Poetry
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.”
Beth Ann Fennelly’s third collection of poems, “Unmentionables” (W.W. Norton & Co., $23.95) is substantial in every way. The title is cute and tricky and deep. “Unmentionables” are, as the Shorter OED reports, “(chiefly joc.) underwear, esp. women’s. E19.” That is, in the early 19th century, women’s underwear began to be referred to, humorously, as “unmentionables.” For me the word conjures an image of flappers in their flimsy, filmy undergarments sipping gin and cavorting in a fountain; it’s a word Cole Porter could have fun with. On the other hand, there are the themes we often avoid mentioning: desire, loss, sorrow, obligation, culpability, death, the unmentionables that define the shadows and the inevitabilities of human life.
Fennelly meshes these seemingly incompatible motifs with brash wit, lyrical verve and verbal legerdemain, balancing, with the riskiness of a tightrope walker sans pole, sans net (perhaps sans rope), her multiple personae: a young mother both selfless and selfish; a former bad girl trying to be good; a Yankee living in the Deep South; a hard-working and successful poet — “Unmentionables,” her third book, holds 118 pages-worth of poems — still questioning her talent and confronting her masters. The ride she offers along the back roads of Lafayette County, Mississippi, one imagines in a rusty blue pick-up truck, windows wide open to humidity, honeysuckle and mosquitoes, is rough, unsettling, passionate and joyful.
Though “Unmentionables” contains a number of stirring and exciting individual poems (as well as, among them, the book’s weakest moments), its heart lies in three sequences: “Berthe Morisot: A Retrospective,” an impressionistic 15-poem biography of the French Impressionist artist; “The Kudzu Chronicles,” a witty homage to the South’s ubiquitous ground-cover and a metaphor for the poet’s sense of displacement in and acceptance of the South (Fennelly was born in New Jersey and grew up in Chicago); and, “Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle,” a stunning evocation of, challenge to and plea for the eccentric greatness of John Berryman, the troubled poet who committed suicide in 1972 and whose most notable work (now largely unread) was his long series of “Dream Songs.”
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.”
The session at 1:30 this rainy afternoon at the 15th Oxford Conference for the Book featured two poets, Van Jordan and Rob Griffith. The poets were introduced by Beth Ann Fennelly, author of the poetry collections “Open House” and “Tender Hooks”; she and her husband, short story-writer and novelist Tom Franklin (”Hell at the Breech,” “Smonk”) teach at the University of Mississippi.
It turns out that Griffith is originally from Memphis. After the readings and question-and-answer period, I asked him about his background. He grew up around the Park and Perkins area and attended Harding Academy for high school, 
followed by college at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Poetry wasn’t really on my mind then,” he said. He worked “for years” for Lockheed in Knoxville and “got tired of writing yet another technical brochure,” so he went back to school, this time to get a graduate degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, studying under such well-known poets as Jim Whitehead and Miller Williams.
Now 38, Griffith is associate professor of English at the University of Evansville in Indiana. He is editor of the poetry journal Measure and author of three collections of poems, “Necessary,” “Poisoning Caesar” and “A Matinee in Plato’s Cave.”
His fellow-reader is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas in Austin. He, too, has three collections of poems, “Rise,” “M-A-G-N-O-L-I-A” — about the first African American women to be admitted to a national spelling bee — and “Quantum Lyrics.”
My note on page 51 of Sarah Arvio’s exhilarating and exhausting second book of poems, “Sono: Cantos” (Alfred A. Knopf, $15, paperback) — the poem is “John” – goes like this: “Wow — tough, sinewy, naked, brave, vulnerable.” If that description doesn’t make you want to read this book, I don’t know what to do with you. Arvio writes poems in passionate 
detonations of words, metaphors, puns, rhymes and cross-rhymes and off-rhymes, alliteration and repetition and rich allusion, phrases and motifs passing from poem to poem, yet she maintains strict control over the form of the poems, writing in three-line stanzas (usually nine per poem). These rigorous vessels compress and intensify Arvio’s brilliant, self-lacerating, wit (John Donne crossed with Eve Ensler), making her razor-edged forays into shame and mortification (the subjects of course involving love and romance), almost unbearable; the risk — effervescent, exciting, numbing and sexy — is not merely to the success of the poem but to language and the poet herself. After all, ”Sono” means “I am” in Italian, and ”sono,” from the Latin for “sound,” is also the root for such words in English as “sonorous” and “sonority.” That is to say: The utterance of the poem and the being of the poet are inseparable. Read the rest of this entry »
No Comments