Note on Poetry: John Ashbery Revisited

Poetry readings at Harvard can be high profile events. Two weeks ago, the usual audience of corduroyed intellectuals and well-dressed Cambridge ladies buzzed in anticipation as John Ashbery '49-Pulitzer Prize winner, post-modern poster boy, darling of Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler-took to the stage in a reading sponsored by the Grolier Poetry Book Shop and the Harvard University Art Museums.

Ashbery read "Some Trees," a lyrical piece written during his time as a Harvard undergraduate (later published in 1956), "The Painter" (see your Norton Anthology), and several recent works illustrative of his trademark style. The language of the poems was straightforward and casual; the content associative and complex; the meaning elusive. The applause was great.

How does a poet, once underground, unrecognized, and, to most people, incomprehensible, become beloved by the academic world?

That kind of question can take a career to answer, but a good place to begin is at what Ed Sanders has called "a secret location on the lower east side," that fortuitous confluence of cheap rent and raw talent that produced some of the last century's most important writers: Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, William Bourroughs, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayers.

Throughout the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, these and many other poets flooded New York City to form the community that may rightly be called America's last avant-garde. Decidedly unconventional and anti-academic, they stapled together 8 1/2 inch by 11 copies of their own poems in dingy church basements, distributed them to a small group of subscribers or friends, or published in magazines with names like Lines or Fuck You: A Magazine for the Arts. It was cheap, efficient, bohemian and fun. But these once unknown writers have come a long way since then. Random House and Alfred Knopf are their venues now.

That's why Ashbery's Harvard reading was more than just a celebration of the starving artist who made it big. He was here promoting the re-release of One Hundred Multiple Choice Questions-a prescient burlesque, it seems, of "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire"-and the small press that first published it 30 years ago, Adventures in Poetry. Edited by Larry Fagin, a iconic figure in New York underground, Adventures in Poetry was one of several dozen shoestring publishing ventures that burst onto the scene during the "Mimeo-revolution" of the 1960s. The revival of the press represents an effort both to rehabilitate the spirit of community that characterized the New York avant-garde while highlighting what Fagin thinks are the best minds of the present generation.

Adventures in Poetry

"I was Hitler, but I was a good Hitler," Fagin says with a characteristic smile at the Brookline headquarters of the reincarnated press, an hour from Harvard. "I came back to New York in 1967 to live permanently, and right away was involved in a community of writers. My way of being involved was to cleave them to me and control them all by starting a little magazine. It became a kind of benign power, and at the same time a friendly way to involve myself. That was my original motivation."

As co-director of the New York Poetry Project, a landmark venture located in the basement of St. Mark's Church that sponsored hundreds of public readings, Fagin had "instant accessibility" to the best work then being produced. "If somebody read something that I heard and I liked I could run up and say "I want that!" People might as well have moved into the church and written poetry, and I would have printed it."

Imagine stacks of paper on a basement table; Ashbery's sorting to your left, and Ginsberg's stapling to your right. "Everyone was loose and free and easy," Fagin says of the pseudo-utopia he and his writer friends created. "I know it seems idyllic, but maybe it was." Like the School of Paris in painting, the New York School of Poets-closely linked to emerging abstract expressionist artists-was simply a group of writers defined by their common vocation and narrow geographical living space.

"The key," Fagin explains, "was speed. We were able to run an issue off over the course of a night, collate it, put the covers on, staple and distribute-instant publication." One of Fagin's greatest credits is publishing Ashbery's "The New Spirit," included in his Three Poems of 1972. Many see the landmark prose poem as responsible for introducing the form into modern poetry. Charles North, who also read at the Harvard reading, had his first book published by Fagin and insists that it was "the best poetry venture in my lifetime."

The press stopped publishing in 1976, due in part to a lack of "interesting manuscripts." North, gentle and erudite, partly blames the "fake professionalization of poetry and by the MFA phenomenon" for the shoddy state of contemporary verse. Indeed, Masters programs at prestigious schools (of which Iowa is the most famous) seem increasingly out of touch with the imaginative energy so consistent of underground communities. But today's problems are also economic. When publishing was cheaper, poets could devote their time to the serious business of writing verse-and keep their sense of humor about it. "Now," Fagin laments, "poets are not serious and no fun. One cannot have fun when one has to work one's ass off."

Cyberzines may represent a relatively recent alternative to hard copy publishing, with the advantage of more writers having access to more work from more places. But the possibility exists that the good writing-which, Fagin and North agree, can take years to be recognized as such-might be deleted before it achieves any critical acclaim.

"Poetics of Indeterminacy"

The very notion of "good" writing is a subjective one and a perennial problem for "avant-garde" writers who generally receive little outside approval of their work. Even Ashbery's ascent to the ranks of "academic poetry" was-and still is-something of a mystery to his underground contemporaries. "Ashbery was even then a hero to most of us," North explains. "However, the idea that he would ever be read beyond this small circle seemed an absolute impossibility. It's hard to remember that before 1976 when he won all sorts of awards [for "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"] he was a genuine underground figure-and despised by the Academy. The whole thing is still mindboggling."

Indeed, Ashbery's poetry remains recalcitrant even to his most celebratory of academic reviewers. John Shoptaw, one of Ashbery's foremost critics, has defined Ashbery's style as a "poetics of indeterminacy"-a euphemism, perhaps, for the poetry's intimidating lack of structural or thematic unity.

"How did anti-academic poetry find its way into the academy?" Fagin asks. "At a reading a couple of weeks ago I was listening to the trip John was taking people on in his works wondering what the hell they were getting out of it. And I asked John, "how it was that you ever became famous at all?" And he doesn't know, he still doesn't know." Fagin acknowledges that "part of the problems is personalities." North, hardly a household name, will probably never receive the same kind of attention as Ashbery, someone who has become "famous for being famous."

Yet that's not to say that Ashbery isn't a good poet, North asserts; it's just that critics miss the mark when analyzing his work. "They're not interested in any of the early stuff we all love," North explains, "like The Tennis Court Oath." The 1962 collection presents a mishmash of generally incomprehensible image fragments intended to reflect the experience of everyday consciousness. "Harold Bloom sort of dismissed The Tennis Court Oath as John getting through to the real stuff that Harold Bloom can understand. I think it's fair to say that, as poets, we don't really think about critics. We assume from the start that there are certain people that will get what's going on, but we don't have terribly high expectations for the academic audience."

Such sentiments are less than encouraging for the aspiring Harvard critic-or critical professor. It may in fact be that academic impulse to perfect poetry, to make it the carefully crafted product of a deliberate mind, is misguided. "The thing people don't realize is that poetry is not cerebral," North admits, "but, like John, associative." With a carefully guarded smile, North adds those words that any young poetprays to hear: "You have to remember, poets don't always know what they're doing."

Charles North's new release is called The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight, Adventures in Poetry, $12.50, 48pp.

100 Multiple Choice Questions by John Ashbery, Adventures in Poetry, $12.50, 28pp.

100 Multiple Choice Questions by John Ashbery, Adventures in Poetry, $12.50, 28pp.