Yet I cannot escape the picture
Of my small self in that bank of flowers
John Ashbery, “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”
Regular readers of Some Flowers Soon will know that this newsletter takes all of its title and at least some of its vibe from John Ashbery’s poem “What is Poetry”. So I’m delighted to be able to use this week’s post to celebrate the appearance of a new biography of Ashbery by Jess Cotton, published this month in the Critical Lives series from Reaktion Books.
Below are Jess’s answers to some questions I asked her about the writing of the book and the disorienting humour of Ashbery’s work. Keep going to read an illuminating extract from the first chapter about the poet’s early diaries and discovery of his vocation.
Hi Jess — welcome to Some Flowers Soon! And congratulations on the publication of your new book on John Ashbery. In it, you call the last line of Ashbery’s “What is Poetry” (“It might give us — what? — some flowers soon?”) “a meditation on the uncertain role of poetry”. What is it, do you think, that made so many people feel that Ashbery fulfilled that role, gave us those flowers?
Thank you for having me! It’s a delight to be on a Substack which takes Ashbery as its patron saint.
I think from the beginning there was a sense that Ashbery was saying that poetry doesn’t have to be something stuffy and dull and formulaic, but that it could be weird and funny and also public. I think people heard lines that sounded like a cross between Rimbaud and Wallace Stevens and John Cage and Popeye and knew that something that sounded like a surrealist painting looked had to be, if not profoundly annoying and terrible, good — the real deal. And that if this was the real deal, then the real deal didn’t have to sound how you thought it sounded; that this is poetry that makes a world of its own, that creates a sense of possibility; that reminds us that we don’t have to follow “destiny’s piñata,” as Ashbery wrote in a late poem, with a never-ending sense of humour. There’s a strange mixture of ambition and modesty and comedy and seriousness in the work — and particularly in a poem titled “What is Poetry,” which unfolds as a series questions and ends, as you say, with a flower (I like to imagine the speaker popping out of a box at the end of the poem with a flower in hand — here is your reward). There are no answers here, the poet says, only a little of that fanciful dreaming that Keats once called negative capability.
I know a number of people — myself included — whose first experience of reading Ashbery was bemusement, indifference or dislike. It was only later that something clicked (I found myself haunted by this couplet: “In a far recess of summer / Monks are playing soccer”). Can you relate to this? Was there a particular poem that clicked?
Yes, absolutely — though I think the experience, at least in my case, might have felt more like intimidation and curious bewilderment than indifference or dislike, or rather I was bemused and impressed and overwhelmed by this work which I didn’t feel I had any kind of language to describe and I was kind of fascinated and a little terrified by that and somehow I decided that something I was intimidated by was worth pursuing (I’d probably these days have a little less patience, but who knows, as Ashbery says, we’re always returning to where we started out).
Yes, I think “The Picture of Little J.A.” — which is all about something clicking — does provide a primer of sorts to the Big J.A. There’s that command: “‘Aroint thee, witch’” — who speaks in this surreal, comic language? What are we to do with it? The tone is sassy — I imagine its speaker strutting around, refusing to be contained by the bounds of the poem — and I think where elsewhere the voice of Ashbery’s poems is sober and meditative, here the reader feels OK I’m up for this performance, this provocation; keep surprising me. And then we get: “Her tongue from previous ecstasy / Releases thoughts like little hats.” You feel the language — almost like a comic strip bubble — float off from the page, and I find myself pressing a little harder on my chair to check everything is still in place.
The poem I remember “clicking,” so to speak, was “Pyrography”— I think it was a recording I listened to so maybe it was all about the sound of the lines unfolding from one another; it probably also has something to do with the pace of the poem, its stage-set scenery, the historical reach of the lines which seem to give you — or at least me — whiplash: “The galloping / Wind balks at its shadow,” and then the mock official voice: “This is America calling.” And “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: the hall of mirrors in which the self dances, the Parmigianino painting, with its hand pressing up against our vision of the painter — and the poet, reflecting on himself — and where are we?
Your book makes fascinating use of Ashbery’s vast archive at Harvard. What was it like to trying to sift through all those boxes of papers for a short biography?
