The Mooring of Starting Out
John Ashbery
Should explain my presence first. CJ was bemoaning the lack of light-hearted vituperation on this blog, and suggested I do something about it. Most of my hatchet-work will be done in the Comments section, the posts will be just vanilla...
What a journey it has been for John Ashbery: from not existing at all to becoming the eminence grise of American poetry! "Flow Chart" is required reading for the computer scientists among us: nowhere else have I seen such a brilliant and exhaustive exposition of the idea. A certain astronaut and his buddy may be interested to know that Ashbery was once a quiz kid of national renown. The arcane facts and references strewn about his poems are but fragments of this previous life.
posted by Cheshire Cat @ 7:55 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Welcome aboard !
The Cheshire Cat of course needs no introduction.
I will state for the record that he only grudgingly accepted my suggestion to choose a moniker that Cosmo readers, er... I mean the rest of us would, ...ahem, "get". Left to his own devices he would have doubtless chosen something from his current favorite metaphysical poet whose name, it goes without saying, is not google-able yet.
It therefore gives me great pleasure to inform the Cat that SpaceKowboy is neither from deep space, nor is he merely a cowboy who hasn't learnt to spell. His name is an homage to the frontman of Jamiroquai, a dance/funk/acid-jazz outfit from the London underground scene. Jay Kay, the original space cowboy, has been shaking fanny for the last decade or so.
Must hasten to add that this is the return of the return of the same cowboy
Lip-smacking metaphors. I've read two Ashbery poems so far, but Meghana's (when you know her as long as I have) metaphors were delightful.
"The best thing to do, then, is not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music."
"Ashbery becomes a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter, so that the poems are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long. Sometimes (as you can imagine) this is infuriating. But in the best of Ashbery, the excess verbiage helps make the moments of lyric focus all the more propulsive and startling, like coming across a lost tune as you spin the dial—the sort of thing that briefly brings promise of "a movement out of the dream into its codification." "
"But make sure to stay receptive to the farcical comedy in the poems, which often arrives out of nowhere—like a deadpan subway announcer in a good mood"
"Words, on the other hand, are our effort to create a logic for ourselves, to articulate what Wallace Stevens once concisely called "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind."
"Imagine the poems as a series of different self-revising, self-interrupting voices—the different voices we use to talk to ourselves in our own minds"
Post a Comment
<< Home