Marvellous. You know, it has given me a better understanding of where he's coming from -- reading all of Some Trees for instance, in its entirety (and imagining Auden reading it too) -- and even, very occasionally, finding work that makes Ashbery seem more like a struggling, not always successful poet and less like an infallible poet-god of the anthologies and selected poems. It's an impressive body of work, but also strangely reassuring to find some misses among the hits, if that makes any sense. I think it can only really make sense to someone trying to write poetry too, esp as Ashbery's shadow has grown so long and looming of late. One needs to decide where one stands re the work in this book if one wants to write modern poetry. I think...
This type of edition - I have the Wallace Stevens, too - always reminds me of a Bible (the wafer-thin paper, the ribbon, the whole air of a testament).
I think you're right: rather like what Bunting said about the Cantos, Ashbery's work is there and you have to confront it somehow. Go round it, through it, or run away screaming.
Years ago I used to get deeply frustrated with the poems - they so obviously don't offer themselves to certain habits of reading.
What I now enjoy is taking an Ashbery poem and just wandering around in it. I don't think there's much to be gained by trying to establish 'what it's about'. Better to see what is actually going on. The very first one in the collection has all sorts of interesting doublings and so obviously over-deliberate rhymes. In a sense, he's a handbook of 'how-to-do-it'.
I particularly like the way he uses a deadpan 'flat' phrase. ("The day was warm and pleasant").
As for the ones that work and don't - well, I'll see what I feel this time around.
Question: do you read the book with the jacket cover on? Or - as I'm doing - jacket off?
Anyway, enough here to keep us going for the next ten years (at least).
Still feeling under the weather.
Cheers
The C.
PS Just got out Jandek's 'Six and Six'. I'm expecting a kind of musical Boo Radley. The guy who lives behind the shutters ...
Absolutely -- a biblical feel to it... So odd that a poet as wilfully obscure & experimental should be clasped to the Establishment bosom -- but as the presidential elections just proved, America is a wonderfully contradictory place, still capable of surprising us all. Even the more post-avant poets seem to win prizes over there. Possibly because Andrew Motion isn't judging every competition.
I too feel a pull of attraction-repulsion with Ashbery. You have to be in the right mood, as with all poets, I suppose. Did you read the interview that came with the announcement of the book? (It's on the Library of America website.) His lack of interest in euphony made sudden sense to me. I wondered if that accounted for the "unquotability" of his work, its almost throwaway, disposable nature. Some sort of music fixes a line in the head (as TS Eliot understood, so that the stuff never shifts once in!)...
Answer: I haven't yet dispensed with the jacket, but it's tempting, I agree...
Indeed. Although I'm always astonished at how even the flattest line is 'sonically' justified - either within the line itself or as an anticipation or fulfilment of some sound pattern.
Ashbery also seems to work a lot by fictitious structures of argument: his use of a declarative sentence followed by a 'thus' or 'yet' compounding the illusory logic. To then round things off with a series of questions - as though we'd agreed about something all along!
The double structure of many poems - a Part 'I' then 'II' - further complicates matters. Do we read 'II' as in some way paralleling 'I'. Or as its contradiction?
Anyway, I came across Julia Cameron's 'The Sound of Paper'. One of those 'releasing your creativity' books I bridle at, don't buy, and - in the end - buy and read. So I bought this one outright to save time and energy. It's a descendant of Natalie Goldberg's 'Writing Down the Bones'.
What do you make of such texts? Do you feel a similar ambivalence?
Is it an Anglo Saxon quality - we're suspicious of such up-front tackling of The Mystery?
And yet, the more I read of writers' daily habits the more I'm aware of all sorts of bizarre little tricks and routines to keep the juices going.
And, finally, it all comes down to one thing: Daily Practice.
I do feel a similar ambivalence, yes. At the same time, I think sometimes aspiring writers are too hard on themselves -- expecting too much too soon. I really admire Ashbery's insouciance -- in interviews and on the page -- where he claims to be too lazy to revise poems, he just sees what comes and always does it the way he wants to. That kind of single-minded confidence is the stuff of greatness, I think. I hadn't heard of The Sound of Paper, but I see on amazon that it's actually rather interesting. Will you let me know if it's any good? Exercises to get the juices flowing -- Bernadette Mayer's list comes to mind -- but I've never used it. The closest thing I have is that Ray Bradbury book I mentioned before, which reminds us to write with gusto, enthusiasm -- to enjoy it . . . From personal experience it's more often reading another poet that makes me want to write a poem -- not imitation at all, as that's too rigid an exercise, but some spark has passed from the poet/poem to me (Olson's kinetics, perhaps, or Deleuzian active forces), filling me with enthusiasm for moving words around on a page. I love it when that happens, though the results are hit and miss. I'd say one in three such attempts is worth keeping, or at least reading a few more times before throwing away!