Most of the archival research was done before I wrote the biography as part of my PhD research. I visited the Harvard archive twice in 2017, but that was before Ashbery passed away and more material was released. Then I had a short deadline to write the biography and the pandemic happened, and I was reliant on archivists at Harvard to photograph material, so it was an assorted piecing together of different archival finds really. I think there were some interesting finds in the archive but these were often quite characteristically elusive pieces so I didn’t have a sense of this big revelation (an archivist I spoke to this summer said the eureka moment you expect to have in the archive rarely happens but pieces eventually fit into some kind of puzzle that helps pad out, expand or complicate the story you thought you knew). I think perhaps some of the more revelatory material comes from letters in other archives — from the painter Jane Freilicher’s (also at Harvard), from Frank O’Hara’s, James Schuyler’s and Joe Brainard’s — where you can locate Ashbery’s voice a little more clearly: he was a great conversationalist.
In your introduction you say: “Making things readable — even when they seem most opaque or out of reach — is central to Ashbery’s poetry, and what renders it so distinctive”. This is such an interesting idea, because it seems to turn the notion of interpretation right round: we don't interpret a poem, it interprets us. What kind of things does Ashbery make “readable” to you?
What does he make readable? I think things like dreams — like the American dream: “This honey is delicious / Though it burns the throat” (I hear that line most times when I’ve swallowed an idea or someone’s words a little too hard); things like intimacy (“I prefer ‘you’ in the plural, I want ‘you’”); things like love (“Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same”); things like living in a system it feels impossible to challenge (“I’ve tried recreation / Reading until late at night, train rides / And romance”); things like violence (“Batman came out and clubbed me. / He never did get along with my view of the universe”); and pain (“the bruise will stop by later”); of how life isn’t some big forward-marching project but a long, circular unfolding — how we keep coming back to the same point (“For time is an emulsion”), learning and failing to learn (“It all wears out. I keep telling myself this, but / I can never believe me”), caught in the same snares, driven by the same fixations. I think his poems, as they interpret us, make us feel OK with things being a bit weird, strange, a little bit uncertain, a little disorderly, and sometimes even a bit riotous. He liked (if my memory serves me right) Elizabeth Bishop’s test for a good poem: it should transform the world a little for a good 24 hours. I think he does that and allows us to see how that is done.
Ashbery was a gay man who grew up in an America where homosexuality was illegal. Early on he had to keep his sexuality secret, and critics have argued that it often features secretly in his poetry. The letter from 1970 where he jokingly refers to “Gay Pride” as “a nice name for a new brand of whipped-cream mayonnaise” seems typical of what you call his “cautious distance” from political activism, and his worry that “the gay signature of his work would overdetermine its meaning”. How, as a critic, did this inform your own readings?
At the time I started writing about Ashbery, many small moons ago (or so it seems to me), queer theory seemed to open up avenues for talking about his work in a way that released it from the ponderous, solemn tones of say Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler (who, of course, are brilliant readers in their way, if that’s your kind of thing, but whose reading always felt to me like the kind of reading that wouldn’t give a reader intimated or baffled or annoyed by the work any room to breathe). I think I emphasised the queerness because of how important it was in creating new ways to organise social life and new forms of intimacy at mid-century — and because much of Ashbery’s poetry plays with ideas of the margins, and destabilising and illicit forms of intimacy, of finding a way, especially during the Cold War period, of thinking outside of the forms of gendered and sexual life on offer. But reading the queerness of the poetry — its skewering of normative sexualities and relations — is also a way of avoiding talking about the rhetoric of the closet, which seemed to me too fixed as a way of describing Ashbery’s ambivalent approach to sexual identity — as with other forms of identity.
The last chapter of your book discusses the “zaniness” of late Ashbery — what you memorably call “the myriad wiry voices that light up his brain”. This period, starting in 1994, saw him publish over a dozen new collections, a prolific streak that only ended with his death at the age of 90 in 2017. Where should readers start with this writing? Or is the idea of a starting point — like an endpoint — something it makes fun of?
