New York Letter

In progress

Gerrit Henry New York When John Ashbery won the Pulitzer Prize in May for his recent book of poems. SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror, the New York Times described him as follows: 'Born in Rochester, N.Y., on July 28, 1927, educated at Harvard and Columbia . . . Spent the decade 1955-65 mostly in France . . . Art critic for the New York Herald-Tribune and the executive editor of Art News . . . Has written plays and essays, and with James Schuyler a novel A Nest of Ninnies . . . The Pulitzer is his third major literary prize this year: he also won a National Book Critics Circle Award and a • National Book Award ..

I discussed Ashbery's work briefly-in an earlier letter on the newly established National Book Critics Circle Awards. With Ashbery the recipient of further honours from the National Book Awards and Pulitzer committees, it is now appropriate to present a fuller picture of the man who has become America's most distinguished albeit most puzzling and complex poet.

First, though, some further information from the Times: 'A poet who admits his work is complex . . Denies, however, that he is deliberately difficult ... The outlook in his poetry is romantic, though there is no subject matter in the accepted sense . . . Poetic forebears range from W. H. Auden to Friedrich Holderlin, including folk poetry . . To that list of poetic forebears should be added Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and, preeminently, Wallace Stevens. Ashbery's achievement is that he has made a highly personal poetic language out of these influences, a deeply American language which resembles painting and music more than the language of conventional or established poetry: This nondescript, never-to-be-defined daytime is The secret of where it takes place And we can no longer return to the various Conflicting statements gathered, lapses of memory Of the principal witnesses. All we know Is that we are a little early, that Today has that special, lapidary Todayness that the sunlight reproduces Faithfully in casting shadows on blithe Sidewalks ...

This poetry—meditative, as in Wallace Stevens, but with the free-verse rhythms of Whitman—also shares with William Carlos Williams a gift for raising the banal and the everyday to the level of the sublime. But Ashbery is, indeed, more 'difficult' to understand than his forebears. Like Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning in painting, he is an abstractionist in language. Con trary to what the New York Times has to say, Ash bery's subject matter is the modern self in all its ever-shifting manifestations— physical, emotional, intellectual and imaginative. That self can only be discovered, if at all, through continual reflection—an activity which takes place on the page itself. Through his first book, Some Trees, published in 1956, on through the highly experimental volume of 1962, The Tennis Court Oath, through the 1966 Rivers and Mountains, the 1970 The Double Dream of Spring, and, in 1972, Three Poems, a stunning, I I 8-page meditation in prose, John Ashbery's quest for poetic self-definition has continued. In recent years, pop bards like Rod McKuen and pseudo-experimentalists like Allen Ginsberg have offered us easy answers— sentimental and religiose—to the dilemmas of identity and language. Ashbery has offered nothing but the poetic experiment itself, the infinite vicissitudes and beauties of his life's work-in-progress.

But, to the man himself. Ashbery—slim of build, medium height, with silvery-charcoal hair and piercing green eyes—can be as witty and as enigmatic in person as he is in his work. When I visited him in his large, comfortable apartment on the West Side of New York City, '1 asked him if winning three awards in one year made his thirtyyear struggle as a poet worth it ?

'Well, no,' comes the reply in Ashbery's wry, slightly nasal voice. 'I don't think that people get into such a parsimonious field as poetry if they're reward-oriented. The only satisfaction, really, is one's own feelings about one's work.

'Even though there are literary prizes for poetry, I don't think they mean as much as those for a novel, where the sales will skyrocket. In my case, I think about ten more copies were sold.

'Anyway, it certainly comes as a pleasant surprise, but not the culmination of my career, as it would be if I were a film actor winning the Academy Award. The struggle is still going on.'

Struggle is, in a sense, what Ashbery's poetry is all about. As a country of only two hundred years, America has not blessed its poets, or its painters or composers, with a tradition to draw on. In America, the arts must almost always be re-invented with each generation. In relation to this, Ashbery reads to me from an essay by the twentieth century American composer Elliott Carter: 'Although I was very interested in writing "American music" ythen I began, this has ceased to interest me as a goal, for I was doing it whether 1 wanted to or not. To be an American is to be yourself. America is always in the process of being cleated by the acts, thoughts and products of its citizens at any given moment. I try to give expression to this notion of process in my music.'

Ashbery shuts the book. 'We might talk about the differences between American and English poetry. In America, we never know if we're using an "Americanism" or not— the American language has so many more words in it than English, and the idea of poetry here is to incorporate as many of those words into a poem as possible, even if they're not entirely justified by the "situation". In England, it seems to me, the idea is to keep the language pure of these hybrids. It's possible for an English person to recognise Americanisms in the language, where it isn't for Americans very much.'

Still. I had heard that Ashbery had a sizeable following in England (a poem of his had recently been published in the Spectator, together with a review by Donald Davie). `So I've been told, but my books have all been rejected by the major publishing houses there—Oxford and Cape, although Jonathan Cape did publish my Selected Poems a few years back. It might be nice to mention that.'

Having spent the large part of his career in relative obscurity, his work known, until recently, only to devoted admirers in New York and on the west coast and in universities, did Ashbery feel in any way alienated from an American society not particularly involved with contemporary poetry?

'When my first book was published and it bombed, 1 realised that no one was going to be very interested in my poetry—ever, it seemed to me—so I thought I'd just forget about the reader and write for myself. Not that I wanted to forget about the reader, but he left me no alternative.

'Even now, I don't feel that these three awards mean a sudden wave of acceptance of my work. I feel pretty much the same way about my work as I did when I started writing—now that I've received public approval, I can still write as I choose.

'But, in general, no, I don't feel the poet is particularly isolated in America. Probably less so than in more civilised countries.'

'Less so?'

'Well, in France, for instance, there's a great deal of lip service paid to poetry, but very few people read it. American poetry seems to be quite intimately involved with the pedestrian side of American life—if, indeed, there is any other. Mine is, too. Therefore, I don't feel particularly Tonio Kroger-like when I step out the door.'

Crowned with recent laurels, John Ashbery seems to have no intention of resting on them. Although readers and critics may find his work difficult, Ashbery seems to find it the simplest thing in the world, a little like breathing. Perhaps that is the only way to be a poet in a technological, industrialised society—going about your business, writing art or literary criticism when the occasion demands, teaching those who are interested (as Ashbery does at Brooklyn College), and waiting for the reading public and your prize-giving peers in the literary establishment to catch on, if ever. 'The only satisfaction, really, is one's own feelings about one's work

And is Ashbery working on a new book of poems? • 'I'm trying to.'

'What's the problem?'

'1 don't have any time. People are alwaYs.

coming around to interview me, these days.