Jeffrey Skinner
John Ashbery
1
It seems he is the only one
allowed to plead temporary insanity
(but with such a wry
accent, like Finnish vodka!), over
and over, for which he is
rewarded:
no surprise
to see Ed McMahon show up
at his door–"John Ashbery,
you're the Publisher's Clearinghouse
BIG MONEY WINNER!,"
our hero blinking modestly,
a nocturnal animal
in the blare of TV rack lights . . .
Of course,
then he'd be truly famous
and poetry way off to one side
of the point, a genuine Celeb . . .
It's the suspicion that
not making sense reflects
a deeper organization, not
that nonsense has any value
per se: we want things
to cohere, this being America and all,
no matter the tonnage of hip jargon
settling over meaning
like ca-rt-sort mail.
2
I met him
on a balcony–
the Trask Mansion tower, which was
appropriate, since he insisted on calling me
Zack, and wanted
to know, swiftly
on the heels of introduction,
whether I thought anyone at this bash
was ready for true love, and we
both smashed . . .
I smiled (he was
funny! in real life!)–a slurred
smile–and shook
my head. He teetered
through French doors and tried
to pour a glass from a corked bottle
and, failing that,
marched straight up to G.,
on whose lips
he planted an instantaneous
cartoon smacker . . .
3
Some Trees
was so important to my
Development,
as they say, though that word,
like so many human ideas, implies
completion–the way he'd begin
to move by ear, and legions of his dark
delights and luminous sorrows
filled my crappy apartment
on Kossuth Street,
Bridgeport, Connecticut,
which suddenly
reminds me
of disassembling Chevys
at the curb, and two things
about my landlady: she
1) was a Hungarian émigré
2) had no nose.
It was difficult to talk to her
on the landing, what with my conflicting
repressions
of either nervous
laughter or suffocating
pity, so I
often used the fire escape.
But back to A's
poems, which were
4
firewood in those days I burned
alongside Mishima's novels
and, oh, the usual thousand
other books, records, tapes. And sex,
obviously–the smell of poetry was musk,
the smell of musk, poetry. Ashbery
was from New York, he was a skyscraper!
He wrote a sestina called "Daffy Duck in Hollywood"!
He mumbled his readings!
He wrote book-length poems, any section of which
could have been lifted or dropped
from his shorter poems!
He won three awards for a book no one could explain!
He used syntax like a magician
uses string, weaving it through his fingers,
tying impossible knots, then asking you
to pull, and the string
comes away
like air, no impediment.
He was the flower god of brazen coteries.
He was like, like, like, oh
like a painter with language, for Christ's sake.
5
The Avant Garde has conked him on the head,
wrapped him in a blanket, locked him
in the trunk and absconded. But
as long as he has a flashlight and a notebook
(which he does) the poems keep coming . . .
he has a phone jack in the base
of his skull, his lines daydreamed the Internet
way back when. But he's suffocating
a little now, since emotion follows a curve
of excitation and exhaustion, similar to muscle,
and it's a long drive coast to coast,
a long time to devolve that magnificent
apparatus. Still
he is the definition
of avant garde, given by a Chinese
poet (oh memory!): an ant who,
when coming upon a line of marching ants,
turns and goes the opposite direction.
6
Cleopatra swept in
but Phil was already talking–
that nasal, Detroit
twang, "John said to me, 'You
write that macho
stuff about machines
and work . . . you must think
my poems are lame,' but I said,
'No, you're very
gifted,' and he is." Cleopatra
was the star, could
come and go, etc. Phil
gave her a raised brow
and took a beat. "Now,"
he said, lifting a clutch of poems
from his briefcase, "Who's first?"
Robert raised his
hand. I don't remember
talking then, or much,
remember the subway from
Grand Central better,
cherrystones and beer at the Oyster Bar,
looking at the river,
Eakins' Palisades;
myself, myself–
smashed later at the West End,
my drunken shoulder sway
on the train home,
waking, briefly, in the domino
barcar blackouts. . . . But Cos
Cob, Greenwich, Rowayton,
Bridgeport: those station calls
irreconcilable with
POETRY–
St Marks! Riverside! Gotham!
ASHBERY!
And
Cleopatra, Cleopatra of
Manhattan.
7
Now that sadness has been left out of the argument
and it's Griefs 0, Grievances 1 (add zeros to taste),
I feel, more and more, that sound like a phantom limb,
or as if half the woodwinds were out with the flu,
or the smaller orchestra of a comb, more teeth missing
than present, had become our entire tenure-track
faculty band. Which is, oh, cruel! And, unlike you–
who never divided tears from the self, though you played
a brilliant tag around both. . . . As a planet's orbit is not
circular but elliptical, and not elliptical, exactly,
but an unending, open rosette, so beauty
in your poems becomes a function of distance, and black
space a garden of slow blooming, invisible flowers.
Oh, hopeless retro! Oh lyric! Now all poetry
is the ugly baby friends smile at, pained, racking their brains
for euphemistic praise. Can it
grow up, John, to be a fresh terror, now that no one cares?
From Gender Studies, Miami University Press, 2002.