/

Monday, July 28, 2025

John Ashbery, who would have been 98 today, had this to say about understanding poetry: I don’t quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I’m not quite sure. I don’t want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.

John Ashbery by Allen Ginsberg

my mini-mani-festo . . .

A poem for me is a chunk of text composed of discrete, non-linear lines portraying the activity of thinking. In 2013, I appropriated the IT term, Screen Dump, to describe the process of dumping my thoughts onto a screen. I found that the non-linear chunks could be chunked. I call these chunked chunks, particulars, lifting the term from Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Do thou stand for my father, and examine me upon the particulars of my life. This led me to what I call Modular Poetry. A modular poem is made up of discrete lines that can be remixed, rearranged, chunked into different combinations . . . read in any order . . . up, down, in, out, forward, backward, beginning anywhere, ending anywhere, sequentially, non-sequentially, individually or as one continuous text.

my poetry?

We blunder along. Trying to make sense of it all. Trying to connect the dots. Imposing meaning on the endless parade of impressions, the constant flow of images. Thinking and discovering and remembering and forgetting. Using our limited tools to convey our thoughts, to spin our yarns. I'm trying to portray this – the experience of experience – in my poetry, filling my poems with haphazard memories, scraps of conversation, the inner mumbo-jumbo of the mind, life's buzzing distractions. I’m interested in the limits of language, in teasing the edges of functionality. I'm not interested in linearity, in telling a story, in dispensing bromides, in picture-perfect representation.

others on my poetry . . .

Think John Ashbery without the stuffiness, writing about the everyday, and nowhere near as boring. - Dan Wilcox

Surprising with the odd, but oddly right, word . . . rich in stirred associations . . . impressive variations on themes . . . unselfconsciously examining the self within the medium of culture . . . courageous in its willingness to be misunderstood. - Howard Kogan

Literary references abound, extended puns dominate, authorial wisdom rules. - Alan Catlin

A wild whitewater adventure! - Dennis Sullivan

Kind of reminds me of early Dylan. Some lines WTF? . . . And some lines so, holy crap! that is so true! How did he do that? - Mike Snyder

Poems with a beat, sequence, and surprise . . . language artistry like a sort of total life-forming text. - Alan Casline

Where do the words come from? OMG! You don’t often meet in life people who make you laugh, make you cry, and inspire you! - Anon

Commonalities with Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets. - Dawn Macdonald

Fits and starts, leaving the reader wanting more. - Chloe Z

A sense of motion, this tumbling along, speeding. As if you write your poems all in one burst, thoughts and phrases pouring out of your head through your hand or even bypassing your head and going straight through your fingers onto the keyboard. Wow! - A. Reader

publications?

journals: Albany Review Brussels Sprout Chronogram Exquisite Corpse Hudson River Art Kumquat Meringue Many Waters Metroland Normanskill Offerings Other:Seven Out of Commission Pine Hills Review Poets On Screed The Pace Setter UAlbany Poetry Review Up the River

anthologies: Annals of Perious Frink Coldframe I Thought My Father Was God Normanskill Pebble in the Pond Peer Glass Poetry Don’t Pump Gas Prometheus Chair The Rootdrinker Anthology of Contemporary Poetry True Tales of American Life US 20

online: UAG/HVWG Poetic License 2022, 2023

ars poetica . . .

Ask yourself what you like about their poetry and why. - Anon

My poems are about the experience of experience. - John Ashbery

Poetry takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience. - Lyn Hejinian

You write what you want to write in the way that it has to be. - Anne Carson

I write to participate in the delusion of my own immortality. - Mark Strand

Some poems are not about the about. - Ilya Kaminsky

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. All I know is what I have words for. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood. - Karl Popper

The meaning of the work is in the doing of it. - Cy Twombly

The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. - Lewis Carroll

My poems are about how nothing is about, they're not about about. - Heather McHugh

If the poem’s reach doesn’t exceed my own, if it doesn’t apprehend more than I do, what was the point in writing it? - Gillian Allnutt

The key word . . . perhaps. - Samuel Beckett

Every word has consequences. - Jean Paul Sartre

Entrelacement is a medieval literary technique that braids textual and pictorial subplots into a larger narrative. Digressions and motifs are designed to feel like a bewildering maze of disordered events from the inside, but once on the outside an integral multiplicity that better represents how people perceive the complexity of life than would a simple, linear story. - Tree Abraham

very new poetry???

