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Andrew Epstein on John Ashbery ("Street Musicians")
2.6k Plays2 years ago
An episode I've been waiting for from the beginning: Andrew Epstein joins the podcast to talk about John Ashbery, one of the most important poets of the last hundred years, and his beautiful and haunting poem of mid-career, "Street Musicians."
Andrew is Professor of English at Florida State University and the author of three books: Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford UP, 2009), Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford UP, 2016), and The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry since 1945 (Cambridge UP, 2022). He blogs about the poets and artists of the New York School at Locus Solus and his essays and articles have appeared in such publications as the New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, LARB, American Literary History, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, Jacket2, and Raritan. You can follow Andrew on Twitter.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure today to have my friend Andrew Epstein on the podcast to talk about John Ashbury. And really, there's no one better to talk Ashbury with than Andrew, so I'm so glad that he agreed to come on the podcast and to talk about this
00:00:29
Speaker
great and just absolutely crucial poet. The poem that Andrew has picked for the episode is a poem called Street Musicians, which is the first poem in Ashbury's book from 1977, I think. Andrew's nodding. Good, I've got my history right. The book is called Houseboat Days.
Andrew Epstein's Work and Expertise
00:00:55
Speaker
And I'm sure we'll have plenty to say as the episode goes on about
00:00:59
Speaker
you know, why that fact which I just relayed to you might matter. But before we say more about Ashbury, let me tell you something about our guest, Andrew Epstein. He is a professor of English at Florida State University.
00:01:17
Speaker
and the author of three books. The first of his books is called Beautiful Enemies, Friendship and Post-War American Poetry, and that was published by Oxford University Press in 2009 for people who want
00:01:39
Speaker
to read Andrew discussing the poem that we're talking about today, that book contains just a beautiful and elegant reading of the poem and situates it in Ashbury's career in ways that I'm sure we'll talk about here. But if you want to see it in print, that's where to look.
00:01:59
Speaker
Andrew's second book, a book that I really love as well, is called Attention Equals Life, The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture. That too was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I'll make links to all of these books available in the episode notes. Oh, and that reminds me, I don't know how often I need to say things like this. I shouldn't presume that everybody is listening to every episode. So if this is your first episode, you should know that in the episode notes, you'll also be able to find a link to the text of the poem that we're talking about. So for people who would like to look as well as hear it, you can find it there.
00:02:44
Speaker
Most recently, Andrew is the author of a book called The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945. Cambridge likes these very straightforward titles as part of a series of such introductions, but Andrew's written a beautiful one and such a valuable book to have.
00:03:03
Speaker
That was published by Cambridge University Press, I think at the very end of 2022, is that right? Yeah, or January 23. Okay. Is that depending on which side of the Atlantic kind of thing? Yeah, something like that. Okay, good. That book has this ambitious task of telling the story of American poetry from 1945 to more or less the present.
00:03:32
Speaker
And, you know, as I'll talk about in a minute, the book couldn't have a better author for a task like that. So aside from the books, Andrew regularly blogs about the New York School of Poets at a blog called Locust Solas.
00:03:52
Speaker
And I wonder, maybe we should maybe we'll even have occasion to talk about the blog, Andrew, and to talk about the title of the blog, which is an interesting one. And and of course, I'll make a link available to that blog. That blog is like a first place I often go when I'm curious about some, you know, obscure corner of New York school poetry history. And often Andrew has the answer ready and waiting for me there.
00:04:18
Speaker
And then he's written, you know, mostly but not exclusively about poetry. So, you know, Andrew writes, you know, mostly about poetry, but is interested more broadly in 20th century and 21st century literature and culture, art, for publications like the New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literary History, the Wallace Stevens Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, Jacket 2, and Raritan.
00:04:48
Speaker
I like how that list of venues indiscriminately mixes the scholarly and the public-facing and journalistic. I think that tells us something about the guests we have here. Andrew is, in my way of thinking of him, first and foremost, a literary historian, someone who has
00:05:16
Speaker
at his fingertips, and not that this kind of thing comes easily, it's the product of many years of devoted research, a kind of story of American poetry and of American literature more broadly, and to some extent beyond the shores of this country as well. Literature and culture from the past century and a half,
00:05:46
Speaker
He is the person to whom I turn in off-the-record kinds of ways when I want to know, have I got this question of influence right? Or would so-and-so have read such-and-such by the time they wrote?
00:06:07
Speaker
such and such. I ask Andrew, and he's normally got an answer for me.
