Tag poetry workshop

* John Ashbery, the pit & the friday influence

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Uptick – John Ashbery

We were sitting there, and

I made a joke about how

it doesn’t dovetail: time,

one minute running out

faster than the one in front

it catches up to.

That way, I said,

there can be no waste.

Waste is virtually eliminated.

 

To come back for a few hours to

the present subject, a painting,

looking like it was seen,

half turning around, slightly apprehensive,

but it has to pay attention

to what’s up ahead: a vision.

Therefore poetry dissolves in

brilliant moisture and reads us

to us.

A faint notion.  Too many words,

but precious.

***

This week on The Friday Influence: John Ashbery.

I continue to be stunned by what is in this poem, about time, about painting, vision, poetry.  How it all swirls on the many meanings of the word “precious” – valuable, sentimental, etc.  The conversational tone at the beginning gets the poem underway swiftly.  This intimacy tags you into the poem.  Ashbery handles heavy things lightly and gets you thinking before you catch yourself thinking.  A good poem by him can move the furniture around in the rooms of your mind.

Ashbery is one of those poets I come back to often, dip my head in to see what I can understand, and walk away when it gets to be beyond me.  He gets a bad rep for being difficult but I don’t think it is deserved.  There’s difficult for difficult’s sake.  Then there’s what you can’t help but write.  Ashbery’s best poems – and here  I mean the ones that have meant something to me as a poet/human being – show him to be always figuring something out, always trying to surprise himself (and the reader) with the poem.

Here’s a Charles Wright quote that I keep with me that taps into this idea:

The problem with all of us as we get older is that we begin writing as though we were somebody.  One should always write as if one were nobody…We should always write out of our ignorance and desire and ambition, never out of some sense of false well-being, some tinge of success.  There is no success in poetry, there is only the next inch, the next hand-hold out of the pit… *

I keep this quote with me because of the connection I feel with what it says, that feeling of writing poetry as a ongoing thing, a horizon you walk towards that grows a little farther the closer you get.  And so you keep walking, never fully arriving, never fully satisfied, but happy to be walking, wanting to see more.  There is always another poem to write.

Happy walking!

J

* Paris Review interview, The Art of Poetry No. 41

* some Rimbaud thoughts & eating your own heart out

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I is an other.

– Arthur Rimbaud

***

Mr. Rimbaud may be responsible for our contemporary poetry workshops.  The spirit of these words can be heard around any discussion of a poem in terms of its speaker: the speaker seems real; the speaker isn’t believable; it feels as is if the speaker has issues with his father, etc.

Anything to keep from seeing a poem in terms of “the poet.”

Think in terms of Heraclitus who says You can’t step in the same river twice.  You can’t step into the same poem twice.  Even a week after writing the first draft of something, you come back to the same words a different person.  Maybe you’ve picked up some image or phrase in the passing week that can now go into the work at hand, into the work that this ‘other’ you has left to be revised.

Thinking in terms of “I is an other” can free you up as you write, keep you from being stuck to the detailed-oriented defense of trying to write “how it really happened” and open you up to what can happen now.  Revising should be about coming back to words for more words.  In essence, one is always revising one’s self.

***

Here’s another bit of Rimbaud in this vein of thought:

Beneath a bush a wolf will howl

spitting bright feathers

from his feast of fowl:

Like him, I devour myself.

(from A Season in Hell)

In one stanza, almost carelessly, he writes down what could be seen as the manifesto for 20th century poetry if not 20th century society.   The focus on the self, on uncovering, recovering, and analyzing the self that drives so many memoirs and self-help books – not to mention countless poems in every language – can be seen here.

Below is Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert”, a poem that has a similar effect as the above stanza.  I recall Galway Kinnell using it to preface an essay in which he talked about the nature of being a poet.

 

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

who, squatting upon the ground,

held his heart in his hands,

and ate of it.

I said: “Is it good friend?”

“It is bitter-bitter,” he answered;

 

“But I like it

because it is bitter

and because it is my heart.”

– Stephen Crane

***

Happy eating!

J