It’s tempting to say that this fall marks John Ashbery’s moment. The Library of America recently released “Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987″ ($40), a volume that “inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America’s preeminent living poet.” And the poet, long a New Yorker, was honored by the first exhibition of his collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, a full-circle sort of gesture since the gallery published Ashbery’s first book, the slim “Turandot and Other Poems” in 1953.

Ashbery is the third living writer to be elevated to the pantheon of the Library of America. First was Eudora Welty, whose two-volume collection was published in 1998, three years before her death; then came Philip Roth, the subject of an eight-volume compilation of his fiction (and one memoir) that debuted in 2005 and has three volumes to go.

Yet Ashbery seems always to have had his moment. He was born, in Rochester, N.Y., in a propitious year for great poets, sharing 1927 with W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell and James Wright (who died in 1980, a generation ago). Poetry magazine accepted two of his poems when he was in high school.  When he was an editor of The Harvard Advocate his fellow editors were Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly and Donald Hall. His  first official book, “Some Trees,” was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. He lived in Europe for five years and wrote brilliant criticism of contemporary art for ArtNews and The New York Herald Tribune.  By 1969, he is winning awards and fellowships and his books regularly win prizes. In 1976, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” wins the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1982 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983. In 1985, he is awarded a five-year MacArthur “genius” grant. And so on, including being poet-in-residence for MTV in 2002. His seems a life (or at least a career) blessed with opportunities, accomplishments and rewards.

What is remarkable about Ashbery’s unparalleled success is that it builds upon a foundation of poems that are oblique, hermetic, goofy, surreal and sometimes downright incomprehensible. They can also, with all of that, be deeply moving meditations on the nature of mutability and mortality. “Some Trees” astonished readers at the time, and still astonishes, for its air of supreme self-confidence, a quality that extends to a majestic willingness to mystify and perplex; reading a poem by John Ashbery can be like working a Ouija with a lexicographer afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome. The first stanza of “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” one of the most celebrated poems in “Some Trees” is this:

Darkness falls with a wet sponge

And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch

In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.”

Her tongue from previous ecstasy

Releases thoughts like little hats.

These lines set the tone for the rest of Ashbery’s life-work: Sentences that are perfect examples of grammar and syntax but whose sense borders on the absurd; pop culture exuberance wedded to oratorical intensity; dream-like leaps in consciousness and juxtaposition of images; the implications of vague menace and paranoia; a kind of dislocating cinematic montage effect. While Ashbery’s work has certainly darkened and deepened over the past 50 years,  and his ambition has grown, he remains now much the poet he was at the beginning, a magician whose mantra is not “All will be revealed,” but, as he says wryly (and ominously) in “And the Stars Were Shining,” from 1994: “Soon, all will be hidden.”

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Despite the fact that for millions of Americans the juxtaposition Milton Pound might as well be the name of a rock band, two recent issues of The New Yorker devoted space to essays about English poet John Milton (June 2) and American poet Ezra Pound (June 9 & 16). The piece on Milton, written by Jonathan Rosen, was motivated by a roster of books published this year to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of the author of “Paradise Lost.” The piece on Pound, by Louis Menand, takes impetus from the first volume of a new biography about the poet, essayist, editor and noted fascist.

Improbable as it may seem, Milton and Pound share some characteristics. Both were formidably well-read and learned, and their writings encompass an astonishing breadth of allusion. Both attempted to embody a world-view in an epic poem, Milton in “Paradise Lost” and Pound in “The Cantos.” Both were polemicists, leveling sharp critical prose at cultural, social and political concerns; the feverishly productive Pound issued hundreds of essays and pamphlets on myriad subjects including modern art and poetry (especially the necessity to “Make It New”) and dangerously crackpot theories of history and economics, while Milton is best known for “Areopagitica,” his brilliant defense of freedom of speech, “Doctrines and Discipline of Divorce” (he was unhappily married), and “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” in which he espoused the notion that power resides in the people.

Both Milton and Pound were considered traitors, the former for supporting and working for Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth for 20 years (Charles II was not in a forgiving mood when restored to the throne in 1660, and a warrant was issued for Milton’s arrest, and he went into hiding), while Pound, after spending World War II broadcasting anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda from Rome was captured by American soldiers in 1945, sent back to the United States and was committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, from which he was released in 1958.

Here’s another common bond: Outside of academia, neither Milton nor Pound is read today. Their voluminous writings are considered obscure and difficult (and in Pound’s case often downright crazy), reflecting cultures we no longer understand and that are completely irrelevant to the early 21st century, though surely Milton’s deeply liberal (if not libertarian) opinions on education, freedom of the press and the relationship between people and their governments are, during the tenure of George W. Bush in the White House, more meaningful than ever. Read the rest of this entry »

I remember where I was when I learned that Frank O’Hara was dead. I was sitting in the reading room of the library at the University of Iowa, in August 1966, my first semester of graduate school. The New York Times Book Review ran a memorial essay about the late poet, except that I didn’t know that he had been killed, run down by a Jeep on Fire Island on July 24. One of my favorite and essential poets had been dead for two months, and I hadn’t known. It felt as if I had lost two months from my life.

