INTERVIEW WITH JOHN ASHBERY

In October 1984 I went to America to research material at Harvard and the University of Connecticut for my PhD on Frank O’Hara, Robert Lowell and John Ashbery. I stayed with friends in New York so I used the opportunity to interview John Ashbery in his New York apartment. It was a warm October day, one of those days in New York that defies Autumn, very warm, more than a touch of summer about it. Ashbery was relaxed and an excellent interviewee, responding to my questions with enthusiasm and a desire to be understood in relation to his work, even though I must have been the Nth interviewer to have plied him with questions.

JM: What is your feeling about the frequent criticisms of your work that it is difficult, or that it doesn’t make sense?

JA: It disturbs me somewhat because I think this reputation that has grown up around my work and possibly among people who haven’t read it might discourage others from even trying to look at it – though they might enjoy it once they began to. I wonder what people can mean by poetry not making sense. What exactly is meaning and sense in that context? Probably the lines of poetry that mean the most to us are ones that don’t make sense in the way we’re accustomed to think of sense.

JM: Is your elusive use of language an attack on preconceived notions in the way language is used on the street?

JA: No, I don’t think I’m attacking that. What people say to each other when they are trying very hard to communicate is always sloppy and unsatisfying and full of uncompleted sentences and thought. Nevertheless, this is the trope we all use when we are trying t make ourselves understood, and I’m sure there must be a good reason for this or the situation wouldn’t have evolved like that. It’s that kind of speech that I find very poignant and moving. Everybody knows Mallarmé’s dictum about purifying the language of the tribe. In my case I don’t feel it needs purifying. I try to encourage it.

JM: But some of your work has looked pretty radical – like "The Tennis Court Oath", which isolated language into single words or fragments. Do you feel drawn to repeat that kind of experimentation?

JA: No, I don’t think so. I wrote that book really as a kind of therapy during a period when I felt frustrated with poetry. I was living abroad and out of touch with my own language and was just sort of feeing around. I never expected to have another book published after the first one (Some Trees) – which took eight years to sell 800 copies – so I didn’t think that these experiments would one day end up in a book of poetry. I published The Tennis Court Oath and perhaps I shouldn’t have done so. If I were submitting that book again I would take out a lot of what is in it, although some of it still interests me.

JM: That reminds me of something Munch said. He called his paintings his “children” and couldn’t bear to part with them. Does your attitude towards your early work change much, do you shift allegiance from book to book?

JA: I’ve said something very similar about my own work, that all the eleven books are like children and of course one loves all one’s children but secretly prefers some to others. I’ve mentioned one of the ones I’m probably least interested in. I like most of the others, although I would  probably like to remove a lot of poems. The ones I like best are Three Poems (1972), Houseboat Days (1977) and most of A Wave (1984).

JM: "A Wave" brings to mind a regular feature of your poetry – what you call in the title poem there the subjective-versus-the-objective approach.

JA: I’ve become notorious for my pronouns that don’t relate to anything. But it seems to me a condition of poetry almost. Every poet uses the ‘I’ frequently, but who is ‘I’? Je est un autre. Similarly, the poet addresses a ‘You’, who can be either himself, someone he is close to, or an unidentified reader. It seems this is the situation in almost any poetry and I perhaps emphasize this more than most would. But I don’t really feel the importance of making it any clearer than it is already. It’s not specific individuals or people that I’m interested in but the relations among them, the going out towards someone, having something projected back at one. That’s what I’m trying to illustrate.

JM: You’ve said before that you don’t use your experience in your poems because you don’t find your experiences particularly interesting. Is this why you use pronouns as you do to try and keep autobiography out of the poems?

JA: It might be that. On the other hand, of course I find my experiences interesting: they are the only ones that I’ve had. My life is very important to me, but I don’t expect the reader to be interested in my biography. Therefore I don’t want to go into statistics too much other than to allude to common experiences which everybody has, so that someone who doesn’t know me will know what I’m talking about.

JM: You try to keep autobiography out of it, but I notice in “A Wave” there seem t be something approaching autobiography, or a tone that derives from personal feelings and experiences. Particularly at one point where you write ‘I feel at peace with the parts of myself/That questioned this other, easygoing side, chafed it/To a knotted rope of guesswork looming out of storms/And darkness’. Do you think that as you get older you’re more at ease in using personal experiences, without (as you say) getting too private and alienating the reader?

