John Ashbery, who passed away just over a month ago, was a poet revered by many of the smartest and fearlessly challenging poets alive today. If the term “poet’s poet” means anything, it surely applies to him. At the same time, just as many poets and readers of poetry disdain his work for being overly oblique, incomprehensible, even elitist. And while on the face of it, there are arguments in their favor, I think there is a point that they are missing that distintegrates all of their criticism.
And that point is that Ashbery forces you to read in a way that is completely different fom almost anything else that you will read. And this is a point significant, not only to poets, and lovers of poetry, but to anyone who values the richness of their subjective experience, and who wish to challenge their assumptions and cognitive habits, even those who simply seek to work better, and perform which a richness of fluidity beyond what they know.
To fully appreciate and experience an Ashbery poem, at least one of his better pieces, one needs to surrender to it. There’s no amount of brain-splitting mental tension as if applying all the force of one’s neurology to solving a mathematical puzzle or quantum function. You have to fall into an Ashbery poem the way you would a bath of phonemes, morphological and syntactical strangeness. It’s more like meditation than philosophy, though it contains continents of philosophical significance.
Reading an Ashbery poem, once you’ve done the work to get into the flow – which again is more work you need to do on yourself and your expectations – it will feel the way it does when you are in the midst of an epiphany, without there actually being an epiphany. And that is because you are the zone where epiphanies are made.
Forget the brain gym, and all those gimicky internet tools supposed to enhance your cognitive abilities. If you read enough Ashbery, your brain will function differently. You will find yourself more at home in conundrums that tend to drive you mad, and you will likely laugh more frequently.
My graduate school advisor, David Lehman, was a close friend JA’s, and there were several times I had the opportunity to speak with him, but I shied away, feeling myself overly timid in the face of this timid giant. A friend of mine had several times sat at the bar with him, sipping martinis, and when I asked what they talked about, he said it was jokey stuff about what the newscasters on the TV were wearing. No heavy French literary theory or deep impressions about the current state of the art world. I’m sorry to have missed the chance to take part in that kind of chat, as I’m sure it would have had its own novelties, a special type of fluidity. I will never know.
David used to say that he would often blurt out things he had heard other people say, as if they were whisps of signification that floated right through him. Very often, we were told, he was egoless, a living atmosphere of humanity. Something different from all of us…
After John Ashbery had died, David asked for similes from people that describe his work. What I thought was that Ashbery’s poems read like plants growing and chemical reactions occurring. That’s the best I can do.
But John can say it best.