Walrus
PS Yes you're right, of course, Ashbery's ear is very attuned to the sounds of words and phrases, the music of cliches, even. But it is a far more subtle use of language than the rhythmic, memorable phrase. I think that's all I mean to say -- the unlikelihood of someone saying at a party, for instance, "Or it's like those Ashbery lines [then quoting Ashbery]", which can happen with other more traditional poets. But then again, who cares what people say at parties? And if someone did quote Ashbery at you, what would you think of them?
PPS I've just been looking at Clark Coolidge's "Ashbery Explains", which as far as I can tell incorporates words from Ashbery's "At North Farm" -- an example of an almost sublime Ashbery poem, I think. Anyway, the Coolidge is -- ha ha, very funny -- even more obfuscatory than Ashbery manages to be -- which is quite an achievement!
The core to 'Sound of Paper' is in the first three pages or so:
i. do Morning Pages - a daily writing practice of 3 pages no matter how trivial or poor - simply to keep the engine turning (Natalie Goldberg offers similar advice in her Writing Down The Bones which I assume you'll know)
ii. Artist Dates - you treat yourself on a weekly basis (go to a film, go to an exhbition) - essentially make time for yourself to enjoy something
iii. Walking - she recommends a 30 min. walk to allow the rational mind to dissipate and the Higher Consciousness to descend/ascend/whatever it does.
Now I do pretty much all three - without necessarily making a big deal of it and/or consistently. (I'd also count my swimming as no.3).
The rest of the book is given over to fairly whimsical New Yorky-self-analysis-style anecdotes with a little 'Try This' exercise appended. These are less B. Mayer-style practical exercises than self-imaging assignments. (i.e. the kind of thing I gag at).
Having said all this ... I will admit to digging out my current notebook which has fallen into a state of stagnation and cutting and sticking in pics from my kids and beginning a little daily routine. And already ideas are starting to gel.
So - it's done the trick. Whether it was worth the 15 euros is another matter. But I suppose I need reminding on a regular basis.
Kate Greenstreet's Blog - now stopped - used to have some notebooking stuff.
Lisa J. seems to be a major fan of self-help books - the kind of set-yourself-10-targets manual - which, again, I find a bit hard to swallow. Nevertheless, a few years ago I took her advice and that's what kicked me into swimming and reducing the wine intake and focusing more on writing and - yes - starting this Blog.
Mr. Cynical has moments of receptivity and open-mindedness!
In sum: I wouldn't buy it. Buy a new notebook & pen instead (that'd count as an Artist Date!).
Day off here. Already made leek soup and gone for a walk with the littler Waffle. Must do my Morning Pages ...
I agree about the unquotability of Ashbery - or what we could call the BBC Radio 4 factor: would he work on a panel game?
I wonder, though, how many of his lines were 'in jokes' and/or derived from his reading of Firbank etc.? (The Tennis Court Oath and Betty of the Biplanes comes to mind).
As for these 'How to Write' books, I think there's a dangerous poetry-porn quality: reading about it rather than doing it? It's probably healthier to read to write - as you're suggesting. I find Lisa J's poems have this effect, B. Mayer's, James Schuyler's, too. The Coolidge-Ashbery is also a great example of what can be done. Kind of write your way out of bafflement. (As I understand it, Peter Gizzi developed several poems as 'mirrors' of originals he loved and revered. That's a clever tactic, too.)
Yes, I think you're right about self-help books. On a final note, however, I did buy a CD box set called First Thought Best Thought -- details here
http://store.soundstrue.com:80/ aw00823d.html
which I found encouraging -- lectures to students -- I may have mentioned it before.
But also, many of the authors of these self-help books aren't established poets -- I'd much rather read, say, WCW's I Wanted to Write a Poem or Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (ed Lehman) in which poets discuss a single poem of theirs and the choices they made.
