{"id":268372,"date":"2017-09-13T17:05:05","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T21:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=268372"},"modified":"2017-11-01T13:46:18","modified_gmt":"2017-11-01T17:46:18","slug":"remembering-john-ashbery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/remembering-john-ashbery\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering John Ashbery"},"content":{"rendered":"

When John Ashbery died this September, at the age of 90, he was widely memorialized as one of the greatest American poets.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he had probably the largest vocabulary of any poet after Shakespeare,\u201d says James Longenbach, the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English. \u201cThat was part of the thrill of his poems. And of his person.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo
James Longenbach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He knew Ashbery both professionally and personally. They first met when Ashbery received an honorary degree from the University in 1994. It was the beginning of a long friendship that also included novelist Joanna Scott, to whom Longenbach is married.<\/p>\n

Ashbery\u2014who maintained lifelong ties to his Rochester birthplace\u2014published more than 20 volumes of poetry. Among them are The Tennis Court Oath<\/em> (1962), The Double Dream of Spring<\/em> (1970), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror<\/em> (1975)\u2014for which he won the Pulitzer Prize\u2014Where Shall I Wander<\/em> (2005), and Breezeway<\/em> (2015).<\/p>\n

In a Boston Review<\/em> essay, reviewing Where Shall I Wander<\/em> and a collection of Ashbery\u2019s prose,<\/em> Longenbach wrote in 2005: \u201cNo one else can write like this, and we are lucky to be alive at the same moment as the one person who can.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What was John Ashbery like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

If anyone could be called the greatest living poet in the English language, it would be he. I\u2019d read him, and written about him, for years before I got to know him. But really, Joanna and I got to know him less in the space of poetry than in the space of daily life\u2014which, for him, was the space of poetry, because he was miraculously and unpretentiously devoted to the minutes of experience as they went by. He was interested in everything\u2014he wanted to talk about anything, everything. And his poems are like that, too.<\/p>\n

Some critics and readers have characterized his work as determinedly obscure. What do you think of that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

He has a reputation for being a very difficult poet, but I really don\u2019t think that\u2019s true. I think he only seems that way because people don\u2019t generally spend a lot of time reading poetry. But if you do read a lot of poetry, his poems don\u2019t seem of a different order of experience than those of Wallace Stevens, or Wordsworth, or John Donne.<\/p>\n

People emphasize one side of his work all the time: that there\u2019s a kind of disjunctiveness to it. Pronouns get messy, and things don\u2019t match up, and you move from one level of diction to another with wild swiftness.<\/p>\n

If it were just that, I think the poems would seem more available, because what that is combined with\u2014and this is what people don\u2019t talk about so much\u2014is incredibly elegant syntax, usually long sentences with gorgeous subordinate clauses. It sounds like the syntax of logic, and of cause and effect.<\/p>\n

But the material that\u2019s in those sentences doesn\u2019t match up with it, and that\u2019s the distinctive thing about him as an artist of the English language. And it\u2019s what can make his poems seem paradoxically more difficult. On the one hand, they sound very familiar and sense-making. And on the other hand, they don\u2019t. Once you notice that, he doesn\u2019t seem that different from Stevens or Wordsworth. He is different, but he\u2019s also explicably a part of the tradition of English poetry.<\/p>\n

Did knowing him change the way you read his poems?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What I discovered in getting to know him is that he was a very shy person. I could feel that in the poetry. I felt more strongly the undercurrent of sweetness and a kind of reticence, a boyishness that distinguished him in person and was there in the poetry.<\/p>\n

He loved ordinary life, and he made his poems out of it.<\/p>\n

What do you value most in his work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One, a thing that you feel with any writer for whom you want to dare to use the word \u201cgreat\u201d: he\u2019s distinctive and yet conversant with the entire tradition of poetry before him. He gathers everything up, and you can talk about his relationship to writers in the past who might seem antithetical to each other. There\u2019s a great gathering force there.<\/p>\n

And the other is the signature of his style that I mentioned earlier: it combines an elegant, extended, rational syntax with discombobulated, all-over-the-map, vocabulary-driven disparities of diction. And there\u2019s really nothing quite like that. He has a lot of imitators, but they usually just imitate the crazy, mixed-up diction. They don\u2019t have the power to make those sentences that he did.<\/p>\n

Is there a poem you\u2019d recommend for people who\u2019d like to start reading Ashbery?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first poem in his collection Your Name Here<\/em> is called \u201cThis Room.\u201d It\u2019s a short poem that is very indicative of how his poems work, but also of the pleasure of his poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Ashbery was memorialized as one of America’s premiere poets upon his passing earlier this month. 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