This houseboat day

On parking my car in the driveway,
after an amiable lunch in town,
I flicked open one of my detested
devices to see if there were any
urgent messages to address, before
joining my English Cocker for an
afternoon constitutional about the
grounds. Nothing pressing, apart
from word from The New York Times,
of the exit of the most-cited En-
glish language poet at this page,
at the permissible age of ninety.

One doesn't like to hear of an ex-
tinguishment of wonder and genius,
at any age. Deep into his 80s, he
found himself translating the boy
Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, 
for which practitioners of three
languages will never forget him -
English, French, and Male Youth.

Preparing to attest to these few
facts I did observe the precaution
of counting citations here, for
William Shakespeare. They are in
second place, voluminously, but I
reckon that John Ashbery engages
the search engine as translator,
as well as poet - much as David
Ferry, and long may he do so.

I have accepted the loss of Shakes-
peare, on the premise that it will
never take place, as I listen to
Mozart, too, to stay hip with the
times. John Ashbery is the most un-
cannily American, uncannily contem-
porary poet in my reading, and not
least for his having seeded his
work with breathtaking likelihood
of future accompaniment, to people
in our place, never abandoning the
voice of fraternity, once removed.

Insulting as the vestal virgins of
his art may take this familiarizing
embrace to be - and couldn't we all
voice that objection - one declares
it on the grounds of Ashbery's per-
sistent, prescient sharing of our 
place. His poetry will be a fixture 
of guest rooms, of bedside tables, 
of daybreak at the barricades, and
at twilight of illusion, lifting. 
He is constantly being found.

As here, where I enjoyed my lunch
today in Charlottesville, Virginia.
I had a good companion, but then I
always do.

           And Others, Vaguer Presences

           Are built out of the meshing of life and space

           At the point where we are wholly revealed
           In the lozenge-shaped openings. Because
           It is argued that these structures address themselves
           To exclusively aesthetic concerns, like windmills
           On a vast plain. To which it is answered
           That there are no other questions than these,
           Half squashed in mud, emerging out of the moment
           We all live, learning to like it. No sonnet
           On this furthest strip of land, no pebbles,

           No plants. To extend one's life
           All day on the dirty stone of some plaza,
           Unaware among the pretty lunging of the wind,
           Light and shade, is like coming out of
           A coma that is a white, interesting country,
           Prepared to lose the main memory in a meeting
           By torchlight under the twisted end of the stairs.























John Ashbery
Houseboat Days
  Poems
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977©

Once a hobbledehoy

  ..
  and just as our way is flat across
  Dales and gulches, as though our train were a pencil

  Guided by a ruler held against a photomural of the Alps
  We both come to see distance as something unofficial
  And impersonal yet not without its curious justification
  ..

  Only the wait in stations is vague and
  Dimensionless, like oneself. How do they decide how much
  Time to spend in each? One begins to suspect there's no
  Rule or that it's applied haphazardly.

Right in the middle of a

stately, searching poem,

one will feel release to

laugh where the phrasing

or the tempo says, "OK."

Is this because, we know

a poem wants more of us,

and is a merry vengeance

part of what it expects?

I honestly happen to be-

lieve, thinking strictly

as a rower, such release

is the finer moment of a

blade's recurring sweep. 

In the assimilation of a

new work of sound, more-

over, it's irrepressible

to pursue its adaptation

to one's own conditions,

adventurously to own it, 

even as its autonomy re-

veals itself. Poetry has

it easy, and yet nothing

else can have it harder.

What one can envy in the

poet, is that he's where

we like to be, composing

invitations to his home.

That needs gorgeousness.

Ah, where is it, for me,

except inside a rule ap-

plied haphazardly?

  In the wearying and world-weary clouds of steam like great

  White apples, might I just through proximity and aping

  Of postures and attitudes communicate this concern of mine

  To them? That their jagged attitudes correspond to mine,

  That their beefing strikes answering silver bells within

  My own chest, and that I know, as they do, how the last

  Stop is the most anxious one of all, though it means

  Getting home at last, to the pleasures and dissatisfactions

    of home?

John Ashbery

Houseboat Days

  Melodic Trains

  [fragment]

op. cit.