8 comments:
Marvellous. You know, it has given me a better understanding of where he's coming from -- reading all of Some Trees for instance, in its entirety (and imagining Auden reading it too) -- and even, very occasionally, finding work that makes Ashbery seem more like a struggling, not always successful poet and less like an infallible poet-god of the anthologies and selected poems. It's an impressive body of work, but also strangely reassuring to find some misses among the hits, if that makes any sense. I think it can only really make sense to someone trying to write poetry too, esp as Ashbery's shadow has grown so long and looming of late. One needs to decide where one stands re the work in this book if one wants to write modern poetry. I think...
Hope the cold's better...an Ashbery cure perhaps?
All the best,
Walrus
It's forbiddingly dense!
This type of edition - I have the Wallace Stevens, too - always reminds me of a Bible (the wafer-thin paper, the ribbon, the whole air of a testament).
I think you're right: rather like what Bunting said about the Cantos, Ashbery's work is there and you have to confront it somehow. Go round it, through it, or run away screaming.
Years ago I used to get deeply frustrated with the poems - they so obviously don't offer themselves to certain habits of reading.
What I now enjoy is taking an Ashbery poem and just wandering around in it. I don't think there's much to be gained by trying to establish 'what it's about'. Better to see what is actually going on. The very first one in the collection has all sorts of interesting doublings and so obviously over-deliberate rhymes. In a sense, he's a handbook of 'how-to-do-it'.
I particularly like the way he uses a deadpan 'flat' phrase. ("The day was warm and pleasant").
As for the ones that work and don't - well, I'll see what I feel this time around.
Question: do you read the book with the jacket cover on? Or - as I'm doing - jacket off?
Anyway, enough here to keep us going for the next ten years (at least).
Still feeling under the weather.
Cheers
The C.
PS Just got out Jandek's 'Six and Six'. I'm expecting a kind of musical Boo Radley. The guy who lives behind the shutters ...
Absolutely -- a biblical feel to it... So odd that a poet as wilfully obscure & experimental should be clasped to the Establishment bosom -- but as the presidential elections just proved, America is a wonderfully contradictory place, still capable of surprising us all. Even the more post-avant poets seem to win prizes over there. Possibly because Andrew Motion isn't judging every competition.
I too feel a pull of attraction-repulsion with Ashbery. You have to be in the right mood, as with all poets, I suppose. Did you read the interview that came with the announcement of the book? (It's on the Library of America website.) His lack of interest in euphony made sudden sense to me. I wondered if that accounted for the "unquotability" of his work, its almost throwaway, disposable nature. Some sort of music fixes a line in the head (as TS Eliot understood, so that the stuff never shifts once in!)...
Answer: I haven't yet dispensed with the jacket, but it's tempting, I agree...
W
Indeed. Although I'm always astonished at how even the flattest line is 'sonically' justified - either within the line itself or as an anticipation or fulfilment of some sound pattern.
Ashbery also seems to work a lot by fictitious structures of argument: his use of a declarative sentence followed by a 'thus' or 'yet' compounding the illusory logic. To then round things off with a series of questions - as though we'd agreed about something all along!
The double structure of many poems - a Part 'I' then 'II' - further complicates matters. Do we read 'II' as in some way paralleling 'I'. Or as its contradiction?
Anyway, I came across Julia Cameron's 'The Sound of Paper'. One of those 'releasing your creativity' books I bridle at, don't buy, and - in the end - buy and read. So I bought this one outright to save time and energy. It's a descendant of Natalie Goldberg's 'Writing Down the Bones'.
What do you make of such texts? Do you feel a similar ambivalence?
Is it an Anglo Saxon quality - we're suspicious of such up-front tackling of The Mystery?
And yet, the more I read of writers' daily habits the more I'm aware of all sorts of bizarre little tricks and routines to keep the juices going.
And, finally, it all comes down to one thing: Daily Practice.
Cut the crap & JUST DO IT.
The sniffles seems to have gone.
Cheers
the C.
I do feel a similar ambivalence, yes. At the same time, I think sometimes aspiring writers are too hard on themselves -- expecting too much too soon. I really admire Ashbery's insouciance -- in interviews and on the page -- where he claims to be too lazy to revise poems, he just sees what comes and always does it the way he wants to. That kind of single-minded confidence is the stuff of greatness, I think. I hadn't heard of The Sound of Paper, but I see on amazon that it's actually rather interesting. Will you let me know if it's any good? Exercises to get the juices flowing -- Bernadette Mayer's list comes to mind -- but I've never used it. The closest thing I have is that Ray Bradbury book I mentioned before, which reminds us to write with gusto, enthusiasm -- to enjoy it . . . From personal experience it's more often reading another poet that makes me want to write a poem -- not imitation at all, as that's too rigid an exercise, but some spark has passed from the poet/poem to me (Olson's kinetics, perhaps, or Deleuzian active forces), filling me with enthusiasm for moving words around on a page. I love it when that happens, though the results are hit and miss. I'd say one in three such attempts is worth keeping, or at least reading a few more times before throwing away!
