[APPLAUSE]
JOHN ASHBERY: Well you're invited to ask any questions
you might feel were appropriate or inappropriate.
Yes?
SPEAKER 1: Mr. Ashbery, first of all
I'd like to apologize for the [INAUDIBLE] of Keats.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE]
ASHBERY: I didn't know till I got here.
SPEAKER 1: --turn your attention to events
that occurred in the war.
I know that art has had a big influence
on your life and your writing.
And I was wondering if you feel the same way about cinema?
And if so, maybe you could reflect
on contemporary cinema with [INAUDIBLE] effect
on your work?
ASHBERY: Well, it probably has had
more of an effect than visual art
although I've been an art critic and even a wannabe painter
when I was a child.
I don't think that I've gotten as much input or inspiration
from artists, from other things, music and movies being
one of them.
And there's a difference between the artists
of contemporary film who I feel an affinity towards and just
old run of the mill B movies that
are like some childhood memory that I keep seeing on TV.
Of the filmmakers of the now or recent past,
I think Godard is certainly an important influence and Ozu.
My favorite probably is Eric Rohmer right now.
Although I've just really gotten around
to appreciating him in the last few years.
Although I've seen his movies for a longer time than that.
These are mostly non-American directors.
I like American films very much but I
can't think of a director who per se
who has made a deep impression on me
like you know John Ford or somebody like that.
I-- they haven't particularly.
But much of it is involved first with a sense of the past.
And I have a vast collection of old B-movies
that I have taped at the wee hours of the night.
And it's as though I was always trying to find something
that I missed a long time ago.
And in fact, when I was a kid my parents were very strict
and didn't allow me to go to the movies very much,
except Shirley Temple movies which they thought
would have a beneficial effect.
Also we lived out in the country and it
was rather difficult for them-- for me to get back and forth
from the nearest movie theater.
And so that's one thing that keeps me going back to cinema.
And the other is in the case of people
as like Ozu or Godard which I just
mentioned, the freedom which they have to suddenly stop
things and you're in a different place
without exactly knowing how you got there.
The-- well, I like David Lynch's movies
a lot too for that reason that you're in this world
and you can't say what it means or how you got there
but it's affecting you.
And this seems to replicate life for me.
I don't know if you had any more specific--
SPEAKER 1: Thank you.
I would just like to mention Lynch.
I wonder what you thought about Lynch's work
and particularly how he treats violence?
It's something that-- it's hard for me to say.
I don't really find it in your work in the way
that I find it in contemporary cinema.
I don't know [INAUDIBLE].
ASHBERY: Well I'll often respond to work
that doesn't really resemble my own or what I would like to do.
And I don't see violence in my work.
You're right.
But I actually like Twin Peaks better
than any of the movies of his that I've seen.
And it's-- I don't know why.
It's sort of like--
it's like reading Proust for me.
That may sound a little weird but I
have that feeling of suddenly being absorbed in something
that I have no wish to get out of
but couldn't possibly get out of I did want to.
Great art can produce in one.
SPEAKER 2: I would just like to go back [INAUDIBLE] If you
could say something about your relation
or not related to The Tennis Court Oath,
the sense of a broken system, that's
the one we'll be able to see without abbreviation
[INAUDIBLE].
ASHBERY: [LAUGHS] Yes, it's true that the Language poets think
that's my only worthwhile book, I've been told.
That book was written under strange circumstances.
It really wasn't written as a book in fact.
After my first collection was published in the Yale series--
in fact before it was published I went to France
on a Fulbright scholarship and I ended up
staying there for 10 years during which I was pretty much
out of touch with American poetry,
not because I wanted to be but because you simply
couldn't find it there.
And my friends didn't write to me very much or so
it seemed, sending me their works and commenting on mine.
So I don't know.
I felt cut off from the American language,
the American vernacular which has a great role in my poetry
I think.
And also the book didn't seem to have any success whatever.
There are only a few reviews most of them
negative except for the one that my friend Frank O'Hara gave it.
And of course that didn't count for me.
And so I thought, well probably I'll never get another book.
No one will ever publish another book of my poetry.
And if I want to go on writing I'll
have to do it because I want to, not because somebody else is
going to read it and enjoy it.
And I was rather tired with the--
or I feel I reached the end of a certain preliminary stage
in my writing at that time and wanted to try something new
but I didn't know what.
