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 | Mar. 30–Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh 1853-1890

This day was born in 1853, in Zundert, the Netherlands, Vincent Van Gogh.

His work was beginning to be acknowledged by art critics in Holland when he committed suicide at the age of 37.

His brother Theo was an art dealer, and for years sent money to Vincent in return for the paintings that Vincent gave him.

Garrison Keillor quotes from one of Vincent's letters:

How much sadness there is in life. The right thing is to work.

In another letter, two days before he died, Vincent wrote:

I feel a failure. That's it as far as I'm concerned - I feel that this is the destiny that I accept, that will never change.

I have posted previously challenging the assertion that Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting in his life. His financial arrangement with his brother was not just charity – it was in large measure a professional one. Vincent painted because he was encouraged to do so by his brother, who was an expert at judging paintings.

Sometimes all it takes is one good patron to sustain the creativity of an artist.

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.

BIRTH | May 8–Edmund Wilson (Comment)

The young Edmund Wilson.

This day in 1895 was born in Red Bank, NJ, the writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson. He was an editor in the 1920s at Vanity Fair and The New Republic, and later a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Garrison Keillor provides the following samples of Wilson's acerbic attacks on writers he didn't like:

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg. 

[Another writer's] style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Wilson called "juvenile trash" and Kay Boyle's Avalanche "a piece of pure rubbish." In 1959, he wrote to Lionel Trilling:

In my opinion, [Robert] Frost is partly a dreadful old fraud and one of the most relentless self-promoters in the history of American literature.

He said that his friend and fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald

has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given a desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.

Comment (JT Marlin):

Wilson's To the Finland Station, which I had to study for an exam at Harvard, was a good read. While I was an undergraduate, I wrote Wilson a letter and then called on him to try to persuade him to speak to a group of students. He was sitting on a sofa with Mary McCarthy, drinks in their hands, in their ancient two-story house in Cambridge. He said–"Wait a second"–and he made his way to the upstairs floor. There were sounds of rummaging around, and he returned downstairs with a card that said, at some length:

Mr. Edmund Wilson does not write introductions to books, read manuscripts, give speeches etc. etc.

It was neatly printed on a postcard flyer. Having established the principle, he then said he would be glad to have a meal with a group of us, which was a fine prize for my aggressiveness.

I did not know then, nor did he, that the woman he was once passionate about, Edna St. Vincent Millay, was my great-aunt. She married my mother's uncle. In her letters, she refers to him affectionately as "Bunny". He was mad for her body and her lyric poetry. Maybe the first influenced the second. She was grateful for his interest in her poetry but unflattering about his desirability as a lover. When she married, in 1923, it was a blow for him.

In his book on the 1920s, he expresses disappointment that she would marry someone he described as  a "Dutch importer". It was an accurate enough description, but he could have added "successful Dutch importer" which has a slightly more interesting ring to it. Boissevain & Company had a fleet of ships operating between Java and New York City delivering coffee.

Furthermore, Eugen Boissevain had already won over Inez Milholland and had established his credentials as a ladies' man twice over. Other men gave Eugen more credit. William Marconi, inventor of the radio and finance for several months to Inez, told Eugen that Inez needed a stronger man, someone like him. Max Eastman, who fancied both Inez and Edna, gave an admiring appraisal of Eugen Boissevain in his book Great Companions, identifying in Eugen the qualities that made him appealing.

Having lost his first wife to an illness, Eugen was totally dedicated to Edna's well-being. She once regretted not having their satin sheets at their home in Austerlitz. So he got in his car and drove to New York City to get them...

Edna herself paid the ultimate tribute to her husband after he died in 1949, a year before she did. She wrote: "The only thing I ever did for you was survive you. But that was much."

St. Valentine

Garrison Keillor in his daily birthday list says:

Today is Valentine's Day, the day on which we celebrate love, especially romantic love. The holiday was named after an early Christian priest, St. Valentine [link to the History Today site] who was martyred on February 14 in 269 A.D. The tradition of exchanging love notes on Valentine's Day originates from the martyr Valentine himself. The legend maintains that due to a shortage of enlistments, Emperor Claudius II forbade single men to get married in an effort to bolster his struggling army. Seeing this act as a grave injustice, Valentine performed clandestine wedding rituals in defiance of the emperor. Valentine was discovered, imprisoned, and sentenced to death by beheading. While awaiting his fate in his cell, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with the daughter of a prison guard, who would come and visit him. On the day of his death, Valentine left a note for the young woman professing his undying devotion signed "Love from your Valentine".

This is a wonderful story. It would be murderous to kill it  because of lack of evidence sufficient to convince 21st-century sceptics. What do you want after 1,744 years?  

The saint was taken off the Catholic calendar in 1969! You go to the Catholic encyclopedia it waffles around about there being three different Valentines and implies that maybe they are all apocryphal. Wikipedia explains:

Several differing martyrologies have been added to later hagiographies that are unreliable. For these reasons this liturgical commemoration was not kept in the Catholic calendar of saints for universal liturgical veneration as revised in 1969. 

Not good enough! Such a good story deserves to be retold and passed on as a matter of  faith. 

Meanwhile there is still hope for rehabilitating the saint:

The Martyr Valentinus who died on the 14th of February on the Via Flaminia close to the Milvian bridge in Rome" still remains in the list of officially recognized saints for local veneration. Saint Valentine's Church in Rome, built in 1960 for the needs of the Olympic Village, continues as a modern, well-visited parish church.

19th Amendment Passed Congress in 1919

Garrison Keillor's excellent daily email announces today (June 4) that "On this date in 1919, the 19th Amendment passed the Senate and gave American women the right to vote." Actually, the right to vote wasn't obtained for another year and three months, when Tennessee was the last required state to ratify the 19th Amendment, in August 1920. Keillor's summary is well-drafted:

Susan B. Anthony drafted the original amendment, with the help of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and it was first formally introduced in 1878. It sat in committee for nine years before it went before the Senate in 1887 and was voted down. Over the next decades, several individual states approved women's voting rights, but a Constitutional amendment wasn't considered again until 1914. It was repeatedly defeated, and an anti-suffrage movement campaigned against it, claiming that it was unfeminine for women to venture outside their natural domestic sphere. But in 1918, Woodrow Wilson threw his support behind the suffrage movement. Women had entered the workforce in large numbers during World War I, and in a speech that President Wilson gave in September 1918, he said: "We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of right?" The amendment passed both Houses of Congress the following May.

The question that Keillor does not address is: Why did Wilson endorse the suffrage amendment in 1918? He opposed it in the election of 1916. The suffragists said that year: "He kept out og war, and he kept us out of suffrage." Wilson reversed himself in 1917 on the war, and in 1918 on suffrage. The reason for Wilson's reversal was ostensibly the partnership of women in the war effort. But a more plausible reason is that public opinion had become solidly pro-suffragist because of the brutal treatment of women in the prisons to which they were taken and force-fed after they took up a silent vigil in front of the White House. This vigil in turn was started immediately after Wilson insulted a delegation of women in January 1917 when they came with 250 memorials from women's groups around the country using Inez Milholland Boissevain's death to argue that the President should revisit his opposition to suffrage. More on Inez Milholland at www.boissevain.us.