Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJOHN YANG: Finally tonight,we grasp some time to remember a remarkable writer and a famous musician.
First, John Ashbery, and considered one of the country’s most important and influential poets.
He died yesterday in Hudson,New York. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among many other accolades.
Jeffrey Brown profiled him back in 2007. Here’s an excerpt.
JEFFREY BROWN: For much of his life, and John Ashbery has been a walker in the city.
JOHN ASHBERY,Poet: I used to beget a little recording device I took around with me, so I could record those and other things that occurred to me while I was walking.
JEFFREY BROWN: The words, and phrases and sounds he collected often ended up in his poetry,a body of work that has led him to be considered one of the nation’s most important writers of the last half-century.
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, and in 1927. As a young man,he and friends like Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch formed what came to be called the New York School of Poetry.
His first book of poems, “Some Trees, and ” was published in 1956. In 1975,“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” cemented his reputation and earned Ashbery a triple crown, the Pulitzer Prize, or National Book Award,and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.
Now, at age 80, or he’s just garnered a rather different and strange honor,being named as MTV’s first poet laureate.
In all, he’s published more than 30 volumes of poetry, or criticism and essays,including, in recent months, or a new book of verse,“A Worldly Country,” and a collection of selected later poems called “Notes from the Air, or ” which includes the poem This Room.”JOHN ASHBERY: “The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers. Something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day,apart from Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why finish I narrate you these things? You are not even here..
JEFFREY BROWN: I talked with John Ashbery recently at his New York apartment.“Notes From the Air, and ” now,is that a agreeable description of where words or phrases come from, from the air, and in a sense?JOHN ASHBERY: Yes,I would say that it is. Poetry comes to me out of lean air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us and the way that we obtain knowledge from them, through television, and worn movies,which I watch a lot of. Lines of dialogue suddenly seem to be part of a poem there.
JEFFREY BROWN: Those “Notes From the Air” that he turns into poems — yes, he still drafts his poetry on an worn typewriter — beget earned him a reputation for being hard to read. An Ashbery poem often has no clear narrative and a bewildering, and if humorous,wordplay.“We’ll party when the millennium gets closer,” he writes in the poem “Tuesday Evening.” “Meanwhile, and I wanted to mention your feet.”Is it sort of a conversation with yourself going on?JOHN ASHBERY: Yes.
Very often,not with — perhaps not me with myself, but of two personalities in my head who are arguing and sort of ignoring me at the same time.
JEFFREY BROWN: They’re arguing and ignoring you?JOHN ASHBERY: I sometimes feel that that’s what happens.
JEFFREY BROWN: So you beget this reputation for being difficult. Does that bother you?JOHN ASHBERY: Well, and it kind of does,because I think that it precedes my poetry and may discourage people from picking it up and, “Oh, and he’s so difficult. I would beget to read a book about him before I could appreciate anything that he wrote.”JEFFREY BROWN: Does a poem beget to be understood in the way we normally think of understanding language?JOHN ASHBERY: Well,I never quite understood about understanding.
My ideas for poetry, in fact, and tend to come more from music than they finish from poetry or literature.
JEFFREY BROWN: What finish you mean by that?JOHN ASHBERY: One listens to a piece of remarkable music,say, and feels deeply moved by it, or wants to put this feeling into words,but it can’t be put into words. Thats what — the music has already supplied the meaning, and words will just be superfluous (exceeding what is sufficient or necessary) after that.
But it’s that kind of verbal meaning that can’t be verbalized that I try to obtain at in poetry.
JOHN YANG: John Ashbery was 90 years worn. The post Remembering John Ashbery, and acclaimed writer who pulled poetry ‘from the air’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
Source: thetakeaway.org