Well… I think you should start wherever you fancy, and, in fact, there might be some kind of logic in working backwards (insofar as there is any logic at all). Some of the early 2000s collections like Your Name Here, A Worldly Country and Planisphere are probably the more accessible — though if you’d like to really be dropped in the deep end you might pass go and head straight to Quick Question, Breezeway, or Commotion of the Birds — they’ve all got plenty of wordplay (“Freedom is a pin in the ass”), mishearings (“I said we were all homers not homos”), and contemporary references (“Why can’t everything stay the way / it used to be, O biggest hipster, dolor?)”. There’s also — moving back in time — Girls on the Run, which was published in 1999, and is a Rimbaudian acid trip of a poem — it’s a long poem so you can digest it in one sitting and it plays with references to the outsider artist Henry Darger so that’s quite fun — and at least gives you some kind of anchor in an otherwise turbulent poetic sea.
There are lots of American poets from the last half century who we don’t hear enough about. If you like Ashbery, who should you try next?
Ashbery was part of the band of poets that is known as the New York School — so if you’re not familiar with the work of the other four — Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler — that would be a natural place to start. The lesser known — Guest and Schuyler — are both wonderful and I think still, as people like to say, scandalously underrated. Guest is more abstract and conceptual; her poems often feel like quiet philosophical exercises (“There is no fear / in taking the first step or the second or the third”) where Schuyler has either these super skinny (“That bluet breaks / me up”) or expansive long lines, which seem to pulse through the everyday, taking everything into their orbit (“To live! So natural / and so hard”). One of my favourite things about Schuyler is the way his poems — like Ashbery — don’t simply represent the world but use the poem as a stage-set — so we see how the world isn’t something that’s out there — but is constantly being made. Ashbery once said (borrowing a line from Marianne Moore) that Schuyler wrote in the “plain American which cats and dogs can read” and who wouldn’t want poetry to be that simple and beautiful and free?
Jess Cotton
John Ashbery (Reaktion Books, 2023)
from Chapter 1, “‘Living on the Edge of a Live Volcano’: Childhood, 1927–42”
At a young age Ashbery became an autodidact to amuse himself, and dreamt of becoming a painter. At eight years old he tried — and perfected — his first attempt at poetry, writing a dazzling, precocious poem he titled “The Battle”, about a fight between fairies and bushes. Ashbery was so impressed with what he had written that he decided then and there to stop writing, believing he had already reached his peak. Painting became his central interest at this time: he took a painting class every Friday afternoon at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. Ashbery’s painting style — like his diary entries — was marked by a fascination with melodramatic images of femininity and his predilection for nineteenth-century French art.
One of Ashbery’s most important early artistic encounters came about through his discovery of Joseph Cornell’s Soap Bubble Set (1936) in Julien Levy’s book Surrealism (1936) at his grandparents’ house; he recalls feeling moved in particular by an artist who would be, alongside Elizabeth Bishop, a key figure in his interest in a “homemade” form of Surrealism. Cornell often reveals himself through childhood in a way that is distinctly surreal, a form that becomes the signature of Ashbery’s own early work, with its French titles and its revelling in all things childish. In an early poem, “Business Personals”, we find, at odds with the title’s purposefulness, the lines, “The songs decorate our notion of the world / And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.” This glimpse of Surrealism offered Ashbery a sense in which his world could be otherwise defined — and the role of art in not simply reproducing the world but creating an alternative reality. Reading through Ashbery’s copious diary entries between 1941 and 1944, an oblique portrait of the artist as a young man emerges, coupled with an early desire to fashion his own poetic persona. One of the first entries reads, “I am writing a theme on my future occupation (artist).”
In his diaries Ashbery not only records his own daily experiences and feelings but notes snippets of conversation that he did not want to forget. The diary was a space where he begun to experiment with a public persona. On Sunday, 20 September 1942, he wrote: “Today arose about 9:30. Carol and I read and I drew some cartoons which Carol wanted. One was a glamor gal eating breakfast in bed and reading a paper and saying ‘my God!’ . . . A motto – a girl pulling up her hair in front of a mirror, yelling ‘Hey Myrt, Jean Arthur!’ Another two little girls, one saying ‘I like Walter. He’s more the Victor Mature type.’” The diary entries are accompanied by marginalia of women’s fashion designs. On 7 October 1942, he jots, ironically “write in my ‘diary’”. This preoccupation with girlish performance makes its way into another early poem, “Melodic Trains”:
A little girl with scarlet enamelled fingernails
Asks me what time it is — evidently that’s a toy wristwatch
She’s wearing, for fun. And it is fun to wear other
Odd things, like this briar pipe and tweed coat.
