Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Light flurries are just starting to fall, now.  The woodstove is going, our tree is decorated and lit, the Christmas shopping is finished (mostly for my nieces and nephews at this point, oh how I love to give them books).  The house is clean, which always feels like a tiny victory.  The doors on the advent calendars are opening one after another, too quickly.  I wish these quiet days would slow down.  We went to a concert a few nights ago and heard carols in the round, by candlelight.  I am humming my favorites, picking them out on the piano in the evenings, and letting the calm of winter settle into my being.  I love this time of year in Maine, when the sere and bleak gives us a rest from the lushness of spring and summer.  The landscape changes, and we change alongside it.  The outer echoes the inner.  My birthday approaches - I am turning 52 this year, and what kind of an age is that, I ask you - as does the solstice and the new year.  I have all kinds of plans for 2020, some quite elaborate, some cloud-castle best-case-scenario kinds of things, because why not.  Why not put the most hopeful items you can think of on your Christmas list, for your look ahead.  Some of them might just come true.

But that is for the future, for the new decade fast on approach.  Meanwhile here we are, about to turn the corner into official winter.  My winter reading project is keeping me busy and interested.  The New York School of poets and artists is satisfying to read about for many reasons, but one of the primary ones is the interleaving of lives.  I read a biography of one person, all the rest are there too.  I read another person's collected essays, and many of them are about the others in the group.  Each book adds to the complex picture of the whole circle.  Which was made up of friends, lovers, frenemies, and rivals (and often all of the above).  I read about John Ashbery and discover facts about Fairfield Porter I never knew, despite having read about Porter extensively.  In Porter's paintings, there is Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery, and Jane Freilicher.  I read about Frank O'Hara and there is Grace Hartigan, and Patsy Southgate, and Bill Berkson, and James Schuyler.  I read Ashbery's essays and there is Jane Freilicher.  I read about Jane Freilicher and there is John Ashbery.  I read James Schuyler's poems and there too is "Ashes."

John Ashbery is the writer I have been focusing on for the past few weeks, after my long visit with Frank O'Hara.  Ashbery has mystified me for the better part of three decades.  Largely because I have never taken the time to seriously investigate his work, until now.  His poetry is opaque.  Recognizable narratives are largely absent, at least as far as I can tell.  But I have always put his work aside instead of wondering why that is.  I ordered secondhand copies of both Library of America volumes of his poetry, to see if I could get to the bottom of it:


Collected Poems 1956-1987 and Collected Poems 1991-2000, edited by Mark Ford (2008, 2017).  I also found a used copy of Karin Roffman's recent book The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2017), the frontispiece of which helped me immeasurably when I was feeling like I could not understand Ashbery's poems, no matter what I did.  Here it is, across from the title page:


A little cut-up, a collage, a poem.  A light bulb went off in my head when I saw it.  OH, I thought, I think I get it, even without getting it.  I knew that he sometimes collaged his poems from other sources - the newspaper, magazines, the mail I guess, but I don't really know - but the message is right there.  The poem starts "Here is everything for everyone" and finishes "...tawny, tantalizing."  The lines between them don't make any kind of sense, but they do contain messages, beauty, snippets of this and that, and specific words, which resonate in a nonlinear, un-thinking kind of way.  When I began to suspect that this was his whole point (maybe? I mean, I am really guessing here, but will back up my guess with some supporting statements below in a moment, so please bear with me), to engage some other part of his own mind and ours, the readers', I thought OH, again, and turned back to his poems as if I were planning to read Tristram Shandy, knowing it wasn't supposed to "make sense" in any way I had thought it might.   Instead of thinking I don't understand this, bah, and setting it aside, I realized that understanding it was beside the point, and I have been able to (for the most part) let Ashbery's veritable blizzard of words rush past, and let my expectations go with them.  This has been a real challenge for me, a reader who loves beginning-middle-end, romantic stories, traditional narratives, understandable poems, and whole lives that resonate with meaning (not Tristram Shandy, which a few readers may remember that I could not cope with at all, and never finished).

Not pictured above is an essential volume, Selected Prose by John Ashbery, edited by Eugene Richie (University of Michigan Press 2004).  I just finished reading it, and I have to say that every essay in it had me wishing to know more, wanting to read more about the people and works he deals with, even when I don't think I'd even enjoy reading their work.  The essays, reviews, and talks within illuminate his own work in helpful ways, while also enabling an understanding of why he writes his poetry the way he does.  Besides, pretty much every piece in this volume is brilliant.  He writes about Gertrude Stein, Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Kenneth Koch, Jasper Johns, Frank O'Hara, Jane Bowles, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Louisa Matthiasdottir, James Schuyler, Joe Brainard, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and plenty of other people I had never heard of until now, mostly writers.  The pieces are mostly short and as I said, intellectually satisfying.  And as I read them, more light bulbs were further brightening things up.  In the essay on Joan Murray's poetry, Ashbery writes (pp.298-299):

"How did we get from there to here, and what have we been told?  As so often, this remains partly or even largely mysterious.  What we are left with is the sense of an act accomplished, an act of telling, and a feeling that we must take this communication away to study it; something important is hidden there.  Repeated readings may not reveal it, but the mere act of reading Murray's poetry always seems to be pushing one closer to the brink of a momentous discovery."

OH.  Okay, now we are getting somewhere.  Earlier in the book, in writing about the poet John Wheelwright and his work, Ashbery says (p.141):

"Even while beginning to wonder what this is all about, one notes its crochety sense of conviction.... I am unsure of what is being said, but also fairly sure that it doesn't matter, that we are in the presence of something as dumbfounding as Cubism must have seemed to its first spectators and as valid as it now looks in retrospect."

Unsure, but it doesn't matter!  I love that.  And this, about Frank O'Hara (p.83):

"Like Pollock, O'Hara demonstrates that the act of creation and finished creation are the same, that art is human willpower deploying every means at its disposal to break through to a truer state than the present one.  The work of both is in the form of a heroic question: can art do this?  Is this really happening?"

AHA.  I am getting closer to Ashbery's poetry.  I think.  I've read over half of each of the Library of America volumes and his work glimmers.  For good reason.  I've taken a few notes here and there, and gone back to re-read certain poems that linger in my mind.  I will write more about them soon but they still feel almost hopelessly difficult.  Immersing myself in his work has shown me that you can read all you want about someone and read reams of their own words but they remain essentially unknowable.  I get these little flashes but that's it, in the same way I look at a Fairfield Porter painting of Ashbery and find it beautiful but inscrutable.  It's too hard to put into words.  I want to become more comfortable with not having to know.  I look out the window here this afternoon and wonder about everything and its meaning.  And the snow falls.  I can't stop it, I don't want to.  It is so beautiful, even as it obscures the familiar and creates a new kind of reality.  I remember that things do not have to make perfect sense all the time, in fact they usually don't.  Ashbery among them.

Work on my painting memoir continues, speaking of things that don't make sense.  I took up the most recent draft again, after letting it sit for nearly six months, and currently I am editing, adding, and subtracting.  Some sections need more, some need a lot less.  These homebound winter days will help me see it through.  I'd like to be able to call it finished, sometime in 2020.  But.  This is just one more thing I do not know.  Which is a lot.  My brain hurts!  I'm going to go stoke the stove and make gingerbread.  Cozy up, everyone!  Peace on Earth, and Joyeux Noël.