JA: Yes I think so. That poem came out of a personal relationship which was very important to me and I probably found myself enjoying being able to talk about it and still feeling that I was writing poetry.

JM: We are all trying to relate to these things as we get older, common experiences and sense of change. But when you set yourself up as a poet you become something other than the person in the street. You become, at least to the majority, the romantic who stands apart from society. How is the poet and poetry receive in America today?

JA: That’s difficult to answer because I’m just sending it out and not really being aware of how it’s being received. But probably it’s not very different than it is in England, although I’m not sure that Americans are aware of poets to the extent of even feeling their separateness. There’s a poem by C. Day-Lewis about poets: ‘If they are invited they are apt to spoil the party’. Here, I think everybody is curious about everybody to the point where they are not curious about anybody. At the same time there certainly seems to be a large audience for poetry, much more so than, say, 25 years ago. When I lived here before going to France there weren’t poetry readings except at places like the Y.M.H.A. where elder statesmen of poetry occasionally read. Then when I came back everybody was reading their poems in cafes and on street corners, probably as a result of Ginsberg and the Beat poets and everybody wanted to see what they looked like and what they sounded like. Now I seem to be contradicting myself, what I said before, but I don’t know what that means, how deep it goes, whether people actually read much more poetry than they used to or whether they just think it’s something they should know about. I occasionally read that I’m a famous poet, but I was just saying to someone that I’m not famous, people just think I am. Some people become famous for being famous. It seems as though in America there are more writers of poetry than there are readers of it.

JM: Do you feel part of any American tradition, in poetry, or not?

JA: I don’t see myself in any line of poetry although I felt when I began writing poetry that I was probably going to be a Modernist poet and that my poetry seemed somewhat strange to me as was all modern poetry, and that indeed was part of being a modern poet. It’s what the 20th century is all about, but then it seemed I was somehow an exception, that my poetry was really too strange and beyond the pale. I guess I finally came around to accepting that view and wrote for a long time without really expecting any kind of audience and indeed grew quite comfortable with that situation until I found I had an audience, or at least a lot of people who knew about me.

JM: So you weren’t looking for what William Carlos Williams called the American idiom?

JA: Not in the sense that he was. The idea of the poem as an object seems to come from his part of the forest. It seems as though American poets are divided, at least by critics, among those who are somehow connected to Stevens and those connected to Pound and Williams. The ‘No ideas but in things’ line of Williams has created the curious notion that it is possible to put real object into poems.

JA: That’s what O’Hara did I suppose to a certain extent. Filled his poems with things.

JA: I don’t really agree with that. Williams’ idea seems to imply a kind of imagism, that when something’s briefly and concretely described, that’s a poem, one like ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. Whereas O’Hara’s poetry seems much more involved with his life, his friends, thoughts about anything and everything, and it’s pure and demonstrative.

JM: O’Hara, yourself and others have been lumped together as the ‘New York School of Poets’. To what extent do you think you belonged to a New York group?

JA: That all came about without my knowledge or consent and in fact the term was coined by the art dealer J.B. Myers, when I was in France in 1961. He’d published pamphlets of our poetry. I never felt it meant very much, merely a group of friends who happened to find themselves in New York. It was a convenient place to be, to find jobs, friends, theatre, whatever. Living in New York doesn’t seem to be taking a stand or making a statement as it would if one worked in San Francisco or Black Mountain, North Carolina, and other places where one is always conscious of living in the right place, which is something very few people have the luxury to do. I’ve seldom been able to live in the place I’ve wanted to be in. I don’t know exactly what that place would be. Different places at different times I guess. Nevertheless, it’s seen by people who are not in New York as a division. The thing which we all had in common, I think, was a desire to experiment. I never really thought that anything at all would come of our efforts, that what we were doing would ever be read or appreciated. If I had known that this was a possibility I probably would have looked around and paid more attention and tried to get a feeling of exactly what was happening. It didn’t seem like an unusual situation.

JM: You weren’t motivated then by any sense of American idealism. We hear so much in Britain about the American Dream. Are you motivated by this idealistic bent in American society?

JA: I don’t think so. I don’t think that American society is very idealistic. You don’t hear very much about the American Dream on this side of the Atlantic except in political speeches, and also the period when we all moved to New York and found ourselves together coincided with McCarthy and the Korean war, which was a very humiliating and cynical period, a low point.