And so I just did a lot of experiments,
sort of a lot of them involving collage
or approaches similar to the cut ups
that Burroughs and Corso were doing at that time.
Although I wasn't aware of them at that time.
And all I knew was I wanted to do something
other than what I had been doing but I
didn't know what that was.
So I produce a lot of kind of unsuccessful experiments
and then suddenly had an opportunity
to get another book published.
Or at any rate, someone--
judge of the Wesleyan series wrote me strongly,
hinting that I had a good chance of getting
a book published there if I sent my works in right away.
So I sent in just whatever I happen to have around.
And it was that and it did come out.
And a lot of it is not very satisfying to me
now, although some of it is.
I think I actually succeeded in moving
into a sort of next style in some of the poems in the book.
But for some reason they're the earlier ones
that I kind of after a few attempts
that which satisfied me, I then kind of,
for reason I can't remember or didn't know perhaps,
dropped that style of writing and went on into much more
dubious experimentation.
But, as I say, there are a few people
who seem to think that seem to sort of like that.
I'd say I like about 2/3 of the book.
But every book I've found has, once it published, are things
you wish you'd left out and even though they look fine even
when you get proofs for the book at some later point
after it's out, they become irritating to you.
And in this case, it was--
there were more irritating ones than usual.
SPEAKER 3: Do you feel that some or much of your work,
as you said, is a reaction to or of [INAUDIBLE]??
ASHBERY: I think that probably that's
the way I started out originally when I first
began writing poetry in the '40s, when poetry
was pretty academic and stodgy.
And I kept trying to track down the few poets who weren't.
And yes, there was always a kind of an anti-academic impulse
that I felt there.
I think though that there are-- there
were a lot of poets, interesting poets of the '30s and '40s
in America whose work is still forgotten today
and who should be looked at again.
If I ever had time, which I probably won't, I
would try to make an anthology of some of these people
who were considered pretty important at the time I was
first reading modern poetry.
And now their names would mean very little to any of you.
SPEAKER 4: [INAUDIBLE]
ASHBERY: I suppose you mean the long poem called "Litany"
that's in two separate columns?
SPEAKER 4: Yes.
ASHBERY: I don't know.
I'm always trying to think of something
that I haven't done yet.
And often it can--
often it can be something very rudimentary or unpromising.
But the fact that I haven't done it yet
makes me want to try and do it and see what will happen.
And I don't know exactly how I started doing that.
I was doing it for--
writing it for a while before I was actually aware
that I was doing so.
And looking back, I can see probably influences.
One is-- well the fact that we're so frequently
in a room or a situation where you're
trying to overhear two conversations at once.
And I thought, what does this mean or rather
what does what we hear of it all mean?
Can it be possible that this is a different kind
of meaning than just sitting listening to somebody talk?
Probably not because we never actually do that either.
We're always wandering off into our own thoughts.
Then I heard a work by Elliott Carter,
his duo for cello and piano, shortly
before I started writing it.
And although I didn't--
I wasn't aware of it until after I'd written the poem,
I think this was probably one of the things that got me started.
There was-- the work has a cellist on one,
or at least the premiere that I heard,
on one end of the rather large stage
and the pianist is at the other end.
So there is a kind of argument between these two entities
who are quite distant from each other.
And the-- actually it's for violin, I think, and piano.
The violin of course being rather an unequal adversary
for the piano which is so much-- has such a much stronger sound.
And yet it frequently did seem to get the upper hand.
And this kind of argument that went on between them
I find, and continue to find, very interesting.
And Carter's work much of--
it's all really very much like that.
There are-- the instruments seem to be voices that
are talking with each other, or ignoring each other,
or in unison or they're almost personified.
And another thing that some film buff of my acquaintance
pointed out to me that I think is true,
although I hadn't been aware of it
until he said so, was that part of the film
The Chelsea Girls by Andy Warhol, where there are two--
there's a split screen and two completely different monologues
happening in each part of the screen.
And I don't know, there might be other examples as well.
But the point, I guess, is that this idea you
have two parallel discourses that
don't meet but somehow inflect each other just
by being there together strikes some kind of a chord in me
that I want to listen to.
I'm not exactly sure why.
SPEAKER 5: In your poem "The Ice Storm," [INAUDIBLE]??
ASHBERY: "The Ice Storm?"
SPEAKER 5: Yes.
ASHBERY: No, I wrote it in paragraphs.
Also, well in the case of "Litany,"
people have asked me how I wrote that.
