Plutzik Series: John Ashbery
Title
Plutzik Series: John Ashbery
Date
1970-04-27
Rights
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Genre
Lectures
Transcription
Introduction
There are so many special claims on our attention. It's hard to know where to begin. We might, for example, begin with his maternal grandfather, Henry Lawrence, a University of Rochester alumnus who taught here as a distinguished professor of physics from 1901 until 1934, and whose portrait hangs even now in the Faculty Club. Or we might begin with the fact that the poet himself was born in Rochester in 1927 and grew up on a farm just east along the lake near Sodus. Or we might pursue his academic and editorial careers, which have taken them through Harvard, Columbia and a Fulbright sojourn in France to his present position as an influential critic and associate editor of Art News in New York. But it is the man's poetry in which these intriguing details may play their part that we have come to encounter first hand.
And I begin and end my remarks with that. Commencing with his first book, Some Trees, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award for 1956 and continuing through three subsequent volumes, The Tennis Court or Tennis Court Oath, 1962, Rivers and Mountains, 1966, and The Double Dream of Spring, which has just appeared, John Ashbery’s poems have explored with a kind of weird modesty and imaginative landscape unlike anybody else's in modern poetry.
Ashbery country is a fantastic but hospitable place in the mind where Popeye and Swee’ Pea live among farm implements and rutabagas, where lessons are given in Coca Cola, where Arctic Honey blabs over reports causing darkness where precise mechanisms love us. Where the map of Europe shrinks around naked couples. Where, in short, anything the poet wants can happen and our workaday syntax does not break down, but rather opens up to reveal themes that are often as rich and witty as they are undeniably strange.
Mr. Ashbery has remarked that he writes poetry with a bias towards music and painting and that he often aims at, quote, “reproducing the power dreams have of persuading you that a certain event has a meaning not logically connected with it, or that there is a hidden relation between disparate objects.” The powers of painting, of music, of dreams are surely felt in the best of these poems.
And if they are hidden, relations remain hidden, Mr. Ashbery His poems invite us to always to remember Goethe’s wisdom about appreciation: that it is splendid, splendid to interpret an artist's work, noble to meditate upon it, but sometimes nicest of all just to look, or in this case, to listen to Mr. John Ashbery.
John Asbery:
I'll read for about 50 minutes, starting with poems from the earliest of these books, Some Trees and working through to the most recent one, The Double Dream of Spring, published this year. That there's another reason for doing this besides the fact that it's chronological order. The fact is that I feel the later poems somehow rejoin the earlier ones, but I hope with a difference. The earliest poems I think are perhaps more available as far as language and diction are concerned.
Then I went into a more experimental phase during the time when I was living in France, which was ten years from 1955 to '65, during which I felt very much out of touch with modern American poetry and the modern American language, which is always a source of inspiration to me. Many of my poems take off from something I overhear in the street, for instance, and I've experimented in this way trying to get down to the essentials of language, of words, of what they meant to me.
And in many cases, these poems in the intermediate phase would be composed of isolated words and phrases with no apparent connection to each other. It was my intention eventually to put things back together and hope that they made more sense to me than they did at the time when I began this experimental period. And those poems are in somewhat in Rivers and Mountains and perhaps even more in the last book, the Double Dream of Spring.
There are so many special claims on our attention. It's hard to know where to begin. We might, for example, begin with his maternal grandfather, Henry Lawrence, a University of Rochester alumnus who taught here as a distinguished professor of physics from 1901 until 1934, and whose portrait hangs even now in the Faculty Club. Or we might begin with the fact that the poet himself was born in Rochester in 1927 and grew up on a farm just east along the lake near Sodus. Or we might pursue his academic and editorial careers, which have taken them through Harvard, Columbia and a Fulbright sojourn in France to his present position as an influential critic and associate editor of Art News in New York. But it is the man's poetry in which these intriguing details may play their part that we have come to encounter first hand.
And I begin and end my remarks with that. Commencing with his first book, Some Trees, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award for 1956 and continuing through three subsequent volumes, The Tennis Court or Tennis Court Oath, 1962, Rivers and Mountains, 1966, and The Double Dream of Spring, which has just appeared, John Ashbery’s poems have explored with a kind of weird modesty and imaginative landscape unlike anybody else's in modern poetry.
Ashbery country is a fantastic but hospitable place in the mind where Popeye and Swee’ Pea live among farm implements and rutabagas, where lessons are given in Coca Cola, where Arctic Honey blabs over reports causing darkness where precise mechanisms love us. Where the map of Europe shrinks around naked couples. Where, in short, anything the poet wants can happen and our workaday syntax does not break down, but rather opens up to reveal themes that are often as rich and witty as they are undeniably strange.
Mr. Ashbery has remarked that he writes poetry with a bias towards music and painting and that he often aims at, quote, “reproducing the power dreams have of persuading you that a certain event has a meaning not logically connected with it, or that there is a hidden relation between disparate objects.” The powers of painting, of music, of dreams are surely felt in the best of these poems.
And if they are hidden, relations remain hidden, Mr. Ashbery His poems invite us to always to remember Goethe’s wisdom about appreciation: that it is splendid, splendid to interpret an artist's work, noble to meditate upon it, but sometimes nicest of all just to look, or in this case, to listen to Mr. John Ashbery.
John Asbery:
I'll read for about 50 minutes, starting with poems from the earliest of these books, Some Trees and working through to the most recent one, The Double Dream of Spring, published this year. That there's another reason for doing this besides the fact that it's chronological order. The fact is that I feel the later poems somehow rejoin the earlier ones, but I hope with a difference. The earliest poems I think are perhaps more available as far as language and diction are concerned.
Then I went into a more experimental phase during the time when I was living in France, which was ten years from 1955 to '65, during which I felt very much out of touch with modern American poetry and the modern American language, which is always a source of inspiration to me. Many of my poems take off from something I overhear in the street, for instance, and I've experimented in this way trying to get down to the essentials of language, of words, of what they meant to me.
And in many cases, these poems in the intermediate phase would be composed of isolated words and phrases with no apparent connection to each other. It was my intention eventually to put things back together and hope that they made more sense to me than they did at the time when I began this experimental period. And those poems are in somewhat in Rivers and Mountains and perhaps even more in the last book, the Double Dream of Spring.
Files
Citation
Ashbery, John and Plutzik Reading Series, “Plutzik Series: John Ashbery,” RBSCP Exhibits, accessed April 26, 2024, https://rbscpexhibits.lib.rochester.edu/items/show/7709.