Collected Poems 1956-1987

'John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford (Carcanet), was a book I found inexhaustible.Possibly the greatest living English-speaking poet and one of the most prolific, Ashbery takes language to its limits, so that words serve as pointers to shifting experiences that elude description.Containing his masterpiece 'Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror', one of the most penetrating 20th-century meditations on what it means to be human, this collection succeeded in stirring my thoughts as well as delighting me.'
John Gray, The Guardian Books Of The Year 2010

To begin plainly, the book brings together twelve volumes to 1987, ordered chronologically by American publication, plus 65 uncollected poems from periodicals and anthologies to 1990.
When I bring my single volume Ashberys off the shelf I am reminded they are mostly Carcanet-published, following USA publication, and not infrequently a new Ashbery poem appears in, say, the London Review of Books. But has there been influence here? Is there a British Ashbery trail during this more than half a century?
My far from comprehensive instinct says not. My instinct is also that following him is likely only to result in parody. This not least because it is rarely clear what he's doing. It's his genius, uniquely mindful.
The paradox deepens with the thought, how widely shared I don't know, that this first Collected seems to me of more significance than almost any other book of poetry published this year.
Of his many individual books, even my few of them show what uniformity results from bringing them into a Collected. At an extreme, The Ice Storm here collected as 4 pages, I have as a 29 page tiny pocket edition (Hanuman (Madras/New York 1987); The Vermont Notebook is here as originally set, but in the original edition (Black Sparrow Press 1978) the prints by Joe Brainard are much starker; Flow Chart will come into the next Collected, and will not reproduce the impressive original document (Carcanet 1991) accommodating its long lines.
As is well known, and is clear from the 14 page biographical Chronology in this Collected, Ashbery was drawn early in his life to both the visual and musical arts. His poetry is surely best read with this in mind, and the separate books (and his poems in the LRB with plenty of space around them) are playful with form.
As format matters, so do the years between. Having on one's shelf (eventually) 'all of Ashbery' in let's say two volumes, is very different from discovering his latest during the years of its making; and there hangs in the air still the critical reception book by book; few poets have become such markers of both themselves and of us. Someone will write a book on this - too much to embark on here, even were I able.
In September 1986, John Ashbery gave a reading at the Shrewsbury Poetry Festival. About a hundred people attended, including Michael Longley and Lydia Pasternak Slater, who had their own festival spots. I am reading from the notes I made in a copy of his Selected Poems (Carcanet 1986). In response to a question whether he used dreams, he said, "My poetry is somewhat like dreaming to me." When asked who he thought he was writing for, I have his reply as best as I could note it, that his poetry "is speaking to someone .... in general, to myself, .... the you in my poetry is generally rather vague."
He began by reading the first three poems in the Selected, which are now in the Collected as the first two and the fourth, from Some Trees. He read 'Glazunoviana', 'He', (from The Tennis Court Oath) 'Thoughts Of A Young Girl', then jumped the years towards the back of the Selected (from A Wave): 'At North Farm', 'The Songs We Know Best' and 'Landscape (After Baudelaire)', and as he read the last of these I noted where he broke or ran over the lines. He observed the breaks to line 3,
Dreaming, I'll hear the wind in the steeples close by
then at line 4 he read
Sweep the solemn hymns away. / I'll spy )
without a break into line 5,
On factories from my attic window, resting my chin
and observed the break there, although the phrase carries over to the next line. [I am indicating / as a spoken break, ) as a run on]. For the rest of the poem he read sometimes over the lines with no break, sometimes where he might have done this he didn't. And given what is on the page, this makes musical sense. But then why write
How sweet to watch the birth of the star in the still-blue )
Sky, through mist; / the lamp burning anew )
At the window:.......
At the time it bothered me and perhaps it does still, although if I imagine visually the poem as he read it, it would be all over the place. So there's an orderliness of fracture, which may be of the essence.
After that he read from loose sheets. My only personal note was that when he was introduced (I didn't know by whom) as "the greatest since Lowell in America", I noted that 'he sat there with this going on over his head, like a bent-over Cheshire cat, as if suffering it gracefully'.
Whereas the selection from A Wave concluded the Selected, in the Collected it ends at page 787 with April Galleons to follow to 884, followed by 99 pages of Uncollected.He's a poem machine.
Whether or not to run over the lines when reading aloud (or indeed silently) might have some bearing on why if you opened the book about a third of the way in, you'd say it was prose. This is, one might suppose, the defiantly titled Three Poems (1970), made up of 'The New Spirit', 'The System' and 'The Recital'. From the second page of the latter,
But as the days and years sped by it became apparent that
the naming of all the new things we now possessed
had become our chief occupation; that very little time
for mere tasting and having of them was left over, and that
even these simple, tangible experiences were themselves
subject to description and enumeration, or else they too
became fleeting and transient as the song of a bird that is
uttered only once and disappears into the backlog of
vague memories where it becomes as a dried, pressed flower,
a wistful parody of itself.