In her essay, Close Calls With Nonsense: How to Read, and Perhaps Enjoy, Very New Poetry, (The Believer, 2004), Harvard Professor Stephanie Burt tells us that Very New Poetry:

- does not tell a story
- is hard or impossible to paraphrase
- teases, demands, frustrates
- incorporates data from a range of realms
- weds subjective (internal) and objective (external) realities
- tries to capture the random, irregular nature of experience
- mixes tragedy, whimsy, indifference, cheerfulness
- appears simultaneously attached and detached
- brings together diverse voices and sources
- consists of free-floating, discrete, seemingly unrelated lines with few transitionals
- uses sincere, non-ironic straight talk or everyday language
- is indeterminate and open-ended
- presents nonlinear declarations
- has a fragmented, interrupted, choppy rhythm
- moves away from the literal
- focuses on artifice (and personality) at the expense of sincere or natural speech
- leaps, as a person's thoughts do, from topic to topic
- mixes the real and the surreal.

Further, Burt suggests that when reading Very New Poetry:

- don’t look for a story
- don’t get hung up on trying to figure out what the poem means or what the poet is trying to say
- don’t fight the poem, let your imagination interact and collaborate with it
- accept irrationality
- look for a persona and a world
- enjoy the words, the wordplay, the double meanings, the images, the sounds
- look for self-descriptive or for frame-breaking moments, when the poem stops to tell you what it describes
- let the poem wash over you.

In her introduction to The Best American Poetry 1990 (Collier, 1990), Jorie Graham reminds us that Very New Poems:

. . . do not let us become comfortable with plot, point of view, setting; eventually force us to read in a different way; force us to let music take the place of narrative flow; force us to let our senses do some of the work we would "normally" be letting our conscious minds do. We discover, in the process, that we can trust a deeper current of our sensibility, something other than the lust-for-forwardness, with all its attendant desires for closure, shapeliness, and the sense that we are headed somewhere and that we are in the hands of something. We are forced to suspend these desires, to let the longing stay alive unsatisfied; forced to accord power to a portion of ourselves and a portion of the world we normally deem powerless or feminine or "merely" intuitive.

Interviewed in the May/June 2023 American Poetry Review, poet Bianca Stone said I think poetry is an effective outlet for the natural movement of the mind, with its ambiguity and non sequitur way of assembling thought. . . . Poetry is not a craft of rhyme or cleverness of form. It is not an outlet for emotion. Rather it is a delicate yet messy orchestration of human thought as it is linked to the ineffable mystery or consciousness. . . . We need the written texts that confuse people’s idea of “meaning,” to challenge what they think meaning is.

poetry 102?

Shouldn’t poetry take risks? Shouldn’t it “make it new?” Shouldn’t it expose our vulnerabilities? Our secrets? Our innermost thoughts? Shouldn’t it do more than feed the status quo? More than entertain? Inform? Clarify? I say yes! I say poets should walk a greased tightrope. They should take chances, push the envelope. I like poets who prestidigitate words; who massage them; who work them in new, different, sometimes odd, uncomfortable ways. I like poets who are non-sequiturists; who play with words, pull them out of a hat, push them around, mix them into unconventional, but tasty, stews. I admire poets who are unafraid to move beyond the literal; who toggle between the real and the surreal; who try to mimic the process of thinking; who attempt to portray the experience of experience by capturing haphazard memories, odd associations, random images, scraps of conversation, the inner mumbo-jumbo of the mind, life's buzzing distractions. In other words, I’m fascinated not so much by what poets say but how they say it. I’m interested in texture and tone and musicality; I'm not interested in linearity, in story-telling, in picture-perfect representation. I like to think that open-ended poems or fragmented poems or just plain weird poems better invite the collaboration of the reader’s or listener’s imagination into the experience of the poem.

from a 1922 Times review of Ulysses:

Moreover, he is determined to tell it in a new way. Not in straightforward, narrative fashion, with a certain sequentiality of idea, fact, occurrence, in sentence, phrase and paragraph that is comprehensible to a person of education and culture, but in parodies of classic prose and current slang, in perversions of sacred literature, in carefully metered prose with studied incoherence, in symbols so occult and mystic that only the initiated and profoundly versed can understand - in short, by means of every trick and illusion that a master artificer, or even magician, can play with the English language.

Imagine the closest thing you can to someone’s stream of consciousness written on a page. But this is not a curated, edited, and formatted diary entry, but a messy, confusing, random slideshow of thoughts. This is Ulysses. It’s a human mind’s experience in the streets of Dublin on an ordinary day in 1904. - Jonny Thomson, Big Think, December 23, 2023

Maybe the real pleasures and triumphs of Ulysses are on the level of the sentence. - Sally Rooney

but what IS poetry?

