There’s a great article in the New York Sun about poet John Ashbery. Ashbery has never been one of my favourite poets. He nearly always sends me to the dictionary, which I don’t mind, but even after extended meditation and repeated readings I often have no idea how to enter many of his poems. They tend to confuse me in ways that I cannot explain. And that bothers me. But all the same, the poems for which I can find an entry point are exquisite, and I respect him as a strong poet.
The article is ostensibly a book review, but it also touches significantly on the poet’s life, and I learned a lot about him that I didn’t know; his age in particular surprised me.
I haven’t read any of his later poetry, but after these paragraphs I’m going to make a point of doing so:
Mr. Ashbery has grown more prolific as he has aged, and he writes most of the shorter poems in one sitting. While too much can be made of perfectionists like Elizabeth Bishop or Philip Larkin, who would slave over a single poem for years, one sitting does seem awfully brief, even for someone this talented.
Robert Kelly, a poet who teaches (as Mr. Ashbery does) at Bard College, disagrees. “As wonderful as the early stuff was, I feel that in the past 10 years his work has taken such a huge leap in its humanity, in its simplicity, in its fun, in its way of being poetry for everyone,” he said. He characterized the poet’s persona as that of “your wise old uncle who has had one martini too many, just blathering on, but a minute later you realize the blather is profound and beautifully formed.”