Montale, Ashbery, in transit

E andando ned sole que abbaglia
sentire con triste meraviglia
come'è tutta la vita e il suo   travaglio
in questo seguitare una muraglia
che ha in cima occi aguzzi di   bottiglia.


And walking in the dazzling sun,
feel with sad amazement
that all life and its torment
consists in following along a wall
with broken bottle shards embedded in its top

Some departure from the norm
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The consensus gradually changed; nobody 
Lies about it anymore. Rust dark pouring
Over the body, changing it without decay -
People with too many things on their minds, but we live
In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,
Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness
And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.
How careless.

So l'ora in cui la faccia più impassibile

è traversata da una cruda smorfia:

s'è svelata per poco una pena invisibile.

Ciò non vede la gente nell'affollato corso.

I know the moment when a raw grimace

crosses the most impassive face:

for an instant an invisible pain is revealed.

The people in the crowded street don't see it.

.. Yet in the end each of us

Is seen to have traveled the same distance - it's time

That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,

Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it were

The same as making it happen. You're not sorry,

Of course, especially if this is the way it had to happen,

Yet would like an exacter share, something about time

That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means.

This posting was conceived

in glad memories of times

with Mme Ulli Steltzer,

portraitist of Mann, Einstein,

Oppenheimer, Bruno Walter, 

and me; lady of Princeton
and one's mentor in coffee.

Yes, Ulli. I'm Papa's

complaint with Brahms.

Eugenio Montale

Ossi di Seppia, 1926

Jonathan Galassi, translation

Cuttlefish Bones

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998©

John Ashbery

Saying It to Keep It from Happening

 Houseboat Days

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975©

Ludwig van Beethoven

Op. 73, Adagio un poco mosso

Walter Gieseking, piano

Herbert von Karajan

The Philharmonia Orchestra

EMI, 1952©

A participle, nowadays

a word formed from
a verb and no long-
er seen as a verb,
as in guy reading.

   All through the fifties and sixties the land tilted
   Toward the bowl of life. Now life
   Has moved in that direction. We taste the conviction
   Minus the rind, the pulp and the seeds. It
   Goes down smoothly.

   At a later date I added color
   And the field became a shed in ways I no longer remember.
   Familiarly, but without tenderness, the sunset pours its
   Dance music on the (again) slanting barrens.
   The problems we were speaking of move up toward them.

























John Ashbery
Houseboat Days
  Whether it Exists
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977©

Wynn Bullock
Boy fishing
Gelatin silver print
1959
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Striking a style

I report the evident closing of the tumblr, ciné.

..

but it's all right 

the way of staying 

you started comes back procession into the fire 

into the sky 

the dream you lost 

firm in its day 

reassured and remembered.

John Ashbery

Houseboat Days

  The Thief of Poetry

op. cit. 

Anything you canoe

 First, you say.
 How? Precedent
 or preference?

 From experience
 but also expec-
 tation, who can
 forget the boat
 that defines a
 body of water?

 Anything one ca-
 noe it canoe too.
 It might have be-
 gun many things.

..

What I am writing to say is, the timing, not

The contents, is what matters. All this could have happened

Long ago, or at least some other day,

And not meant much except insofar as the eye

Extracts a progress from almost anything. But then

It wouldn't have become a toy.

And all the myths,

Legends and misinterpretations, would have scattered

At a single pistol shot. And it would no longer know what

  I know.

         

John Ashbery

Houseboat Days

  Fantasia on 'The

  Nut-Brown Maid'

1977

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999©

"One cannot guard .."

The date
that's never 
about anything else.
His birthday.


..


Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,
These other ones, call life. Singing accurately
So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of
Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers
Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulises
The different weights of the things.
                                But it isn't enough
To just go on singing. Orpheus realised this
And didn't mind so much about his reward being in heaven
After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven
Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to
them.
Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.
But probably the music had more to do with it, and
The way music passes, emblematic
Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it
And say it is good or bad. You must
Wait till it's over. "The end crowns all,"
Meaning also that the "tableau"
Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,
Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure
That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes.







John Ashbery
from Syringa 
Houseboat Days©
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977


Christoph Willibald Gluck
Danse des Ombres from
Orphée et Eurydice
Wilhelm Kempff, DGG©