Walrus
PS Yes you're right, of course, Ashbery's ear is very attuned to the sounds of words and phrases, the music of cliches, even. But it is a far more subtle use of language than the rhythmic, memorable phrase. I think that's all I mean to say -- the unlikelihood of someone saying at a party, for instance, "Or it's like those Ashbery lines [then quoting Ashbery]", which can happen with other more traditional poets. But then again, who cares what people say at parties? And if someone did quote Ashbery at you, what would you think of them?
PPS I've just been looking at Clark Coolidge's "Ashbery Explains", which as far as I can tell incorporates words from Ashbery's "At North Farm" -- an example of an almost sublime Ashbery poem, I think. Anyway, the Coolidge is -- ha ha, very funny -- even more obfuscatory than Ashbery manages to be -- which is quite an achievement!
The core to 'Sound of Paper' is in the first three pages or so:
i. do Morning Pages - a daily writing practice of 3 pages no matter how trivial or poor - simply to keep the engine turning (Natalie Goldberg offers similar advice in her Writing Down The Bones which I assume you'll know)
ii. Artist Dates - you treat yourself on a weekly basis (go to a film, go to an exhbition) - essentially make time for yourself to enjoy something
iii. Walking - she recommends a 30 min. walk to allow the rational mind to dissipate and the Higher Consciousness to descend/ascend/whatever it does.
Now I do pretty much all three - without necessarily making a big deal of it and/or consistently. (I'd also count my swimming as no.3).
The rest of the book is given over to fairly whimsical New Yorky-self-analysis-style anecdotes with a little 'Try This' exercise appended. These are less B. Mayer-style practical exercises than self-imaging assignments. (i.e. the kind of thing I gag at).
Having said all this ... I will admit to digging out my current notebook which has fallen into a state of stagnation and cutting and sticking in pics from my kids and beginning a little daily routine. And already ideas are starting to gel.
So - it's done the trick. Whether it was worth the 15 euros is another matter. But I suppose I need reminding on a regular basis.
Kate Greenstreet's Blog - now stopped - used to have some notebooking stuff.
Lisa J. seems to be a major fan of self-help books - the kind of set-yourself-10-targets manual - which, again, I find a bit hard to swallow. Nevertheless, a few years ago I took her advice and that's what kicked me into swimming and reducing the wine intake and focusing more on writing and - yes - starting this Blog.
Mr. Cynical has moments of receptivity and open-mindedness!
In sum: I wouldn't buy it. Buy a new notebook & pen instead (that'd count as an Artist Date!).
Day off here. Already made leek soup and gone for a walk with the littler Waffle. Must do my Morning Pages ...
Never a dull moment!
Cheers
The C.
... and ...
I agree about the unquotability of Ashbery - or what we could call the BBC Radio 4 factor: would he work on a panel game?
I wonder, though, how many of his lines were 'in jokes' and/or derived from his reading of Firbank etc.? (The Tennis Court Oath and Betty of the Biplanes comes to mind).
As for these 'How to Write' books, I think there's a dangerous poetry-porn quality: reading about it rather than doing it? It's probably healthier to read to write - as you're suggesting. I find Lisa J's poems have this effect, B. Mayer's, James Schuyler's, too. The Coolidge-Ashbery is also a great example of what can be done. Kind of write your way out of bafflement. (As I understand it, Peter Gizzi developed several poems as 'mirrors' of originals he loved and revered. That's a clever tactic, too.)
A useful day everything considered.
Cheers again
The C.
Yes, I think you're right about self-help books. On a final note, however, I did buy a CD box set called First Thought Best Thought -- details here
http://store.soundstrue.com:80/
aw00823d.html
which I found encouraging -- lectures to students -- I may have mentioned it before.
But also, many of the authors of these self-help books aren't established poets -- I'd much rather read, say, WCW's I Wanted to Write a Poem or Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (ed Lehman) in which poets discuss a single poem of theirs and the choices they made.
Now I must get on with some work!
Walrus
PS I want to read Betty of the Biplanes!
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