Ashbery’s work — which is constantly returning to “the mooring of starting out”, as he writes in his poem “Soonest Mended” — is suspicious of beginnings and origin stories, the kind of irresistible momentum that drives family romances and the American pseudo-psychoanalytic narratives that informed the dominant poetics of the mid-century.
Ashbery’s early writing is characterized by a playful refusal of the values of maturity that seem synonymous with a heterosexual masculinity. His poetry offers us an image of pre-war life, which is uniquely filtered through his own experience of growing up on a farm. So that, for example, in his two-stanza poem “This Room”, we catch a glimpse of his young self as an oval portrait, where what is “hushed up” about the past is framed in terms of the violence that is intimated in the odd double passive structure of the lines: “We had macaroni for lunch every day / except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us.”
Sketches of women’s clothing, accounts of wintry weather, anecdotes from 1930s movies, comic books and early sexual encounters are some of the things we find in Ashbery’s early diaries. They offer us a portrait of Little J. A. (to borrow the title of one his early poems, “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”), which emerges from the precocious interest that the young poet self-consciously cultivates. Ashbery’s young diaries provide us, more broadly, with one of the most revealing portraits of queer childhood in pre-war America, interleaving psychosexual revelations with snippets of popular culture and the eccentric “howtos” of childhood manuals. The result is an image of childhood not as a developmental narrative but as an artefact created in the interstices of culture; it draws attention to the performances of childhood — Ashbery’s and everybody else’s — and of the image of the child as poet as we find in the poem “Hotel Dauphin”: “A child writes / ‘La pluie’. All noise is engendered / As we sit listening.” The young Ashbery who emerges in these diaristic takes is a poet-in-the-making who self-fashions himself through his own distinctive tastes and styles. The diary entries are performative and playful, wry and all-knowing; they are continuous with the interest that informs the speakers of his early work who linger at a distance from the experience they recount. Playing the role of the comedian was a way, for Ashbery, of passing the time in the absence of family members, and entertaining friends and family; but also its own defence against the merciless terms by which “reality” is conventionally defined — a reality that the young poet saw as ill-fitting with his own desires and interests. As Ashbery writes in his senior thesis on W.H. Auden’s long poem The Sea and the Mirror, “the only solution” to the reality of a “false childhood” and a “false adulthood” is “seeing ourselves as we are — actors in a completely unconvincing and beautiful drama”.
The beauty of the drama seems dependent, to a certain extent, on its unconvincing nature. In his work, Ashbery creates worlds that are non-mimetic, referring back not to his own experience but to a different means of inhabiting space, one that is, above all, interested in performance. Daily life consists of “performing the wholly sundry tasks”, as Ashbery notes in a 1942 diary entry, in a voice that sounds distinctly unchildlike. Reading young Ashbery often feels akin to leafing one’s way through an English comedy of manners novel (exemplified by the work of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett). Indeed, what we rarely find in the precocious pages of his work is a mood of innocence. In spite of the interest that he takes in childhood as an idea, he appears to emerge fully formed; his young voice feels oddly continuous with the one that we encounter throughout the poet’s career: nostalgic about the loss of childhood yet resisting the pull of this nostalgia. Ashbery thought self-consciously about the role of the poet from a young age and he spent his early years cultivating an artistic sensibility. Taking an interest in art and literature becomes a subtle form of resistance to the American life that feels all-assimilable in his youth. Imaginative resources provide a psychological and social armour that allows him to hold off the strictures of identity that are at odds with his own interests and desires, enabling memories of childhood to flood his poems without them suggesting anything in particular about his identity.
Jess Cotton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge.
Reprinted with kind permission of Reaktion Books