Cultural Context in Epstein's Books
00:06:12
Speaker
But of course you can find that history in his books too and on his blog. But beyond that, Andrew's history, his way of doing literary history, and I think this is partly by virtue of, well, two things really. One, his interest in literary theoretical and philosophical questions,
00:06:37
Speaker
And two, the sense I have, and that anyone would have reading his stuff, that Andrew cares deeply about the art forms that he's writing about himself as art forms, that he's a beautiful reader of texts and of images and of
00:06:58
Speaker
other kinds of avant-garde experimental artistic practices. Because I think he's got that philosophical and literary theoretical background and because he's such a sensitive reader of texts,
00:07:15
Speaker
His literary histories always wind up telling us something about the way we live now. So, you know, the first book about friendship, you know, appeared at a moment when social media was really the sort of moment of flowering to whatever it has now become.
00:07:36
Speaker
a little more than a decade ago when Facebook felt omnipresent, where Twitter had recently, I think, launched. Somewhere in the background maybe of Andrew's book are sites like Friendster. I mean, these are all things like in the deep background. I'm not saying the books are about these things, but reading the book, you felt like you were learning something about the way friendship
00:08:03
Speaker
and rivalry and social networks sort of functioned in the culture that surrounded you. His second book about attention, in ways that I don't need to elaborate here, couldn't be more timely.
The Evolution of 'Contemporary' in Poetry
00:08:23
Speaker
That's a book about the kind of interrelation of the topic of attention as a kind of philosophical or phenomenological question
00:08:33
Speaker
and what Andrew calls everyday life projects. So works of art that have sort of formal and thematic concerns with what ordinary experience is like, what the everyday is like. In both of those books, the New York school poets, and we'll say more about what that term even means in a moment,
00:08:58
Speaker
feature prominently, but Andrew is sort of Catholic, lower-sea Catholic in his tastes, and is more than happy to situate that kind of coterie of poets about whom he's a real expert in a wider literary landscape, and that's one of the many reasons why I so value his work.
Ashbury's Influence on Epstein
00:09:19
Speaker
You know, in Andrew's last book, it occurs to me as about a period, it's sort of like,
00:09:25
Speaker
I think Andrew and I are about the same age. When we were in grad school, there was this period referred to as the contemporary. And what that meant was like everything after 1945. It's becoming harder and harder to call that contemporary in a way. But of course, Andrew's work is capturing some of the ways in which that term still applies. And so I'm grateful for it. And I'm just super grateful to have you here. Andrew Epstein, how are you doing today?
00:09:53
Speaker
Speaking of the everyday. Great. I'm doing very well. Thanks so much for the introduction. Very happy to be here.
00:10:01
Speaker
Oh, good. And I'm so glad we get to talk about Ashbury together. You know, as I was saying to you before we started recording today, we've had all kinds of poets already featured on this podcast, and some of them I have the sense going into recording will be relatively unknown to our listeners and then others more famous.
00:10:24
Speaker
And I suppose Ashbury, I would think, falls towards the more famous end of that spectrum. But having said that, I really like not to assume that our listeners know very much about things that we come into these conversations, you know, stuffed to the gills with stories and context at hand.
00:10:46
Speaker
Maybe we could begin the conversation today, Andrew, with your telling the relatively uninitiated listeners, who was John Ashbury?
John Ashbury and the New York School of Poets
00:10:56
Speaker
How was he someone whom you came to care about? And then maybe if you could wind up by telling us something about where the poem that you've chosen for us fits into all of that, that would also be really useful.
00:11:08
Speaker
Sure, yeah. So for people who aren't that familiar with it, John Ashbury was considered by the time he died in 2017, probably the most famous living American poet, but his career was always sort of, and his work was always sort of controversial, in that it seemed very difficult and unusual. And his rise to fame was accompanied by a lot of people saying, you know,
00:11:31
Speaker
How do we read this guy? Does the Emperor have any clothes? That sort of thing, which we can talk more about that debate. But to go back to the beginning, he was born in 1927 in Western New York State and grew up basically sort of on a farm and in a remote location.