JM: So you weren’t motivated to the extent that Williams was? Your allegiances were on the other side of the Atlantic?

JA: Yes, I agree with you about Williams; he was perhaps more optimistic. In my early youth everyone wanted to get out of the country and the political environment here and I was only too delighted to leave for Paris when I was given a Fullbright scholarship.

JM: Benjamin Lee Whorf believed that speakers of different languages perceive  the universe in different ways. When you were in France, isolated from you own language, were you ever aware of this?

JA: That’s hard to say. The world itself was so different, that that might have accounted for the frame of the language. There was never a time when I spoke French all the time. And it was a long time before I became fluent.

JM: Do you think it enlarged your perceptions?

JA: Yes I think it did, because I felt deprived of ordinary American ways of talking. I’ve always felt though, that French is a too precise language for poetry and I’m not really fond of much French poetry.

JM: I think your poetry would translate well into French.

JA: I don’t know. I’ve had experiences with a French translator who had lived in England for a long time. His tendency was to try and iron out the bumps and wrinkles in my poetry, which is partly what makes it what it is. It came out sounding kind of smooth and classical rather in the manner of Bonnefoy. I kept trying to correct him but he would counter with “You can’t say that in French”. It seemed that most of the things I wanted to say were things that couldn’t be said in French.

JM: A recent article by Tom Paulin, published in "Poetry Review", criticized you for using Un-American English. How do you react to such criticisms?

JA: It seemed a bit odd that a British poet who had just spent a few months in the United States would attack an American poet for not writing American English. But perhaps it’s just a variant on the usual British complaint that we don’t write English English, a complaint that is almost never voiced but is frequently there just below the surface. It seems that the English expect Americans to either sound the barbaric yawp or be sophisticated and move to England and become T. S. Eliot. When one does neither, or both, it produces a certain amount of consternation. I suppose I write the language I grew up speaking, just as writers everywhere do, and none of us deserves praise, or blame, for doing so. But really, what difference does it make? We are all trying to do more or less the same thing with the technical means at our disposal.

JM: Do you have any particular dislikes in poetry?

JA: I don’t like most poetry that’s called Confessional. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath or Lowell.

JM: We’re taught in school that we don’t need to know anything about Shakespeare the man. But I get the feeling with the Confessionals that it is very difficult to isolate the person from the poetry, given the mental instability of most of them, and that given the circumstances that was the only way they could write.

JA: I’ve probably written some confessional poetry myself only nobody recognizes it as such. You can’t be a part-time confessional poet or part-time anything else once you’re labelled. But in general, the way that kind of poetry turns out doesn’t please me; it’s not the fact that I’m against trying to deal with one’s life in poetry or the disturbed feelings of these people. It’s rather strange to me, the people who get taken up as spokespersons for everybody living at a certain time, when no one else may happen to care. Leopardi, for instance, who seems to be the voice of mid-19th century disillusioned Romanticism and who was hunchbacked, very unattractive and never had any happy love affairs as a result of it. It was of course his particular problem but nobody has any difficulty in accepting it as a basic condition of poetry. The same could be said of Plath, Lowell or Allen Ginsberg. But it seems odd to me and something I wonder about a great deal: why is it that the average Joe when writing poetry doesn’t really illuminate the experience of a number of readers the way a very odd, exceptional, damaged sensibility does?

JM: That compulsion to write as a sort of cathartic outlet comes as much from frustration as it does from mental instability. Do you think you are motivated, or at least influenced by a sense of frustration or concern at the effects of time?

JA: Yes. I think this is maybe one thing I am concerned about. For a long time it seemed to me as though my poetry didn’t have a subject in the say that poetry is supposed to, but it occurs to me now, looking back, that getting older is a thing I’ve been writing about all the time; though I didn’t realise this before I began to get seriously older – I’m fifty-six now – and of course I never thought that I would.

JM: You’ve never felt that sensibility can be overburdened by a sense of frustration?

JA: I’m sure it could. It could happen to almost anybody. All of us are in the familiar situation of animated cartoons where the rabbit or whoever it is, is walking towards the edge of a precipice and then starts to walk out into thin air. Which works perfectly naturally until he looks down and realises there’s nothing underneath him and goes crashing to earth. Human voices wake us and we drown.