What I did was I wrote the left hand side of the page,
the column on the left, and the column on the right,
and then went on to the next page,
rather than writing one and then going back to the beginning.
People often want to know that.
So I thought I'd mention it.
That was a kind of prose poem which I've heard with--
an idea that I've flirted with from time to time.
SPEAKER 5: Would you say [INAUDIBLE]
record the story for you?
ASHBERY: No, I was thinking of it more as a kind of journal
of not of my own but of somebody else's,
some forgotten 19th century poet.
I was thinking about the poetry of John Clare at the time.
He's a poet whom I feel a lot of affinity with.
He was a 19th century farmer poet in England
who was insane for much of his life in an institution.
But you can't really tell which of his poems were written when
he was crazy in which weren't.
They--
He was born in Northamptonshire which
is mentioned at the beginning of the poem,
not that anybody's supposed to make that connection.
New York.
I write most of my poems.
SPEAKER 1: In your writing you've
written about the principle that makes works of art
so unlike what the artist intended.
How do you feel about your own work right now in that respect?
What surprises you about it [INAUDIBLE]
your own intentions?
ASHBERY: Well there's always a difference between what
we imagine we're going to be--
this poem is going to be and the way it actually comes out.
I think though that as years have
rolled by that my poems are probably closer
to my original intention.
Although my original intention is something very vague,
that I would be very hard put to talk about or define,
which I suppose is probably true of any poet or any artist.
But I feel more at ease writing now
than I did when I was young, just I suppose because I've
been doing it so long.
And it becomes a kind of skill that you eventually
acquire if you keep at it.
Although I know poets my age wouldn't
agree with this, who find that it doesn't get easier
as time goes by, perhaps even more difficult.
SPEAKER 6: Yeah.
Tell us your-- what you see as forthcoming
and [INAUDIBLE] seems to be a certain [INAUDIBLE] difference
[INAUDIBLE] meter from shorter poems.
And I'm wondering if they also make different demands on you
as you find yourself changing the [INAUDIBLE]
before [INAUDIBLE] or adapting a stronger narrative structure
as some of the other books by younger contemporary poets that
are coming out?
Yeah.
ASHBERY: Well unfortunately it doesn't
have any narrative structure.
It's just like my other poems except it's 134 pages long.
[LAUGHTER]
I certainly have never written as much in a short--
well not a short period, about six months actually.
But I've never written as much in a six-month period
as I did on this.
I have no idea what the reception will be
or whether anybody will ever read it even.
It's a completely sort of stream of consciousness I suppose.
Probably that could be said of all of my poetry.
Although it usually seems to apply to characters in novels,
like Molly Bloom, rather than the author.
But there are kind of clusters of ideas that occasionally
recur, I would say.
There's a-- I don't know.
There are thoughts-- there's things about death,
and aging, and loss.
These are not exactly new hot topics.
But what can I say?
They're there.
I wrote it--
I often take people's suggestions.
And I have an artist friend who asked me
what I'd been writing lately.
And I said I've been writing some short poems that I
didn't really like very much.
And he said, why don't you write a 100-page poem
and write it about your mother?
Because my mother had died shortly before that.
So I actually did this in a way.
Although there's very little in it about my mother.
Nevertheless it occurs in a few places
and maybe kind of an underpinning in the poem
as well as a dissolving relationship, which
I was writing about at the time, which then stopped dissolving.
Perhaps this is a result of the poem
but I kind of see it as a graph of floating things that
are hard to seize.
And that's the definition.
I didn't really know what a flowchart was for quite a while
after I started after I chose that as the title.
And I looked it up in the dictionary
and said it's a graph or a chart indicating
the direction of the operation of work
as in a factory or the charting of a complicated activity.
And so I suppose in that case this is a complicated activity.
I don't think I was ever aware of the word
until I happened to be listening to the Ollie North
testimony on TV.
And it mentioned that he'd used a lot of flowcharts
while explaining his activities to people
he was trying to convince in government to go ahead and let
them do whatever it was he did.
You mentioned being in France for 10 years.
Would you talk for a few minutes about your experience
of coming back to the States and finding--
how does American poetry after that [INAUDIBLE]??
Well actually I came back for a visit after a five year period
of not having come back because I didn't have enough money
to get back and go back.
My parents would have sent me money
to come home but not money to return.
So when I came back I discovered to my surprise
that people were reading my poetry
and that there was, not only mine,
but that there was a tremendous upsurge of activity in poetry
which there had not been when I--
a mere five years before.
