When I met John Ashbery in 2005, he seemed to have difficulty remembering his time in 1950s New York with fellow poets Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, which is what the roughly two dozen people in the university seminar room mostly wanted to talk about. They had read about those early days spent in artists’ studios sipping martinis or at the Cedar Tavern arguing about poetry while Jackson Pollock got drunk. They had read the work, too—work that was announced as “the new American poetry” in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology by the same name and that, along with that of poets from San Francisco and Black Mountain, promised freedom from old concerns about concision and coherence.
The era had the aura of myth, especially for precocious middle-class kids from Midwestern suburbs, and here was one of only two surviving members of the New York school of poets—which included Barbara Guest and James Schuyler in addition to O’Hara, Koch, and Ashbery—unable or simply unwilling to say much about it, foxing his way out of an answer. Guest died in 2006. On September 3, 2017, Ashbery joined her at the age of 90.
Ashbery, of course, had been foxing his whole life. Born in 1927, he was raised on a fruit farm in western New York near Lake Ontario. He disliked rural life, was uninterested in sports, and got along poorly with his father, who had a short temper. He spent much of his time reading books at his grandparents’ house near Rochester, where his grandfather taught physics at the university. With the help of a neighbor who apparently recognized his promise, he attended Deerfield Academy and went on to study at Harvard, graduating cum laude in 1949.
It was at Harvard that Ashbery met O’Hara and Koch, who shared his interest in surrealism, atonality in music, and avant-garde theater. In 1952, he attended a performance of John Cage’s Music of Changes and was inspired. “It was just arbitrary bangs on the piano over quite a long period of time,” he told Michael H. Miller in the Observer in 2013. “I had been in a drought with my writing. I felt I hadn’t written anything good in almost a year. It really gave me ideas about how to write poetry again.”
But there was really only one idea: to use seemingly arbitrary fragments of varying diction to create poems that lacked any controlling image or narrative. Over 30 volumes of verse, several volumes of translations, and a handful of plays, Ashbery would single-mindedly explore the surface of language.
In 1954, W. H. Auden was unable to pick a winner for the Yale Series of Younger Poets; none of the manuscripts he reviewed that year seemed worthy of the prize. For the next year’s competition, he picked Ashbery’s poems—but apparently only begrudgingly. Some of the editors involved in the competition, who had eliminated Ashbery’s submission, were outraged by the selection, and Auden wrote an ambivalent foreword warning Ashbery of the “problem” of manufacturing “calculated oddities.” Other than a defensive review of Some Trees in Poetry in 1957 by Ashbery’s friend O’Hara, the response to the volume was universally negative. “I could make very little headway in understanding Mr. John Ashbery’s Some Trees,” wrote William Arrowsmith in the Hudson Review. “Apart from two or three poems . . . I have no idea most of the time what Mr. Ashbery is talking about . . . beyond the communication of an intolerable vagueness that looks as if it was meant for precision.” This judgment was typical.
But for Ashbery it was contemporary poetry that was odd and imprecise. He would go on to write poems that were even more disconnected. “My poetry,” he once remarked, “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.”
He would move to Paris in 1955 and remain there for a decade, publishing The Tennis Court Oath in 1962 and Rivers and Mountains in 1966. His break would come with the publication in 1975 of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. It seems Ashbery had not changed, but literary tastes had: The book won all three of America’s most prestigious literary prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The volume, which takes its title from the painting by Parmigianino, shows Ashbery’s preoccupation with diction and syntax over meaning.
The disjunction of life could be, in Ashbery’s hands, corny, terrifying, or beautiful—or simply a fact that, like all facts, becomes more interesting and harder to pin down the longer one thinks about it. “All things are palpable, none are known,” he writes in “Poem in Three Parts”:
In later volumes, Ashbery would allow himself a little more fun. In “A Held Thing,” for example, from And the Stars Were Shining (1994), he pokes a few good-humored holes in “poetic” diction and the preoccupation with clarity:
Yet our attempts to make sense of experience were never occasions for derision for Ashbery. William Logan writes that he transformed “insouciant nonsense into a charming anti-literary manner,” which may be putting it a little too lightly. Still, Ashbery nudges and prods, often including himself in the great—if also serious—joke of the cosmos. His eye for cracks in the surface of language and ear for the way diction and metaphor patch the surface were the result of a lifetime of practice.
Whether or not Ashbery’s work will “survive the severe judgment of time,” as his early champion Harold Bloom predicted it would, is unclear. The longing to tell stories and make sense of life (and death) may prove too powerful for even the most clever and productive poet to overcome, as those questions from university students 12 years ago, and now many obituaries of Ashbery himself, show.
Micah Mattix is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and an associate professor of English at Regent University.
