John Ashbery is 90

Here’s how his poetry has shaped my music

What is profound in Ashbery’s poetry is also unfixed. You can’t put it in your pocket. This resistant quality, unfortunately, lends itself to impoverished interpretations. Unable to stabilize the precise truth of his descriptions one can be tempted to applaud what seems like, ultimately, an elegant capitulation to artifice. As a first example, here is the poem “Crazy Weather,” from Ashbery’s 1977 collection Houseboat Days:

Crazy Weather It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having: Falling forward one minute, lying down the next Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers. People have been making a garment out of it, Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray Of morning corrects itself as you stand up. You are wearing a text. The lines Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need Any other literature than this poetry of mud And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody Will inspect where some late sample of the rare, Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know.

Evidence for such a deflated interpretation can be found everywhere in this work: small-talk bookends — “crazy weather we’ve been having,” “for all we know” — act as quotation marks, flattening the poem into a mere textuality, while ‘deafness,’ ‘anonymity’ and ‘namelessness’ contribute to a sense of futility, a hopelessness, which pervades not just the written verse and its doomed expressive task, but the world — the “lilacs,” the “sky,” even the “you” — of the poem itself. Pressed flowers fall from between these pages.

So you find yourself lost in the poet’s gaze, he who has kept safe these moments of clear-eyed disbelief. You are there nodding along with him, looking out on the world as he does and as you might, noting cracks in the landscape. Yes, there is something strange. Yes, it does seem rather contrived.

But to come to such a conclusion about Ashbery’s work is to fool yourself twice, to forget yourself twice: Once in relation to that imagined landscape — which, the poet reminds us elsewhere, is “empty yet personal”¹— and again in relation to the poem itself. No matter how fractured, juxtaposed or artificial that landscape — or that bit of language — seems, it seems. To him and to us.

To forget this ‘seeming’ is, as Frank Farrell puts it, to forget the “phenomenological.” For Farrell, Ashbery’s poetry involves:

“a study not just of objects but of the background space of appearing that gives them a subtle and hard-to-grasp character as real… To understand language as Ashbery does is to see how the synthesizing activity of the individual consciousness in relation to the world is not simply deconstructed, even if we are more aware of energies of fragmentation. The space of poetry remains a space where the experiencing consciousness is bringing materials into a pattern that matters.”²

When the phenomenological is kept in view, those clichéd bookends transform into mumbled breaches above an ocean of “simple unconscious” into which you plunge, falling from the biblically wide-angled vision of a “deaf earth,” to the painfully present and external “you,” “shoelaces,” and “mud,” and finally to the opaque and inner — and ultimately hopeful — memorial to a possibility of growth, each of these focal shifts occurring to the reader with the same strange and disorienting motion of “the morning correct[ing] itself” around the “you” — and perhaps, therefore, around you. A phenomenological connective tissue binds the feeling of our active achievement of perception — manifest in the “background space,” as Farrell puts it, orienting itself around a person — with aesthetic appreciation.