Kim Addonizio: Words that wake you up to your own life.
John Ashbery: A recording of my thought processes, the experience of experience.
W. H. Auden: Memorable speech.
Robert Bly: A dream that you are willing to share with the community.
Charles Bukowski: Words that keep me from total madness.
Lord Byron: The expression of excited passion.
Anne Carson: An action of a mind captured on a page.
Leonard Cohen: The evidence of life.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The best words in the best order.
T. S. Eliot: Poetry is punctuation, an escape from emotion and personality.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The shortest distance between two humans.
Robert Frost: An emotion that has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Jack Gilbert: The fearless exploration of the adult heart, brutally honest portrayals of love, loss, joy, sorrow, longing, loneliness, aging, grief, and betrayal.
Nikki Giovanni: A way of capturing a moment.
Louise Gluck: Autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response.
Natalie Goldberg: A small memento of enlightenment.
Jorie Graham: Begins out of nowhere. Moves irrationally. Goes to the heart of the matter. Every word stands out.
Seamus Heaney: Language in orbit.
Lyn Hejinian: A way of thinking.
Mary Karr: Instantaneous connections.
Czeslaw Milosz: The passionate pursuit of the real.
Issac Newton: Ingenious nonsense.
Frank O'Hara: I did this; I did that.
Don Paterson: The science of nuance in language.
Charles Simic: Other people's snapshots in which we recognize ourselves.
Mark Strand: A way of feeling deeply without being threatened.
Mark Van Doren: The shortest distance between you and the subject.
Robert Penn Warren: A light by which we see life.
Walt Whitman: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself."
William Carlos Williams: Poetry is language charged with emotion . . . words, rhythmically organized . . . a complete little universe . . . a view of what the poet is.
Matthew Zapruder: A constructed conversation on the frontier of dreaming.

Being a famous poet is not the same as being famous.

My aim is to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about.

My ideas for poetry tend to come more from music than they do from poetry or literature.

I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.

My poetry is that kind of verbal meaning that can't be verbalized.

I don’t find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.

I’m quite puzzled by my work too, along with a lot of other people. I was always intrigued by it, but at the same time a little apprehensive and sort of embarrassed about annoying the same critics who are always annoyed by my work. I’m kind of sorry that I cause so much grief.

~~~~~~~~~~

He changed how we read poetry. - President Barack Obama on awarding Ashbery the National Humanities Medal in 2012

Ashbery's poems grapple with the subject of the irrecoverable past and the ways memories, as a form of imagination, can conjure a renewed connection to it. - Karin Roffman, John Ashbery's Nest, 2019

Ashbery's poems at first didn't seem to make any sense, or go anywhere, or do anything. . . . The poems offended my sense of what poetry, and art, should do. . . . I remember how I carried into [reading Ashbery's poems] all the notions I had gathered, from my education and upbringing, about art. And also how I felt, despite my anger and resistance, like the poems somehow were addressed to me. That the poet not only needed to say these things but also needed someone to hear them. Something huge and important was at last beginning. What I thought was my principled resistance to meaninglessness was really a fear of, and attraction to, a new life. - Matthew Zapruder, The One Thing That Can Save America, 2017

John Ashbery, the great American poet, made some people angry. The obscurity of his poems annoyed them - they wondered why he had to go so far out of his way to contort his sentences, if "sentences" was even the right word for whatever they were. Couldn’t he just say what the hell he meant and be done with it? - Larissa MacFarquhar, The Gentleness of John Ashbery, The New Yorker, September 5, 2017

The Ashbery poems I had already encountered had coaxed me out of what I'd found to be a limiting, even stultifying, preoccupation with "meaning" and "framing" that I had felt pressure to extract from others' poems and produce in my own. . . . He taught me to cultivate a love for the minor, the underplayed, the "B" poem or film, the word that was just a bit off, the clunk and the goofy shift. - Emily Skillings, Always Becoming: Remembering John Ashbery, BOMB Magazine, September 8, 2017

Enigmatic, confounding, genius, funny, unnerving, stunning, gay, mysterious. Poet John Ashbery died [on September 3rd, 2017] and the descriptions of him and his work are as varied as poetry itself. Reading through these diverse adjectives, I’m left thinking how beautiful it is to not be defined and yet to be so profoundly revered. For Ashbery, poetry is not about definitions or pronouns or intentions or genres. It’s not about telling a story that has a proper conclusion. It’s about what it is to experience - experience anything. His work says you don’t need to decipher the words, just experience them. Is there anything more valuable than that? - Tania Ketenjian, Brilliant, irreverent, indefinable: my poetry class with John Ashbery, The Guardian, September 4, 2017

As perhaps in much poetry, the verbal nucleus that is the original incitement toward a poem undergoes twists and modulations before arriving at its final form. The changes are caused not by careless listening to the speech of others, but by endlessly proliferating trains of ideas that a single word or phrase ignites in the poet's mind. These alter the face of the poem even as they contribute to it and become part of its fabric. As in a sea change the poem has been transformed, often into "something rich and strange," but the strangeness is that of thought being opened up, like a geode, to reveal unexpected facets of meaning. - Flyleaf, John Ashbery's Chinese Whispers (2002)