John Ashbery’s poetic talent, as reviewers have increasingly noted, is the gift that keeps on giving. Since Flow Chart, his book-length poem of 1991, he has averaged a new volume every two years. These have largely been collections of shorter poems, which, without any marked decline in quality, feel like so many lengths of the same dreamlike bolt of cloth. The pleasure of late Ashbery is the sustained extension of a great American style, 'wide as a mountain’s flank / and caked with curious chevrons'.
There’s something of the mountainous flank about Collected Poems: 1956-1987 too, which reprints the 12 books before Flow Chart along with a whole book’s worth of uncollected poems, some notes and a brief chronology. Compiled by the poet Mark Ford, these few pages of biography bring some detail to the kind of life that results in 2,000-plus pages of lyric poetry.
A farm child raised partly by his grandparents, Ashbery’s 'lifelong interest in cinema' was sparked at the age of six by Disney’s Three Little Pigs. By nine, he had decided he wanted to become a surrealist painter. As a teenager, he began to listen to classical music and read modern poetry. Having got to Harvard, he published his poems and met like-minded contemporaries. He moved to New York, wrote a Master’s thesis on the novelist Henry Green, and in 1955 won the Yale Younger Poets prize, judged by W H Auden, which resulted the following year in the publication of his debut, Some Trees.
Summaries of this kind naturally select the details that seem most revealing in retrospect. But a child with that many interests in the arts was perhaps unlikely to go into farming. No area of contemporary culture is alien to Ashbery’s panoramic manner (his encyclopedic memory also made him a Quiz Kids radio show finalist at 14). And his long poems in particular read like the novel of the film of the painting, scored into verse for orchestral performance.
This book reminds us that Ashbery’s style, always distinctive, has nevertheless developed by stages. The most experimental of these was his second volume, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), partly written while living in Paris, which employed surrealist collage techniques to create new texts. It was the least well received of all his books, although it contains some of his most abruptly exciting lines ('The lake a lilac cube').
The experiment also liberated Ashbery’s fluency of invention, which rolled on to Rivers and Mountains (1966), with its Walt Whitmanesque exercise in the naming of rivers, and “Into the Dusk-Charged Air”, an incantation of deadpan inclusiveness: 'The Parnaiba / Is flowing, like the wind-washed Cumberland'. It also essayed 'The Skaters', the first of his long, discursive works. Later came the title poem of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), the enigmatic authority of which put Ashbery – as the critic David Trotter has said – on 'everybody’s reading list'.
Since then he has, like his own description of the moon, 'climbed to the centre of heaven, installed'. This book is a slightly revised version of Ashbery’s recent induction into the Library of America series. Unfortunately for British readers, the high standards of that imprint have translated here into a paperback that is a little too hefty to be transportable.
It is good, nevertheless, to have all the early work together in one volume, especially Ashbery’s less-well-known mid-Seventies collaboration with artist Joe Brainard, The Vermont Notebook. Brainard’s cool suburban doodles complement prose that ranges from lists of words and magazine clippings to direct diary-like passages ('Nov 3 Sometimes the idea of going to the bathroom can make me sick').
One of these – printed between a twin-tub washer-dryer and a full-frontal male nude – offers a sober motto for the poetry around it: 'America is a fun country. Still, there are aspects of it which I would prefer not to think about.'
Ashbery’s inventiveness has produced some of the great, fun poems of post-war America, including a sestina about Popeye. But his affluent language is shadowed everywhere by an awareness of reality 'dry as poverty', as the first poem here has it.
The combination has made for modern poetry at its most romantic, ironic and democratic. Like most people who have fulfilled their childhood ambition to become a major poet, Ashbery has his longueurs. 'I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way', to quote his Three Poems.
It’s tantalising to hear from this edition that he has recently completed a translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and it’s interesting to read odd uncollected pieces like 100 Multiple-Choice Questions. But readers now need to be offered the other, less desk-bound version of an up-to-date Selected Poems.
There are so many ways of writing a poem. The American John Ashbery, who has been publishing poetry for more than half a century, and whose first installment of a two-volume collection, Collected Poems 1956-1987 is already gargantuan, delights, teastes and bemuses us in equal measure. He carries us along a tidal wave of teeming words. We never know quite where we will land or what landfall will look like when we get there. The poems, often quasi-philosophical musings upon the perplexities of negotiating one's way through an ever-shifting world, posess a kind of extravagance, freewheeling gaiety, shifting from the casual to the elevated within the space of a single line.
No one could claim that the inimitable, though much imitated, John Ashbery opens the door to newcomers as readily as the previous pair do. But, in editor Mark Ford's scrupulous edition, his Collected Poems 1956-1987 allows us to hear the full range of a unique voice. Leaving the reader so often on a knife edge between exhilaration and bemusement, Ashbery takes poetry to the outer-most limits of imagination without ever losing touch with his gift for music, and his sense of sh