00:11:47
Speaker
and then grew up as a very kind of precocious artsy kid and then liked classical music and art and poetry and then went to Harvard where he studied literature and poetry writing and he got to know a couple of other poets that became really important to his life and career Kenneth Koch
00:12:05
Speaker
and Frank O'Hara who became his very close friends and eventually after graduation moved to New York and that group of poets all kind of gathered there in about 1949, 1950 or so and formed the nucleus of this movement that Cameron mentioned the New York School of Poets although none of them were really from New York they all came from elsewhere and after college kind of gathered in New York and
00:12:31
Speaker
There's a lot to say about the movement but they all were very interested in modern art and painting and in the avant-garde. They kind of rejected the reigning kind of stuffy conventions of mid-century formalism and T.S. Eliot and his descendants and so they were
00:12:45
Speaker
style themselves as avant-garde experimental writers who were very immersed in the art world. And Ashbury wrote very kind of strange experimental poems and didn't have a huge readership, but he did win a big prize for his first book that was given by W.H. Auden.
00:13:02
Speaker
a book called Some Trees that came out in 1956. And he continued writing on into the 60s and to the 70s where we get to our poem. But he was sort of on the margins. He says in one poem, that's sort of autobiographical, barely tolerated, living on the margin of our technological society. So he, he definitely started out as a kind of marginal avant-garde poet.
00:13:27
Speaker
But he gradually grew closer and closer to the center and to canonization. And in his, I guess, sixth, fifth or sixth book, self-portrait in a convex mirror that came out in 1975, won all of the big prizes that year. And he won the Pulitzer Prize in the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. And I've always heard it described as the the triple crown, the triple crown. Right. Everybody always says that the triple crown of poetry that year. And suddenly,
00:13:57
Speaker
it was gradual then sudden but he was very famous and this is when a bunch of books came out that were there was a book edited by David Lehman called Beyond Amazement which was sort of like how do we go beyond just being like wow this guy's I don't know what he's talking about but he's famous like how do we start to analyze his work and stuff so there was a moment in the late 70s when
00:14:16
Speaker
critics like Harold Bloom and a lot of other people, Helen Venler and Marjorie Perloff, were all writing about Ashbury. And those, for people who don't know, are like probably the three giants of poetry criticism in the second half of the 20th century or the last few decades of the 20th century. Yeah, and one thing to say about them also, which maybe is indicative of Ashbury's unusual status, is that just for example, Marjorie Perloff and Helen Venler are often thought of as
00:14:42
Speaker
poets interested in different sides of sometimes called the poetry wars or whatever you want to call it but the the landscape of American poetry where Marjorie Perloff has been a champion of the avant-garde and Helen Venler is
00:14:54
Speaker
definitely been more interested in traditional less avant-garde poetry, however you want to put it. But the fact that they both are interested as well as Harold Bloom in Ashbury suggests the way in which he became a figure that had appeal for both experimental poets and scholars interested in that work and also
00:15:16
Speaker
sort of more mainstream audiences. So and then he had a very long career and he went on writing voluminously up until 2017. And so he and went on to be, as I said, sort of considered the great living American poet, but still baffling audiences kind of all the way until the end.
00:15:40
Speaker
And it seemed like almost until the end of a book, a new book almost every couple of years. Especially in the last 20 years, the last 15 years, there was almost a book a year, so he kind of sped up in his production toward the end. But the luminous amount of poetry written in this book and this poem that we're going to talk about comes right
00:16:01
Speaker
It's not really the middle, but it feels a little bit like the middle. It's his eighth book, and it's the book that came right after the breakthrough success of self-portrait in a convict's mirror. And we can talk a little bit more about that. And just doing some quick math here. So he was born in 27, so he was 50 when this book came out. And 48 when the poem was published, because it came out a couple years before.
00:16:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Okay, good. Yeah.
Personal Anecdotes with Ashbury
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah. You were going to say something else, though. Oh, I mean, just to go back to your initial question about sort of how I came to Ashbury. Yeah. I think that I was aware of him in college, but didn't know much. He did come and read from his very long poem, Flowchart at Bryn Mawr College. I was at Haverford College and it was right down the road. And
00:16:50
Speaker
I went and saw him read and I didn't understand a word of it, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought every line was interesting, but I had no idea what to make of the whole thing. And so I saw him read in about, I don't know, 1990 or so. And then when I got to graduate school, I actually had this, well, I took a class in which I read Ashbury and it suddenly clicked for me that I thought he was really fascinating and interesting. I loved Wallace Stevens and I was really interested in the connections between Stevens and Ashbury. But then I also had
00:17:15
Speaker
this really fortuitous experience where I was asked to be the sort of teaching assistant and research assistant for Kenneth Koch, who, as I mentioned before, was one of Ashbury's closest friends and one of the central figures of the New York School of Poets. So I had this accidental firsthand introduction to the world of Koch, Ashbury O'Hara, through my working with Kenneth Koch. And I became close with Koch and I worked with him for about
00:17:39
Speaker
seven years running a reading series while I was in graduate school. But for one year I was his assistant and the first thing he had me do, I think the very first day I met him maybe was he gave me a bunch of paper and said, a stack of paper and said, can you go Xerox these? And it was letters and postcards that John Ashbury had written to him over the course of decades that he had just, they weren't in a library or anything at this point. This is 1993 or 1994. And they were just in his home. And so he asked me to Xerox them for him
00:18:08
Speaker
This was actually in order to give them to David Lehman, who was writing a book about the movement. Is that the last stop on guard? The last stop on guard, yeah. So I started reading them, and instead of quickly zero-axing them all, I was just absolutely amazed and engrossed in reading this private correspondence between these two poets that I thought were very interesting poets. So it was a little voyeuristic and total fascinating.
