BIRTH | John Ashbery

John Ashbery

July 28, 2020—Today is John Ashbery's birthday. I was privileged to live in the same building in Chelsea, Manhattan for half his life. We shared the management skills of an overqualified young woman who cleaned our apartments. 

He was a generous man, and did a reading an an exhibition of the art of Brigid Marlin. He had just published "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1974) and Brigid was similarly fascinated with convexity and had done several self-portraits of that nature. John Ashbery when I spoke with him was always thoughtful and instructive. 

Here is what Garrison Keillor says about him:

He was born in Rochester, New York (1927), and raised on a farm near Lake Ontario. He worked as an art critic in Paris and New York in the 1950s and '60s, and his poetry has been influenced by abstract expressionist art. It's also often called "difficult." "I'm quite puzzled by my work too, along with a lot of other people," he told Contemporary Authors. "I was always intrigued by it, but at the same time a little apprehensive and sort of embarrassed about annoying the same critics who are always annoyed by my work. I'm kind of sorry that I cause so much grief." He's won nearly every American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a MacArthur "Genius" grant. In 2009, he became the first living poet to be the subject of one of the Library of America's "Collected Poems of ..." series. The Oxonian Review remarked: "It is a fitting honour for a man whose decades-long reign as one of the high priests of the contemporary American poetry scene has always been something of a paradox. Having received nearly every major award for achievement in the humanities, he continues to incite considerable debate as to whether his poems 'mean' anything at all." Ashbery told the London Times: "I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life."

POET BORN | July 28 – John Ashbery

Ashbery Receives National Humanities
Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Ashbery grew up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, where they read some poetry, all of it classical.

Then he won, as a prize in a contest, Louis Untermeyer's anthology, Modern American and British Poetry. He said he didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them – poems by Auden and Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

Ashbery attended Deerfield for his last two years of high school, from which he went to Harvard. He started writing poetry seriously and published his first book, Some Trees, in 1956, when he was 29.

I first met John Ashbery in the early 1970s, when I became a neighbor in Chelsea, NYC. His newest book was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Subsequently he published A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Garrison Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. As neighbors in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, John Ashbery and David Kerman  have themselves been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Garrison Keillor in a bio of Ashbery in 2014 gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes it should stop you in your tracks – he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" – incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

BIRTH | July 28–John Ashbury (Need for a 5th Dimension)

John Ashbery receives the National Arts and Humanities
Medal from President Obama.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Garrison Keillor today says in The Writer's Almanac:

[Ashbery] grew up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, and although they read some poetry, all of it was old. Then he won a contest, and the prize was Louis Untermeyer's anthology Modern American and British Poetry. He didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them — poems by W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

A generous neighbor, seeing how bright Ashbery was, paid to send him to a good academy for his last two years of high school, and he started writing poetry more seriously. He went on to Harvard, and he published his first book, Some Trees (1956), when he was 29. He has been publishing ever since. His books include Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Comment

Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. Ashbery and David Kermani are neighbors in New York and they have been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Keillor gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes  it should stop you in your tracks - he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" - incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

POETS | Eliz Bishop Homes Neglected in Key West, Brazil

I was interested in reading in the Sunday Times Book Review of December 9, 2012 (p. 10), that when Ian McEwan went to Brazil he was sad to see Elizabeth Bishop's old home surrounded by urban sprawl:

... in the sitting room of Elizabeth Bishop's old home in rural Brazil. ... The street outside was once an obscure thoroughfare for donkeys and peasants. ... That same street now is filled with thunderous traffic - it fairly shakes the house. 