JM: Do you think there’s a qualitative difference between imagination and intuition?

JA: Yes, intuition is important. I remember when I was young, I wanted to paint and had visions and imaginings of things I wanted to paint but didn’t have the skill for it. It may well have been the case with my early poetry too, just not being able to translate it skilfully enough and sometimes intuition would come along and free the imagination in a way that came from knowing what to put in what place in the way that a painter does. And in my case I’m doing this with language and perhaps violating its premises.

JM: Is form particularly important to you?

JA: I think it is. When I’ve completed a poem it seems to have created its form and to be a form, but I don’t know what that is before it’s done. The thing is, we’re not talking about literary forms but about something that holds thought together, a container. That, it seems to me, ends up being what is moving rather than the actual subject matter, what one is writing about.

JM: It’s secondary?

JA: Yes, sure. Although it’s not at the time when one is writing.

JM: In "The Double Dream of Spring" you use a regular stanza form a lot. DeChirico’s painting of the same title seems to be about an ambiguity that arises from trying to transpose the artist’s vision into paint or words. How can the work of art be true to the visions that prompted it? Yet "The Double Dream" of Spring contains some of your least ambiguous poems.

JA: I wasn’t really writing about the painting, I just happened to like the title. The painting isn’t one of my favourites of his at all. I liked the sound of it and the idea of a dream being double and the idea of spring. It seems as though the titles of books of poetry are particularly unsatisfactory since they are usually chosen because they sound good or they are titled after one of the poems in the book. One expects them to describe the contents of the book, but that doesn’t happen very often. There are instances like Life Studies, which is a summary of the poetry it contains. In the case of all my books I don’t really know why the title is there.

JM: You do the same sort of thing with the titles of individual poems, in that the title doesn’t always relate to the poem.

JA: In some cases it makes the poem more interesting. At any rate it causes you to read the poem differently, casts a certain light over the entire poem that alters it slightly. Stevens does that throughout his work. One example is ‘Mrs Alfred Uruguay’. Reading the poem, one keeps in mind that this is a poem with the name of a woman which is the name of a country. Certainly that is an important element in the poem, which would read differently if it weren’t there.

JM: It’s bringing one’s expectations into play, which I think a lot of critics have trouble with.

JA: The critics have a lot of trouble in general. It could be what they are here for. I just remembered the title of a book by Laura Riding, Experts are Puzzled. It seems to me it’s the nature of experts to be puzzled, it’s their function perhaps. But it seems to me that poetry is already criticism and that it’s criticising something that one doesn’t know about, some unknown situation. Criticism of poetry is at a further remove. The poem has already said it all in the only way that it can be said. Paraphrases merely get in the way. The poem should be read again. We’d be rather lost without critics because then nobody would know about us. At the same time...

JM: Getting back to an earlier point – how does your preoccupation with time make itself felt?

JA: When one is writing one is somehow at a command post of one’s entire life and one’s experiences get intruded in the wrong chronological order. Suddenly an experience or a poem that I read years ago and haven’t thought about since, will somehow insert itself in a poem without my really having anything to do with it or knowing how it happened. But it’s an example I guess of being concerned about time.

JM: Which also concerns personal experiences and how form relates to them. Do you think you’ll ever write something like "Three Poems" again? Is that quality of prose something that will always surface? "A Wave" has its share of prose poems.

JA: It might be when I’m far enough away from it so that it seems I haven’t done it before. I’m always trying to think of new things to do, which in most cases turn out to be not really so new after all but they seem new to me at the time, which is enough. But I wrote Three Poems originally because it occurred to me one day, what about prose poetry? It seems like a rather odd hybrid thing and it always sounds too poetic. What if someone were to write prose poetry that was deliberately unpoetic and which would celebrate the utilitarian prose we use when we talk to each other? Having done that I wanted to do something else; I didn’t know what that thing was going to be. In fact there are some prose poems in A Wave which are kind of close to Three Poems. One called ‘Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are’ for instance and then there’s ‘Description of a Masque’. I don’t know whether that’s really a prose poem or not but I put it in the book. It seems to me, incidentally, one of the few things I have written that is very much influenced by the French writer Raymond Roussel. I grew aware some time after I’d written it, that at last this writer who I always felt was very important to me seemed to be showing up in my work. In fact I’ve tried to write prose fiction but I’m not having very much success in doing that.