00:18:33
Speaker
How did Ashbury strike you as a letter writer? He's an amazing letter writer. He's really funny, and they're very gossipy and chatty, but also filled with interesting commentary about poetry and art. They're sort of a goldmine. I assume they'll be published at some point.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, right. I'm sure. I've read many of James Schuyler's letters to John Ashbury, which are in Schuyler's collective letters. And I guess I just wanted to point out, too, for people who haven't or who are noticing this or thinking about this, people interested in the New York School.
00:19:06
Speaker
and our following along with this podcast. Remember our very first episode all the way back was with Brian Glavy on Frank O'Hara. And then we had a more recently an episode with Eric Lindstrom on James Schuyler. So we're quickly work, you know, eventually we're going to work our way through the
00:19:22
Speaker
the major figures of the New York school. Of course, those aren't the only ones. There's also Barbara Guest and a whole host of second generation figures like Al Smiley and Bernadette Mayer and stuff. But the three that we've talked about so far, you've talked about so far, are central figures in this movement and close friends.
00:19:41
Speaker
Skyler wasn't in your story because he wasn't at Harvard, so he sort of came in later. He comes in just a couple years later in New York and he becomes one of Ashbury's closest friends. They have a particularly close bond, Ashbury and Skyler. So when you were working for Coke, it's a fascinating story about getting to
00:20:01
Speaker
read and then copy those letters and postcards. But did you have a chance to sort of be in rooms with John Ashbury too and get to know him personally? Yeah, one thing that was amazing about working with Koch is that he introduced me personally to a whole world of poets in New York and beyond who would come to New York and read on campus.
00:20:21
Speaker
this reading series that I ran with cook pretty early on we had Ashbury read in it I think twice and so I had the opportunity to meet him a few times and I never really got to know him well I got to know other people better he was a little a little hard to get to know as a young you know grad student kid and then later I did have some correspondence with him about my work and you read and like I might say more about that later if you want
00:20:45
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I will want. I will want. Good. So, OK, so that's that's all really fascinating, Andrew. And, you know, I think you've set things up beautifully. I mean, in a moment, I'd like to play a recording of Ashbury reading. He's he's a poet that I guess because he was so famous and his career went on so long and because he was amenable to this kind of thing, like we just have this great wealth of recordings of Ashbury.
00:21:15
Speaker
at poetry readings and so on. And so we had a couple of, as you pointed out to me before we started here, there are a few recordings of street musicians that we can play. Is there anything you'd want to say by way of setting up the recording before we say it? No, he mentions that he's reading this and it's still unpublished. So this is 1975. And the poem came out in the New York Review of Books in 75. And then it became the lead off poem in the book to come.
00:21:40
Speaker
Houseboat days in 1977 and so he's about 48 here and he I think just maybe to situated a little bit, he has just gotten. I'm not sure if he had won the Pulitzer Prize at this point but he was about to and then he was getting a lot of acclaim and this poem.
00:21:58
Speaker
I think, as we'll talk about, feels like it's sort of reflective of a position in his life and sort of a middle-aged moment of looking back to a kind of distant origin point in the poem, as you'll see, is about the loss of another person and what happens to the person who's kind of living on after that. So that's just something to listen for.
00:22:18
Speaker
Okay, so this is Ashbury reading in 1975. I'll make this link available. There are plenty of places where one can find recordings of Ashbury, but maybe the single best place to go to look for them is the Penn Sound Archive, which is just a marvelous archive in general. So I'll link to that as well. But here is John Ashbury. Let's listen and then talk about it.
