On a warm wet evening, John Ashbery once again embraced his poetic roots and generously read in the sanctuary of St. Marks as part of a triathlon of events held to raise some very much-needed cash for the Poetry Project. (Reader, are you a member? If not, stop reading and immediately click “Become a Member Now.”)

After thanking Charles North for “the super introduction every word of which is true,” Mr. Ashbery read first from A Worldly Country, before sharing yet more of the apparently ceaseless flow of new work, which is about to be bottled again, this time into a volume called Planosphere.

Of Planosphere more later, but of The Worldly Country as presented on Thursday we heard primarily from that side of Ashbery that produces works that read most like “poems.”  The title piece, which Ashbery said “rhymes sort of, except for one line that I was very surprised to find doesn’t” seemed to be a re-working of Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening,” filled as it is with clocks and squares and china closets.  In this version, however, “Time” has become “time,” and the “drift of appalling snow” has been transliterated to a “great ungluing.”  As a real live “poem,” it searches, of course, for its “ending,” and as an Ashbery poem, it does so with a sort of anti-ponderous ponderousness: “And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea/we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.”

He then read “Hungry Again,” in which God makes an appearance once more, something that kept happening during the evening.  This was followed by the funny, tender “Phantoum,” one line of which — “The purple emu laid another egg” — was inspired by a book of mistranslations from the French (“le peuple ému répondi” having been hilariously waylaid from its original meaning of “the aroused people responded”).  In this seemingly autobiographical poem containing squawking auks and dissolving albatrosses, grape children try to “cope in a mushroom world,” until one “excused himself. Europe was calling.”

“It’s really very American in spite of the whole time spent in Paris thing,” Eileen Myles said to me after the reading.  “Very Americana even,” I said, thinking not only of the poem “Antiques Roadshow,” which began with the line “There is a tremendous interest in dog-related items” (or was this just a comment?), but also of the overall “delightfully-demented-America” quality of the Ashberean language universe.  “Very iPhone,” Eileen added.

This comment still has me pondering as I try to resurrect the rest of the evening in my mind.  As Ashbery read extensively from Planosphere in that characteristic manner that I’ve always thought of as an equalizing “evenness,” one poem began to merge with the next and the titles took on the quality of charming, but unnecessary pauses.  After a while the sensation was of floating in a vast ocean of language flotsam and cultural debris jetsam, with, on this particular occasion, a splash of God, or maybe it’s the God-esque, added now and then.  In the end, the experience (mistranslated through my own erratic and fragmenting listening capabilities) might be rendered something as follows:

Almighty droop
like unto
not having access to air conditioning
ahoy

so peaceful on my palate
journey, trains, 1861
analgesics & potagers
rabbits in their plankton dispensary

Poetry dissolves in moisture and reads us to ourselves
love me anyway, he said
Spring being a mindless business where strangers come home to breathe

I dreamt of married couples having sex
a rut made by the first wheel
wandering through centuries

“always it was available to itself”

They were living in America ___________
[select one: deliriously, fictitiously, pandemically,
as tissue paper to a comb]

woe betide us

obnoxious smell
rubber cement growing tacky

slurping
nogoodnik
eggbeater

One was encouraged into intimacy
the day we took our gum out

deft music
mustard Coke

A man comes to the end of a drive

What about the cheese?

Standing ovation.

Thank you John Ashbery, pomposity-smasher, lyric lie detector, great impish dignitary.  Live long and prosper!

-Evelyn Reilly

Not to put too fine a point on it—but isn’t it time for John’s urine to be tested?  Most poets, as we all know, like ballplayers who don’t take steroids, don’t “produce”—really produce—after the age of 40; that is, if they’re lucky enough to produce that long.  So what gives?  How can Ashbery still perform at the level he does and still be not only a hero but a beacon for so many other writers?

It seems especially appropriate for John to be giving his only NY reading of the year at the Poetry Project, even though he’s given readings to audiences all over the world and received awards from just about all the important award-givers—including, just recently, the Harvard Arts Medal given to Harvard alums who have distinguished themselves in the Arts.  Speaking of which, I just heard from a mutual friend that at the Boston hotel where John stayed, there was a moment for the ages when, at precisely the time he was exiting via the hotel’s revolving door, the Dalai Lama was entering in the same revolution.  Talk about a photo op!

As to the Poetry Project, it wasn’t quite John’s ancestral poetry home (as it was for some of us who are a little younger) but it was certainly his first devoted audience.  When I began coming to readings in the late 1960s, I kept hearing about this mysterious, experimental poet who had recently returned from a mysterious decade in France, and who, to the young poets I was meeting, and soon me as well, was not only secretly épater-ing the bourgeoisie, but was demonstrating radically new ways to write poems and to conceive of poetry.  The amazing thing to me, still, is that neither we—nor John, as I’ve learned from interviews—ever imagined that his poetry would change American poetry—British too, if not to the same extent—or equally amazing, that he would go on to win every award in the book including—horrors!—those bestowed by the many-headed Establishment.

I find Ashbery’s poetry as surprising and inspiring as I did when I began writing. Partly it’s because, like his pal Frank O’Hara, he just goes on his nerve.  But in his case, the “just” contains multitudes. Going on his nerve wouldn’t mean much if his poems weren’t so often startlingly original, or moving, or endlessly intriguing, or funny, or exploratory about both the outer and inner worlds, in the complexity both deserve.  Which of course makes his poems difficult if approached with the usual expectations; to me, a part of his extraordinary achievement is to have changed our expectations.  I’ll also venture to say that his complex investigations of his own states of mind, which include conscious and unconscious aspects, make a good bit of the other poetry around seem ultimately superficial. But enough about the others!

Well, actually, I do want to grind an axe, but very briefly.  In preparing an introduction for John a few years ago at Pace University, I learned, from the TLS of all places, that he holds, or then held, the record for the most poetry awards!  (Michael Jackson had it for pop music and Steven Spielberg for movies.)  The same friend who told me about the Dalai Lama/Ashbery Case of the Revolving Door joked that I could fill an entire introduction just by listing John’s awards.  But there is one missing, which I hope he’ll forgive me for mentioning.  When poets I know wonder why he hasn’t yet received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the consensus is that he, unlike most of those who have won the prize, is not perceived as engagé. To me, and I believe many others, there’s no writer whose poems are more engaged with what it means to be human.  Poetry sadly, hopefulness notwithstanding, doesn’t make much happen. But it does show us to ourselves, which I would suggest is more vital these days than it has ever been, and has a far more vital relation to the material that poetry is often supposed to be engaged with, than ever before.

[Exit Axe, pursued by a Grove.]

As for steroid tests:  2007 and 2008 would be banner years for anyone, let alone someone who has been writing fascinating poetry for more than six decades (which includes college and even high school).  John published two books of poems in 2007, the lovely A Worldly Country, and Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which won the 2008 Griffin International Poetry Prize.  His  translations of the under-sung French poet Pierre Martory, The Landscapist, came out last year, and in 2008 as well, the Library of America published the first half of John’s Collected Poems—the first (I think the only?) contemporary poet to be so honored.  And, this past fall, he had a terrific show of his own collages at Tibor de Nagy in Manhattan, and he has a new book of poems, Planisphere, coming out at the end of this year.  Dazzling stuff.  Please welcome first-ballot Hall-of-Famer John Ashbery.

Charles North