A massive “Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara” was published in 1971, followed by a “Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” derived from the first volume, in 1974. More of O’Hara’s work came to light, however, in the intervening years, and was published in various editions that editor Mark Ford drew upon for this handsome new “Selected Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf, $30) that expands, to some extent, our awareness of O’Hara’s achievement, especially in the early phases.

I read a story once that when the young Stephen Spender met T.S.Eliot in the mid or late 1920s — and Eliot was a renowned literary figure by that time — Eliot asked Spender what he intended to do with his life, and Spender replied, “I want to be a poet,” to which Eliot said, “I don’t know what you mean” or something like that. To Eliot, writing poems was something that someone did; as a vocation, it did not define you. To Spender, writing poetry meant being a poet; it was a state of existence and consciousness . Frank O’Hara, along with poets like Keats, Shelley and Hart Crane, embodied the idea of being a poet. Poems poured from O’Hara with the intoxicating scintillation of a martini from a silver shaker. He could scarcely stride along the sidewalks of his beloved Manhattan — he calls Whitman “my great predecessor” — without thinking of a poem, writing a poem in his head or rushing back to his office at the Museum of Modern Art after lunch to roll some paper into his typewriter and compose a poem. Significantly, his little book published in 1964 by City Lights was called “Lunch Poems.”

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The Library of America was launched in 1982 with volumes devoted to Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Twain, Harriet Beecher Stoew, Jack London and William Dean Howells, a venerable group of classic 19th Century authors.  Twenty-six years later, the series encompasses 181 volumes, most clad in the now-familiar black dust jacket bisected by narrow stripes of red, white and blue.

The roster of American authors represented is a mind-boggling pantheon of greatness; as well as the writers previously mentioned there are Henry James and Williams James, Stephen Crane, Poe and Thoreau, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Cooper, Edith Wharton, Henry Adams, Eugene O’Neill and on and on. Founding Fathers like Franklin, Washington and Jefferson are included, as well as prose from political,   military and cultural figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, generals Grant and Sherman and Theordore Roosevelt. 

Deeper into the 20th Century, we get Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck, Gertrude Stein and James Thurber, Nathanael West and James Baldwin and Richard Wright, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. There are some surprising inclusions: Three volumes of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction in English; three volumes of I.B. Singer’s stories; two volumes for Paul Bowles. And, in an unusual innovation, the LOA began a series of volumes of the novels of Philip Roth in 2005. 

And the non-profit series has not hesitated to move into genre fiction; there are two volumes devoted to American crime fiction of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, as well as collections of the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. H.P.   Lovecraft was recently admitted, and Jack Kerouac shortly thereafter.  Last year, LOA published “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.” Well, O.K., I thought, that’s fine, but I will admit being brought up short on learning that as well as adding Elizabeth Bishop and William Maxwell to the fold this spring, LOA is bringing out another collection of Dick’s novels in July.

Does Philip K. Dick deserve this attention when the series has not included such essential figures as Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot? Read the rest of this entry »

If you came of age intellectually (or thought you did) in the early and mid 1960s, France was your lodestar. Budding teenaged existentialists holed up in their rooms in Frayser turned their lonely eyes to the novels and plays of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, to Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, to Ionesco, and, in cinema, to Truffaut and Godard. These writers and film-makers made hash of American pretensions, cutting through the baggage of traditional narrative structures and revealing the awful void that lay beneath the complacencies of postwar prosperity. Or so it seemed.

Robbe-Grillet died Monday at the age of 85, no longer the “enfant terrible” of the French literary world but a respected member of the Legion of Honor and the Academie Francaise. With his novel “The Erasers” (”Les Gommes”), published in 1953, Robbe-Grillet launched the Nouveau Roman or New Novel movement, a kind of fiction that eliminated such antiquated notions as plot, character devlopment and straightforward narrative for the sake of pure description, arbitrary psychology and scrambled chronology. Succeeding novels were “The Voyeur” (1955) and, published in one volume in 1959, “Jealousy” and “In the Labyrinth.” Robbe-Grillet solidified the motivations and techniques of the genre in the essay, “For a New Novel,” released in 1963 and instantly proclaimed as the essential guide to avant-garde ficition. Other practitioners of the New Novel style included Claude Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in 1985, and Nathalie Sarraute.

Reading Robbe-Grillets’ slim novels in those great old Grove Press paperback editions felt like striking a blow against the pomposity of the blowsy, soap-operaish fiction that dominated American literature in the 1950s and ’60s, books by such authors as James Jones and James Gould Cozzens, William Styron and Herman Wouk and late John Steinbeck, with their contrived complications and over-heated plots and over-worked symbolism. And compared to the lapidary, affectless prose and cool opacities of Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, the work of Jack Kerouac, a rebellious spirit and hero of my former beatnik era, seemed childish and unformed.

Would I think so highly of “The Erasers” and “The Voyeur” today? I don’t know. I haven’t read Robbe-Grillet in 40 years. I do know that after seeing the Robbe-Grillet-scripted film “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961), perhaps the most ambiguous and perplexing movie ever made, a few years ago, I found it utterly boring, though back in the day I saw it three times in succession, struck with awe and wonder and buoyed by the vast tolerance of youth.