John Ashbery

oh, Mr. Poetry, he's back, yay! I mean, if you can imagine, and this is, you know, 1968, 69, and people just weren't teaching poetry writing with kids in that time.

But Kenneth was always a little chagrined about the fact that he was better known as a teacher of poetry than as a poet, even though he's very, very well known as a poet, along with what they called the New York School, his friends John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and others.

You know,

writing poetry is the most fun when you really can imagine you're doing something that you're not really doing.

It's not even stuff like the Summer of Love.

You go back in 1969, hate Ashbery and all that stuff.

It's a CIA operation.

All of the culture...

Okay.

So [chuckles] Katie came downstairs last night, um, and said, "What is yours?" And I said, "Brian said we couldn't share." And she goes, "It's gonna be a John Ashbery poem, isn't it?"

[laughs]

And I said, "Damn it, how did you know?" [laughs] Because this is, uh, Ashbery is one of the few, few, um, kind of poets I really admire, and Katie doesn't.

[laughs]

Um, and it, it hasn't really caused real, real tension-

So, um, I chose one actually...

Sorry, this is maybe cheating a little bit.

That brought Bei Dao, Gu Chen...

Yang Lian, Shu Ting, the Chinese mystic school poets over to read together with Gary Snyder, Allen, John Ashbery, all these, all the great poets from both shores, right? And so I don't know.

It's just like I walked into the wrong classroom at the wrong time, but somehow I got into the two best rivers in one step you know it's the wrong step you know and that's how I started writing poetry and then just everything just the door opened right and it is just breathtaking to think back right you know how it all happened but I really think it started when when I had to like work the garden Work on the gardening to get food to feed my family and myself when I was like six, seven years old, you know.

And it's all related.

And so it makes sense to me that he would've studied someone like Clyfford Still.

So, um, he was friends with John Ashbery, the poet, and I have a quote from John Ashbery that I liked.

It speaks to what we were saying about the sort of clunky physicality that can sometimes be a part of the language of collage.

He said, um, "The neat workmanlike transpositions ignore the anomaly of surface as though a magic lantern slide were projected on a lunar landscape."

Um, but yeah, I think that was really cool for me.

I, I had heard his name referenced by people who are very into collage as one of their heroes.

And so it was really cool to know that he was like with John Ashbery in San Francisco and like, yeah, really interesting.

Thank you for, for doing a deep dive on him.