Praising Ashbery, Critiquing Coates, Making Moby
This week — “Getting” John Ashbery — with Steph Burt, Adam Fitzgerald, Eileen Myles, Guy Maddin and Jim Jarmusch. Listen to today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Mary McGrath: We hope you’ll indulge a little counter programming this week. There was no lack of news, surely; but with catastrophe as the new normal, there’ll be time a-plenty to examine our hopeless earthly condition. Even so, at the begining of the week, we all confessed that none of us “got” John Ashbury’s poetry, and then alas, came the discovery — or the news, if you will, that you don’t have to! It’s not a club or a cult. You don’t need to do poetry push-ups, Chris said; just jump in and read the damn stuff; begin on any page, or better yet, listen to John Ashbery read it in his own voice.
Ashbery said it best himself, quoting Marianne Moore: there are other things more important than this fiddle. But if you’re liking it enough to pick it up and go ahead,maybe one thing would be to forget yourself while you’re reading it and not think that in order to appreciate it, you have to have read a book about it.
We think our show de-mystified the poetry; maybe we even re-branded it — NDO (not difficult or obscure). I found a few pieces from the New Yorker this week especially helpful (a Larissa MacFarquhar profile from 2005, a Ben Lerner appreciation, and one from Alex Ross), particularly this one from our poet friend Megan O’Rourke called “How to Read John Ashbery.” Megan says don’t try and understand the poems; just take pleasure from them the way you’d listen to music or spin through the radio dial without stopping to tune into any program for long. It might be perfect poetry for our ADD-addled age: you can be intermittently aware of it while thinking of other things at the same time. Somehow it sinks in and sticks with you.
Ashbery’s free-wheeling strategy makes the reader fiercely attentive to the present — to the textures of the world, not the containers the poet has built for them. It enlivens the words on the page, encouraging the reader, as Helen Vendler once said, to note, “at least subconsciously, the whole orchestral potential of the English language.” Many poets aim to do this, but these poets are also obsessed with the pleasures of making a sonnet, or discovering an unpredictable rhyme. Ashbery seems bored by these things.
With that in mind, take in a few lines from the poem Eileen Myles read on the show: Ashbery’s famous long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”:
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.
Zach Goldhammer:
After a week of reading American poetry, it’s a fitting time to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest epic in The Atlantic.
Coates started off his journalistic career with ambitions of becoming a poet himself. He found early influences in the black poets he met at Morehouse College: E. Ethelbert Miller, Elizabeth Alexander, Joel Dias-Porter, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey. He found a model for exposing whiteness and white supremacy in Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” as he told the Poetry Foundation in an interview published last year:
[Though] that poem claims to be about slavery, it actually is about white people. That’s a poem about white people. All the voices are white. Every single one of them. Usually we’re interrogating ourselves, as black folks. What’s wrong with us? What was done to us? And he says, “No, no. I’m going to turn the camera on you and say, ‘Here is what was done to you.’
In his memoir, Between the World and Me, Coates says that “poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away, and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.”
While I’ve been a big fan of Coates’s mixing of high literary style and vast historical scope in earlier essays—particularly in his 2014 “Case for Reparations” piece—the poetic turns of phrase in his most recent essay sometimes feel a bit clunky.
An early passage in the new piece, for instance, describes racism in presidential history as something that sounds more like a description of Mordor than America.
But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.
The fantastical quality here is intentional: Coates is open about the fact that his language here owes a lot to his love of Dungeon and Dragons. In some ways it’s refreshing to read Coates’s repeated references to the “bloody heirloom” as a more visceral description of what’s at stake in so-called “identity politics.” The problem is that this new language doesn’t do much to move liberal thinking beyond the repetitive “identity” versus “class” debates of 2016. The transmutation of white supremacy here into a sort of magic amulet doesn’t feel particularly helpful as way of thinking through this history or the possibility of future change.
