely and say, "A lovely day." Meaning the sun. He seems to agree with a nod and goes back to figuring out how to cross the earth. And I mean he's in very very rough shape moving. Susan, sitting in the sun, was surprised the man was in such bad condition yet had the wherewithal to have immediate attention onto her when he got himself, with help, out of the car. He was going to get inside the tiny book packed building and get plunked down into a comfortable wooden chair up front near the checkout counter and his friend was going to bring him a box of old postcards and John Ashbery was going to wheeze a bit and catch his breath looking over this postcard collection. I've been reading him all my life. We're nothing alike but he's my sort of man of letters. And I felt fortunate to have been with him for a moment today.

Susan later asked before we left, "Don't you want to say something to him?" I do but I shouldn't. He's at a point in life of just getting from one place to another is a dog-team effort. Leave him be to relax.

We drove home the three hours through the old roots and tangled roads of back lots and farmlands. I love the drive back to my old home place. . .in the Berkshires, and I can see it's only a matter of time my other home place, Vermont, will also be overrun.

"summertime" photo 2014  © bob arnold

Ashbery is very frail, and also edging toward 90 years of age (b. 1927), and I mean he should have been carried from the car and into the used book hamlet (which is his familiar, well welcomed by the owner etc) but there is a admirable determination on his part to get from point A to point B with his cane. I couldn't help myself to be right there, in my own familiar (the rural setting) with a man who meant a great deal to me since the age of 15 when I was discovering his poetry, art essays, and translations goodness sakes the same time I was discovering Ted Enslin, Cid Corman, James Koller, Janine Pommy Vega, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Hayden Carruth. Here is, essentially, the genius of the NY School, Frank O'Hara, a pal, later Ted Berrigan, all the guys. The guys that helped save my young life. I'll regret I didn't say something more than "hello" which I at least did, eye to eye, because I am capable of also regretting that I bothered him if I did go ahead and make the plunge. Better to be moderate, since I'm often anything but with an endurance and at least a wish at taking on the day.

(letter to John Phillips, 16 august 2014)

JOHN ASHBERY ~

edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie

Farrar, 2014

QUICK QUESTION ~









Words To That Effect
 


The drive down was smooth

but after we arrived things started to go haywire,

first one thing and then another. The days

scudded past like tumbleweed, slow then fast,

then slow again. The sky was sweet and plain.

You remember how still it was then,

a season putting its arms into a coat and staying unwrapped

for a long, a little time.



It was during the week we talked about deforestation.

How sad that everything has to change,

yet what a relief, too! Otherwise we'd only have

looking forward to look forward to.

The moment would be a bud

that never filled, only persevered

in a static trance, before it came to be no more.



We'd walked a little way in our shoes.

I was sure you'd remember how it had been

the other time, before the messenger came to your door

and seemed to want to peer in and size up the place.

So each evening became a forbidden morning

of thunder and curdled milk, though the invoices

got forwarded and birds settled on the periphery.







 

Northeast Building




I tell myself I'm a minimalist.

Not that it matters to the big guns

who train their sights on us,

who also know about tomorrow and their brothers,

and  had a pretty good run. It would be that time

in the future, that was predicted. The wearing of boater hats

had become fairly commonplace, like going to the park.

Children ran errands while adults went to the movies.

There were more sights along the strand than at first

imagined. Nobody ever heard of an alternative

to these dingy, then bright vignettes.

We slept well and fell into an uneasy dialogue,

like the United States and Canada. Then mild everything.



The runner is already here,

has been for some time, awaiting instructions.

If it was my turn I'd go, but since that is

out of the question, I'll merely keep my counsel,

looking for some converted to preach to.

The other thing, your happiness program, fits in

with the recent trend for self-expression. All in good time.

Why is parting, then, permitted?




______________________________


JOHN ASHBERY
Quick Question
(Ecco 2012)

photo : guy maddin

ILLUMINATIONS ~

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

CITY



I am an ephemeral and not at all dissatisfied citizen of a

metropolis thought to be modern because every known

taste has been avoided in the furnishings and exteriors

of its houses as well as in the plan of the city. Here you

would never point to the traces of any monument to

superstition. Morality and language are reduced to their

most basic expression, indeed! These millions of people

who feel no need to know one another experience such

similar kinds of education, occupation and old age, that

their life-spans must be several times shorter than those

which a mad statistic determines for the peoples of the

continent. Just as, from my window, I see new specters

rolling through the thick and eternal fumes of coal fires,

—our shadow of the woods, our summer's night! —

modern-day Furies, in front of my cottage which is my

country and all my heart since everything here resem-

bles this, —Death without tears, our active daughter and

servant, and a despairing Love, and a pretty Crime

whimpering in the mud of the street.





RUTS


On the right, the summer dawn wakens the leaves and

vapors and sounds of this corner of the park, and the

embankments on the left hold within their purple shad-

ows the thousand rapid ruts of the damp road. Parade of

enchantments. Indeed: parade floats covered with gilded

wooden animals, masts and multicolored canvas back-

drops, drawn by twenty dappled circus horses at full gal-

lop, and children and men on the most amazing beasts;

—twenty vehicles, embossed, flag-draped and decked

with flowers like old-fashioned or fairy-tale coaches,

filled with children costumed for a suburban pastoral. —

Even coffins under their canopy of night brandishing

ebony plumes, fleeing to the sound of huge blue and

black mares' hooves.





WAR


In childhood, certain skies focused my seeing: all char-

acters modulated my features. Phenomena were set in

motion. —Now, the eternal inflection of moments and

the infinity of mathematics chase me across this world

where I undergo every civil success, respected by strange

childhood and abnormally large affections. —I dream of

a War of righteousness or force, whose logic will be quite

unexpected.

---It's as simple as a musical phrase.





DAWN


I embraced the summer dawn.

---Nothing was moving yet on the facades of palaces. The

water was still. Encampments of shadows still lingered

along the road through the woods. I walked, walking liv-

ing and warm breaths, and jewels looked on, and wings

arose noiselessly.

---The first undertaking, in the pathway already filled

with fresh, pale sparkles, was a flower which told me its

name.

---I laughed at the blond wasserfall disheveling itself

through the pines: at its silver summit, I recognized the

goddess.

---Then I lifted the veils one by one. In the pathway, ges-

ticulating. On the plain, where I denounced her to the

cock. In the great city she fled among the steeples and

domes, and running like a beggar along the marble

quays, I chased her.

---Father up the road, near a laurel grove, I wrapped

her in the veils I had collected, and I felt, a little, her

immense body. Dawn and the child fell to the bottom of

the wood.

---When I awoke it was noon.






from ILLUMINATIONS
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
JOHN ASHBERY (trans.)
Norton 2011

top photo: Étienne Carjat

Rimbaud (1854-1891) was known by one as a "disreputable, mean, ruthless, perverse, hateful wretch. He was also one of the greatest poets who ever lived." Ever restless, he managed to travel three continents before succumbing to cancer at age 37. Supposedly his poetry and creative life was all together done with by age 21. We say it has an eternal flame.

Rimbaud self-portrait near the end of his life