I left around the time that the beat
started giving poetry readings.
But at that time, younger writers
didn't give readings the way they have--
the way that has become very common.
There were only a few readings that at the, say, at the YMHA
in New York where Eliot and Auden and people
like that would read.
But these were not a very widely thing that happened very much.
And so when I came back someone asked
me to give a poetry reading.
And I was completely amazed.
And then I noticed that at that same night
there were about a dozen other poetry readings in New York
and that this happened all the time.
So that I came back to find not only
that there was a receptiveness to my poetry
but to poetry in general, which hadn't been there before.
So this was a pleasant surprise.
And also by that time the first poets who got attention
were the Beat Generation who became very visible promoters
of their poetry.
But when the first novelty of that had worn off,
it seemed that then people had begun
looking in for other kinds of poetry as well.
So that there is a very broad range of interest
of people who were actively interested
in different kinds of poetry.
And I just had never thought this was
something that could happen.
And it was mainly that I think that was very different.
And then I lived abroad for another five years.
But I was then more aware of developments here
that were really not very much happening in France,
or in Europe, or in England at that time compared
to what was--
America was really the place I think
where new poetry got started.
It's different now.
There are other things happening in--
SPEAKER 7: You said that the poetry [INAUDIBLE]
ASHBERY: What can I say about what?
SPEAKER 7: [INAUDIBLE].
ASHBERY: Well I don't know.
There's this-- I write these poems
and then I can't imagine who was thinking like that
or how they came out that way.
And I don't have a strong feeling of a persona of my own.
It seems as though I feel as though I were a microphone that
was being grabbed by various people and spoken through.
I was-- in fact, I just read a couple of days ago, someone,
a poet--
a painter, I think, who said that he had--
Yeah.
It was an English painter, Michael Craig-Martin,
who studied painting in America and said
that he had once gone to hear Eliot
read his poems in New York.
And somebody asked him about the persona of Prufrock.
And he said that he had absolutely no idea
what this poem meant, or what he was
thinking about when he wrote it, or how
it came out the way it did.
It would seem totally strange to him.
And he couldn't account for any of it.
And I was very glad to see there is a distinguished
precedent for me.
SPEAKER 8: [INAUDIBLE]
ASHBERY: I don't know.
I'm sometimes appalled by the person who wrote it.
And yes, I probably would like to know him
or her better just so that I would
know who I was dealing with.
SPEAKER 8: [INAUDIBLE]
ASHBERY: Well as I've gotten older I've done less and less.
When I was young I used to labor over poems endlessly.
And as I say, I think in my case it's kind of a sort of knack
that you develop as you go along.
And as time has gone by I've revised less and less.
Although there are still times when I feel that's necessary.
But mostly now I think if I write something
that seems unsatisfactory I'd rather
scrap it and write something else instead,
maybe saving a few goodies here and there.
SPEAKER 9: Do you there's a postmodern
body of fiction in maybe the postmodern [INAUDIBLE]..
ASHBERY: Well in fiction there is as I understand it.
I mean people like Raymond Carver, and Al Barthelme,
and other kind of sort of absurdist or existential
writers which we would have called them a generation ago
or labeled postmodern.
I don't know exactly what this means in the case of poetry.
I still think modernism is alive and well
and should keep on going.
SPEAKER 9: Yeah.
That's what I mean.
Why do you feel that if a painting [INAUDIBLE]
a modernism rather than something
called postmodern world.
It doesn't seem to [INAUDIBLE] If there
isn't an equivalent in poetry [INAUDIBLE]
why do you think that is?
ASHBERY: I don't--
I'm not really sure but I have a feeling
that it's a term that's been invented by critics just
to kind of create some ruckus.
I can tell in architecture what postmodernism means.
It means the domes and columns and things
like that look like an old building.
I don't think that my poetry, to take that as an example,
looks like an old building or is a kind of reconstruction
of something that has gone to--
that has happened in the past and is a reaction to modernism,
if by modernism you're talking about Stevens, Pound, Moore, et
cetera, et cetera.
I think there's-- today there's sort of a poetry that's new
formalism, which would sort of like to nuke us back to the age
of Longfellow and have everybody rewriting "The Courtship
of Miles Standish" as far as I can see.
But I don't see anything revolutionary or evolutionary
about that.
It's the same kind of boring academic poetry
that's always been there and will probably never go away.