Still the piece is worth reading and most of the writing is much more straightforward than the section quote above. You should check it out for yourself (and listen to this Morning Edition interview with Coates) to see what you make of his core argument as well as his evolving literary style.
Listening: Rachel Kaadzie Ghansah on Longform
In thinking about Coates this weekend, it was also interesting to listen to Rachel Kaadzie Ghansah discuss her brutal profile of Dylann Roof on the Longform podcast.
Like Coates, Ghansah’s writing career was initially focused on literature. Zadie Smith says Ghansah is one of her favorite new writers, and Ghansah herself describes her previous work as primarily made up of “love letters” to other writers, including Coates’s own favorite, James Baldwin. The opening sentence of her Roof profile, she points out, is an allusion to the first sentence in William Faulkner’s Light in August.
Also like Coates, her writing about Roof grapples with white supremacy as a visceral force that at times feels like a metaphysical or existential threat. She describes watching Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal during her reporting because she felt like she was “playing a chess match with evil.”
But Ghansah also offers a more textured profile of whiteness and rage. Her first-hand reporting examines class, poverty, and alienation in Roof’s family. She quotes Roof’s former elementary school teacher, Ted Wachter, who suggests that the class resentments he saw in South Carolina are not limited to the South or red states, but are also rooted in dynamics we can see here in Boston:
To understand Dylann, you need to read The Hidden Injuries of Class,” Wachter said. What that book revealed was “how white working-class people in Boston, in South Boston, the more you interviewed them, what came out, especially after a few beers, is how inferior they felt to all the Harvard, Cambridge, bright, educated people.”
In her conversation with Longform, Ghansah argues that this culture of violence will continue to manifest in white communities as “culture war of their own extension.” She sees automation and diminishing prospects of employment as major factors in this increasing sense of desperation, and Trump’s pipe dream promises of bringing back coal jobs as just making it worse.
Ghansah doesn’t offer any easy solutions either, but her commitment to continuing her own clear-eyed reporting on white supremacy might at least clarify the problems at hand.
Coming Up:
MM: Karl Ove Knausgaard is coming to town, and Susan Coyne is going to draw this face! Life may be too short for another multi-volume Scandinavian saga or what KOK is calling a “personal encyclopaedia of the world” addressed to his unborn fourth child, but what the heck…
Nearly Finished:
We’re talking with Cornel West about Moby Dick next week, and we have other exciting guests lined up for our show at the end of the month or nearabouts. And we’ve found lots of great nuggets of Moby Dickiana along the way. Here’s some original reviews from the 1851 edition: (Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature — since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.”)
And here’s an artist who made drawings of every page of the 552 page Signet editon.
More Biblio Fun!
From our friend Katherine in Switzerland — almost poetry…#RuinABookInOneLetter:
The Wino in the Willows
Clear and Present Hanger
Moby Duck
One Hundred Sears of Solitude
Madame Ovary
Lice in Wonderland
And you can play along. Our friends the wicked smaht professors Lydia Moland and Jim Johnson send these ones along: Prude and Prejudice (or Grime and Prejudice), Lady Chatterly’s Liver, and our favorite: The Bothers Karamazov (and Lydia would like to know which Karamazov Chris finds the most bothersome?).
George Hicks wants us to remember another artist who died this week: Walter Becker, half of the songwriting duo Steely Dan, died the same day as John Ashbery. He shared Ashbery’s delight in lyrical obscurantism, and he was an instantly recognizable guitar stylist, melding blues, rock and jazz. Only George could find the Ashbery in the Becker and the Becker in the Ashbery. He says listen closely to the guitar solos in “Gaucho,” or “Home at Last,” or “West of Hollywood.” And at the very least, at the end of “FM.”
And Happy Birthday Sonny Rollins!
Kids are back in school; Boston’s jamming. Lots of good stuff coming up on OS. Stay tuned!
Mary, Zach and the OS band.