In a similar way, I reacted negatively to the appearance of Bishop's home in Key West. I noted my feelings in a post on the website www.boissevain.us, under "Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, 1938-46." I visited Bishop's home on January 14, 2012 (and I posted photos of the disarray here - http://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2012/01/elizabeth-bishop-in-key-west.html):

Yesterday morning my wife Alice and I went to the well-run (privately owned, with the revenue in part flowing to the benefit of Hemingway’s three sons and their families) Hemingway House. In the afternoon I went to pay my respects at the Elizabeth Bishop House, 624 White Street. Alice wisely instead went to the Butterfly Conservancy, which she loved. I was disappointed by the unkempt nature of the Bishop House. The door was wide open but no one was at home at 4 pm. The only thing I can say, hopefully, is that among the overgrown trees and plants and superannuated bikes were signs of equipment for repairs. Could someone be in the midst of making an improvement?

It's a disappointment because Bishop's reputation, like President Truman's, has soared as the years pass. The Key West Reader, edited by George Murphy, gives Elizabeth Bishop a lot of respect. He says that Bishop drew people to Key West just as John Dos Passos lured Hemingway to Key West after Dos Passos made a trip there on a whim in the 1920s after Flagler built his railway. “In the late 1930’s," says Murphy, "Elizabeth Bishop, on a fishing trip, found the island perfect for a new home and later, in turn, piqued the interest of other writers” (p. 18). The Reader includes Bishop’s poem “A Norther – Key West”, which was in her first collection of poems published in 1946.  The Reader’s editor says that the poem “is, in part, a tribute to Winslow Homer whose painting of the same name graces our cover.” Editor Murphy says Elizabeth Bishop “is considered the American poet’s poet, a genius, whose pure, inspired, and precise work has greatly influenced many other important contemporary poets. More, perhaps, than any other Key West writer, she fell in love with the tropics and, upon her departure from Key West, moved further out, to Brazil. 

Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar College [site maintained by Prof. Barbara Page] Elizabeth Bishop now stands as a major mid-twentieth century American poet, whose influence has been felt among several subsequent generations of poets. Highly regarded by critics such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, her rising reputation rests on the admiration of poets, including, among the Americans, James Merrill, John Ashbery and Jorie Graham, and, among world poets, Nobelists Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. Her place in the canon of American poetry is secure. 
At her death in 1979, Bishop's place among poets was less certain. True, she had won many prizes: the Pulitzer, two Guggenheims, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and Brazil's Order of Rio Branco. ...  But the work came slowly. Bishop's first book of poems, North & South, appeared in 1946; the second,Poems (including North & South and A Cold Spring), in 1955; the third, Questions of Travel, in 1965, and the last, Geography III, in 1976. Although her poems appeared periodically in The New Yorker, in her lifetime Bishop was overshadowed by more prolific and public contemporaries, even though they held her in high esteem, as, in Ashbery's words, “a writer's writer's writer.” After a brief time in San Francisco, Bishop moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, invited by Robert Lowell to teach his courses at Harvard while he was on leave. 
[Robert Lowell was an honorary fellow of Quincy House at Harvard starting when it was created in 1959. I was at student residing at Quincy House during 1959-1962 and got to talk with Lowell over at least one meal in the Quincy House Dining Room, one of the luxuries of being an undergraduate there. Another poet I met in this way was W. H. Auden, the only person besides Edna St. Vincent Millay who made a living at poetry in the 20th Century, according to one source. Lowell, who was teaching at Boston University, where one of his students was Sylvia Plath, told me he was disappointed he hadn’t ever been offered a teaching position at Harvard, where he spent the first two years of his college career before going to Kenyon College. I told some faculty at Quincy House about this and maybe had a tiny part - doubtless he made the same complaint to other people - in the offer being made, to the benefit of Elizabeth Bishop! In 1967 Lowell was deemed by Time Magazine to be one of the greatest poets of his generation; Elizabeth Bishop was one of the few included in this designation. In 1972 Lowell married a Brit and moved to Britain. - JTM] 
Elizabeth Bishop: The Poetry Foundation  During her lifetime, poet Elizabeth Bishop was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, her reputation has grown. Her time at Vassar was very important. There she met Marianne Moore, Mary McCarthy and others. In 1938, she moved to Key West, where she wrote many of the poems that eventually were collected in her debut (1946) Pulitzer Prize-winning North and South. In 1944 she left Key West, and for fourteen years she lived in Brazil, where she and her lover, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares, became a curiosity in the town of Pétropolis.  Larry Rohter in the New York Times, has referred to her as "one of the most important American poets" of the twentieth century. 
THE ALCHEMIST'S KITCHEN: Elizabeth Bishop in Key West. Feb 7, 2011 [100th anniversary of Bishop’s birthday - JTM] –  Elizabeth Bishop first came to Key West in the 1930s. She lived in [a] nineteenth-century clapboard eyebrow house at 624 White Street off and on from 1938 to 1946. In a letter to Marianne Moore she wrote: “It is very nice here; I wish so much that you and your mother could come here sometime, I am so sure you would like it. The sea is so beautiful– all spotted and striped, from dark black-blue to what my aunt calls ‘lettuce’ green.” Key West is the site of a wonderful writers' conference: Key West Literary Seminars each January. There was a session on Bishop at AWP. 
Wendy Call Comment: Visited house [that Bishop] bought in 1938. [She] lived there with her lover [Louisa Crane] for several years. She did not just live and write on this block of White Street, she observed it deeply. She painted the Old Armory that now houses TSKW. For the last two weeks, I've been Writer in Residence at The Studios of Key West (TSKW), [teaching] a two-day workshop to a half-dozen Key West writers [at] the lovely Mango Tree House [close to the Bishop house].Bishop left the island in 1944 and headed south to Brazil. In [a] poetry workshop I took, more than a decade ago, the brilliant and generous Mark Doty looked at my terrible poems and said, "Study Elizabeth Bishop." In the first writing class I ever taught, in the fall of 2006, we read and savored "The Fish" -- sans the final three lines. I asked my students to come up with their own final three lines, before we looked at the trio that Bishop had created. I was struck by how close my students' endings were to Bishop's. Half of them had Bishop tossing the fish back, as she actually did in the poem. The sign of perfect craftswomanship, I think. [M]any of my poet-friends worship "One Art." [Wendy Call site has links to the poems.]Elizabeth Bishop in Key West from "The Queerest Places" Mar 6, 2009 – Key West, Fla. Elizabeth Bishop home 624 White Street. Poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was born into a wealthy family from Worcester, Mass. After her graduation from Vassar, she used a family inheritance to live a nomadic life in New York City, Europe, Florida, and other places. In 1938, she and her lover at the time, Louise Crane, purchased a house in Key West. Bishop lived at this residence off and on for the next nine years, first with Crane, then with a subsequent lover, Marjorie Stevens. In letters to friends, Bishop described her island home this way: “It is very well made, with slightly arched beams so that it looks either like a ship’s cabin or a freight car.” The house was located right on the beach and was to Bishop “perfectly beautiful…inside and out.” Bishop’s first volume of poems, North and South, was published during the time she lived in Key West.  It may sound idyllic, but Bishop battled alcoholism throughout her adult life, and the relationship with Stevens did not last. After they broke up, Bishop sold the Key West house and returned to an itinerant life, eventually being hospitalized for both depression and alcohol-related problems. In 1951, with the help of her mentor, Marianne Moore, Bishop secured a fellowship from Bryn Mawr College that enabled her to travel around the world. 
But Bishop never got farther than Brazil, where she met the wealthy Lota de Macedo Soares, who became her lover and tried to nurture her away from alcoholism. Bishop kept postponing her return to the States, until her stay in Brazil had lengthened to 16 years. At her home, Lota built a studio for Bishop that was separate from the house and had a stream running beside it. In that peaceful setting, Bishop was very productive and composed some of her greatest poems. But Bishop eventually returned to the United States after Lota committed suicide in 1967 and her own alcoholism worsened. Elizabeth Bishop on Wikipedia Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia. In 1938, Bishop purchased a house with Crane at 624 White Street in Key West, FL.