So I-- So it's a question I just don't
feel capable of dealing with.
I've not looked into it enough to know.
SPEAKER 10: [INAUDIBLE] did you read the Cynthia Ozick review--
biography of T.S. Eliot in the article--
ASHBERY: No.
SPEAKER 11: What is your sense of the [INAUDIBLE]??
ASHBERY: Well I feel about a lot of it the way
Harold Bloom feels about The Tennis Court Oath.
I like a lot of it but it's gone farther than I would care to go
and therefore I like it even more.
I feel that the burden has been taken off of my shoulders.
I really don't think that--
I really think that you can stretch
the way in which poetry means almost to the breaking point.
But I don't think you can go beyond that as so many
of the Language poets have done, as some of them have done.
But at the same time, again this is a sort of catchall term
that includes a lot of very different people the same way
I always felt that the New York School was
a very unsatisfactory term that really didn't mean anything
in terms of the people, the individual people in it.
And I think that's true of Language poetry too.
And perhaps even more so because there's so much--
in the first place, New York School
was a label that was sort of attached to me and other poets
in the group after the fact.
We didn't sort of set out to found a new movement.
Whereas that the Language poets definitely have done this
and are always issuing manifestos,
and anathemas, and excommunications to the point
where it's really difficult to know what they're talking
about when they use the term.
But people-- certain poets in it like Clark Coolidge,
Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, who have--
There are quite a few that I like, now that I think of it.
But who have not reduced language
to mere sort of decorative shapes
which seems to be what the agenda is
for some of the more extremist.
SPEAKER 11: [INAUDIBLE]
ASHBERY: Yeah.
SPEAKER 11: [INAUDIBLE]
ASHBERY: Yeah, I think they've gone beyond that and want to.
I'd rather not name names but--
SPEAKER 12: [INAUDIBLE]
ASHBERY: Yeah.
Yeah, well I think that probably most artists
would agree to that.
I can think of very few who enjoy having
working from under a label.
But on the other hand, readers and audiences
seem to find this much easier to deal with.
And so it will probably go on happening.
And if they feel that way, then why not?
I don't think it's--
I just don't find it useful for somebody who
is trying to create something.
It's something that gets added on after the fact.
SPEAKER 13: You talked about your poetry before as a kind
microphone where the voice is, rather than [INAUDIBLE]..
It seems like the voices coming through the microphone
get kind of weirdly distorted in a way.
And I was just wondering if [INAUDIBLE] Wordsworth
or Whitman or Eliot or Walden seem
[INAUDIBLE] in your poetry in very strange ways.
And I wanted to know if you could--
If you want to pick or you don't want to pick, pick one of them
and say something about what you like and what you don't like
[INAUDIBLE].
ASHBERY: Well I don't know I agree about Eliot.
I don't see very many traces of his voice in mine.
Whitman perhaps.
There have been times when I've been felt
or felt myself to be influenced by him, especially in the poems
that I've written which have very long lines in them which
was what I discovered in him.
I've often felt that Whitman is a kind of misunderstood poet
in the sense that we tend to think
of him as this sort of kind of bumpkin
who utters his barbaric yawp all the time,
and always has something to say on every subject,
and doesn't know when to stop.
But that's to putting the worst case upon it, I guess.
But I always find his work very beautifully crafted.
And every word seems to count in his lines.
In other words, this sort of kind
of afflatus idea of his poetry I don't feel is there.
At any rate it's not what's important to me.
I think there's a great deal going
on in the poetry besides the proclaimed message of reaching
out to humanity which is of course, nothing
wrong with that.
But there are other things which make it even more
effective at what it's doing.
And I think the writing as opposed
to the content in Whitman is something
that I find very inspiring.
And I have no quarrel with the content
either but I find they reinforce each other in ways
that always surprise me.
Yes?
SPEAKER 14: Is there something that you [INAUDIBLE]
your perception of your relationship [INAUDIBLE]
poetry [INAUDIBLE] like at the [INAUDIBLE]
and the possibility of expression
and the need to [INAUDIBLE]?
ASHBERY: Well this is something I've often been asked about
and I've never really been able to come up
with an answer that's very satisfying to me at any rate.
The only thing that occurs to me is that, as I say, I did
paint up until I was about 18.
And I had started out wanting to be a painter from my earliest
childhood.
And sometimes it seems to me in writing
that I have almost a painter's instinct about using words.