Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

This gray day, with snow in the forecast, finds me peering ahead into 2020 like I am asking a Magic 8 Ball to read my fortune, and all of our fates besides.  Magic 8 Ball says... well, I wish I knew.  I wish I had good news to report, but all I've got is my country field mouse eye view from here, which doesn't feel like much at the moment.  I have high hopes for the year ahead, though, and I believe in truth, beauty, and the greater good with all my heart, so I will keep to that positive message whenever possible.  I can say that today, since I'm on day six of a post-Christmas cold and just starting to take an interest in the world again, after some time of not.  I felt pretty low but was never too sick not to read - to which I say hallelujah - and I am happy to report that I finished the first volume of the Library of America set of John Ashbery's poems.  It was nearly 1000 pages, whew, a cascade of words, and I read the rest of Karin Roffman's book as well.  They complement each other, and since finishing Roffman's The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2017) I feel like I have gained a foothold-understanding, finally, of what Ashbery was doing in his work.  Over and over in her book she explains Ashbery's motivations, at least in his early work, but also in the themes that developed into lifelong concerns and fascinations of his.  Such as this (p.111):

"'Poem,' even in its title, suggests Ashbery's developing attitude toward poetry as a form in which to address unanswerable mysteries of private experience..."

Many of his poems, obliquely or otherwise, touch upon his difficult childhood on his family's farm in Sodus, in upstate New York, the death of his younger brother there, his abusive father, his kind mother and grandparents, his childhood friends, and his growing up and away from all of that, to make a life for himself as a poet and as a gay man in New York and later, Paris.  Several times in her book Roffman mentions this.  First (p.187):

"Using the singsong quality of nursery rhymes and simple vocabulary (one- and two-syllable nouns), he created an effect in which fragments of childhood memories flicker through the poem..."

And, on Ashbery hearing the performance of a John Cage piece (p.203):

"He was hearing a musical equivalent to the world of his childhood: the vast expanse of the lake, hours on the farm with nothing to do, days that were silent, melancholy, and conducive to simmering creativity.  He had hated that dull world and wished to flee its many pains and constraints, but he also knew best its slow rhythms and wandering moods."

And again she mentions (p.207):

"...John's obsession with Sodus as a mythic land of strange and deeply ordinary wisdom and pain."

At one point late in her book Roffman describes the rediscovery of a short film that had been sitting forgotten in the co-director and cameraman's garage for sixty years or so.  The film was never finished, but is based on a play by James Schuyler called Presenting Jane, and features Frank O'Hara (driving, typing), John Ashbery (passenger, reader), Jane Freilicher (passenger, water nymph/goddess), and Schuyler himself as a silent watcher, the outsider everyman.  I'd read about his play and the missing film before, in other books.  So of course I wondered if I could now see it.  Of course I could.  It's available on youtube as part of a 2017 talk by Roffman at Harvard (the film itself begins at 4:57).  The film is black and white, and silent, and only a few minutes long.  Roffman says that Schuyler's script or perhaps a piece of music was going to be added, but never was.  I turned off the sound to see it with no commentary for the first viewing, then went back and watched it again with sound.  Seeing it was so moving - here are these people who still live on the page, and on canvas - here they are now, alive, young and gorgeous, glamorous even, at the start of their life's work.  Roffman's talk also includes footage of Ashbery and Freilicher and others watching the film for the first time in all these years, together.  The old friends were then in their late 80s, and are now both deceased.  Oh my heart.

After finishing Roffman's book, I now want to go back and revisit a lot of the poems in Ashbery's first Library of America volume Collected Poems 1956-1987 (edited by Mark Ford 2008).  I have a list of the ones that I loved when I first encountered them, with not much context to speak of, and now want to read again with my newfound knowledge of his early life.  I suppose I set aside his work for so many years because the poems of his contemporaries felt more immediately accessible and understandable, full as they are of cultural signifiers and references I recognize or could surmise easily, even when the poems themselves were not easy by any means.  As with so many other great authors and books I finally read after years of feeling intimidated or not up to the task, those worries soon evaporated when I started to read.  For a long time Ashbery was a secondary presence to me, there in the background, in a blurry photograph, when I read about his friends, especially Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Fairfield Porter, and Jane Freilicher.  They were ascendant in my affections and I don't quite understand why I hadn't instictively warmed to Ashbery's work in the way I did theirs.  I remember when I worked in a new-book store and would stock Ashbery's books, sell them, and reorder them, but not read them, even though I loved the music of their very titles:  Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Flow Chart; April Galleons.  I did buy a secondhand copy of his collected art reviews (Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by David Bergman, Knopf 1989), and read that closely, but didn't seek out or keep more of his books when I came across them over the years.  How I regret that now!  But I am making up for it, and it is a joy.

Collected Poems 1957-1987 is rich and rewarding.  Even while it's a thicket of words.  Sometimes I feel like Ashbery used all the words.  All of them available in English!  Like a scrambled-up dictionary or encyclopedia, rearranged into a new and less rigid order.  Many poems I still cannot fathom but I feel at peace about that now.  They just are.  (There is almost always a beautiful line, or choice of words, or a few laughs, even.)  And many do help the worried reader understand how and why they were written.  This often feels like a kindly hand extended from the writer out to us, the hapless readers, lingering here on the verso of the page.  As in the opening lines from his poem "The New Spirit" (p.247):

"I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way.  And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way."

And from the poem "Ode to Bill" (p.461):

"...last month
I vowed to write more.  What is writing?
Well, in my case, it's getting down on paper
Not thoughts, exactly, but ideas, maybe:
Ideas about thoughts.  Thoughts is too grand a word.
Ideas is better, though not precisely what I mean.
Someday I'll explain.  Not today, though."

If ever!  These lines also describe painting to me - how a painting can be "about" something, have a subject, yet with almost any painting, if you contemplate it long enough (or attempt to make it yourself in the first place), what the painting is really "about" is an undefinable shimmering something, beyond or behind, under or around, or through, any thoughts and ideas and specifics about what it might be.  Ashbery's phrase and suggestion "...leave all out..." says it so well.  Perhaps what remains and is described, is pure feeling, or experience.

Speaking of painting, a bit of shameless self-promotion is at hand.  I will return to Ashbery again soon, when I finish volume two of the Library of America set, but I must mention that the arts writer and poet Carl Little (author of a slew of highly-regarded art and poetry books) came over for a studio visit this fall.  We walked up the hill behind the house, too, so he could witness the logistics involved in beginning one of my paintings.  His article about me and my work was just published online in the January/February issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors magazine.  The print copy will be out next week.  I am so pleased, to say the least.  If this is any indication of what 2020 has planned, well, I'll say hallelujah once again.