JM: I read a tribute to Truffaut the other day who was quoted as saying “Until the day he dies an artist doubts himself deeply, even when he is showered with his contemporaries’ praise”. Does that ever affect you?

JA: Yes. All of the praise and awards don’t really convince me that what I’m doing is valid any more than the attacks on it convince me it isn’t.

JM: A friend of mine told me that because of the way you use language he wouldn’t know the difference between a good and a bad John Ashbery poem. Do you think that’s a valid criticism?

JA: I think it’s true of a lot of people and I’ve often felt that most of the criticism of me has either been for or against. There hasn’t been any sort of middle ground where somebody said “Well, he’s succeeded  here but he hasn’t there”. Which may in fact have encouraged me to be bit lazy about what I publish, as though I’m the only person who’ll ever know that this certain poem isn’t any good, because  people either blindly adore or hate my poetry. But in fact I feel it’s getting to be less that way as I continue to linger on. There are people in fact who have somewhat of my own view about my writing and can tell me when to stop.

JM: If you had to recommend one of your poems or one of your books to someone who’s never read your work before, which poem or book would you choose?

JA: Well, I told you the ones I like and I suppose I would recommend those. ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ had its success bit is not a favourite poem of mine. I suppose if there’s a clearcut object that seems to be the subject of the poem – in that case Parmigianino’s painting – then people have less difficulty in construing it. I’m rather surprised and jealous of all the attention it’s received – I’m competing with my poems! One poem that seems to be popular is ‘Soonest Mended’ from The Double Dream of Spring. That’s what I’ve often called my ‘One-size-fits-all confessional poem’, which is about my youth and maturing but also about anybody else’s.

JM: Something that interests me about ‘Litany’ – the very long poem printed in two columns that begins the book As We Know – is the way it should be read. In fact you read it in New York with another poet reading the second column. What sort effect did that produce on the audience?

JA: They seemed to like it. I made a recording of the whole thing with the same poet, Ann Lauterbach, and I thought that the contrast of a male and female voice would differentiate between sections. It didn’t actually happen that way, but one thing that did happen was that whenever there was a break in the poem and the other person carried on reading, suddenly being able to hear what was being read for a few seconds was rewarding after hearing two things at once. There seemed to be a tremendous illumination at that point.

JM: So I suppose being read that way it was more true to consciousness, the jumble inside your head.

JA: And of course it’s a common situation to be listening to two conversations at the same time and trying to make sense of them, at a cocktail party for instance. At the same time it’s sort of paradigmatic of almost any kind of attention at any time which is constantly being competed for by outside noises and considerations.

JM: It’s often said that a poet must be a good listener. You use a lot of snatches of conversation.

JA: Yes, very often. That’s  one thing that New York seems to be very fertile in, the things you overhear on the street or in coffee shops. Sometimes they can be rather bizarre and you can’t believe what you’ve heard. In Houseboat Days, ‘What is Poetry’, a short poem, ends with the line “It might give us – what – some flowers soon?” Which is something I overheard a boy saying to a girl in a bookstore. Not that that’s a particularly odd or outlandish statement but somehow it seemed to be exactly what I needed to end that poem.

JM: In a way you’re doing with language what the Cubists did with the image. Speech is drafted into the poem to represent all those happenings that go past you.

JA: Yes, I think that’s something that occurred to me to do without my having thought about Cubism particularly. But on reflection, it’s as though this is part of some 20th century urge that has manifested itself in lots of different ways. For instance in Eliot Carter’s music. I think that was something that influenced me when I was writing ‘Litany’. Just before I wrote it, and again I didn’t realise until much later, I’d been to hear a premier of a work of his for violin and piano. The violin was at one end of a rather large stage and the piano was to the opposite end. It’s usual to hear a kind of dialogue going on between the instruments but they weren’t always listening to each other, they were going off on their own as indeed people do when they are talking and trying to drown out the other person and interrupt. Someone else pointed out the split-screen in Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. There’s a boy who’s giving a monologue on LSD, a fairly insane monologue and the screen is split. On the other side there’s a girl who’s seated in some kind of theatre. She seems to be under the influence of some kind of also and they are both talking incoherently. I hadn’t thought about that; I saw it 18 years ago and it never would have occurred to me to think that I had been influenced by it until it was pointed out to me by someone who didn’t even know that I’d seen it. And he was right.

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