00:22:49
Speaker
This one is called Street Musicians. This is now an unpublished poem. One died and the soul was wrenched out of the other in life, who, walking the streets, wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on the same corners, volumetrics, shadows under trees.
00:23:14
Speaker
farther than anyone was ever called through increasingly suburban areas and ways with autumn falling over everything, the plush leaves, the chattels and barrels of an obscure family being evicted into the way it was and it is. The other beached glimpses of what the other was up to, revelations at last, so they grew to hate and forget each other.
00:23:40
Speaker
So I cradle this average violin that knows only forgotten show tunes, but argues the possibility of free declamation anchored to a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself in November, with the spaces among the days more literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
00:24:00
Speaker
Our question of a place of origin hangs like smoke, how we picnic in pine forests, in coves with the water always seeping up, and left our trash, sperm, and excrement everywhere smeared on the landscape to make of us what we could.
00:24:20
Speaker
All right. Andrew, I think I know the answer to this, but I don't know that our audience would. And maybe I'll be surprised by your answer in any case. As you listen to Ashbury read, is this a typical kind of reading for him of a poem?
Analyzing 'Street Musicians'
00:24:39
Speaker
And what do you notice, just first of all, about the way John Ashbury reads a poem, to the extent that this is typical?
00:24:48
Speaker
I think that Ashbury divides audiences in their sense of whether they like how he reads or not. I think Ashbury people sometimes talk or poetry people talk about this and he has a kind of flat conversational way of reading. He doesn't use poet voice. He has a kind of, I don't know, somebody who describes it or he describes it as like a Midwestern
00:25:09
Speaker
because he's from Western New York, like a kind of like rural sort of, I don't know, twang he makes fun of himself for having. So he reads in a way that might not be to everybody's liking and took me a while to warm up to it. He doesn't, you know, give you lots of highs and lows and dramatic.
00:25:24
Speaker
sort of inflection. But I have come to really like the way he reads. And then when you and I were talking about which one to use, I listened to the three or four that are on pen sound or maybe there's five. And I particularly like this one because I actually think that it does. It is quite, there is some pathos and some emotional resonance in this one. And some of the other ones he reads a little more quickly or whatever. So I find it a moving reading of this. I think some people might not expect this from what they think a poetry reading might sound like.
00:25:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And we can think of lots of different kinds of examples of more or less contemporary poets who read in quite different ways. I only got to see Ashbury read once in person. And for me, the experience was sort of like a revelation because it wasn't until then that I think I understood, I mean, this poem isn't the best example of it, that he was funny.
00:26:17
Speaker
And it was a very kind of flat, deadpan kind of humor, which I think I appreciated. Especially the later work has a lot of slapstick humor and those readings that probably the one you went to often were very funny. Yeah.
00:26:35
Speaker
And this one's not as funny. Yeah, that's okay. Well, this one is in fact quite moving right from the get-go in a way that is maybe, I mean, you know, Ashbury wrote enough poems that the minute you say like, well, he doesn't do this kind of thing, often you immediately think of another example or two of a case in which he does. But I want to say, and
00:26:55
Speaker
And maybe you can clarify for us that this is a kind of unusually self-disclosing and kind of emotive opening for a poem. One died and the soul was wrenched out of the other in life. And then it goes on. I'm sure there's a lot to say just about that opening line and a half.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, I know I agree with you. It is more direct and emotive than a lot of Ashbury and he certainly writes about death and mortality a lot but this is sort of disarmingly direct. On the other hand, something we can talk about is that it doesn't say
00:27:37
Speaker
You know, Sam died and I was really sad, right? And then there's a whole issue here about the sort of deflection of self-disclosure at the same time that it is self-disclosing. But there is an emotional directness to it and it's a very stark blunt opening. One died and the soul of, you know, it's quite dramatic. The soul was wrenched out of the other in life.
00:28:00
Speaker
It's a line with a lot of, yeah, I guess, emotional and gravitas and the idea of a soul being wrenched out. I find it, like you said, uncharacteristic of Ashbury in the power of that opening. You know what I had never thought of until just this very moment was the way Persian fairy tales begin.
00:28:27
Speaker
you know, how we say once upon a time in English. In Iran or in Farsi, people say, Yekibud, Yekinabud. And what it means is like, one was, one wasn't. And it's like another way of sort of putting you in a kind of in-between land of is this true or isn't it, you know?
00:28:49
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and I know that Ashbury knew Persians. Well, when you mentioned that, his, at that point, partner and later husband, David Kermany, who he had started seeing about four or five years before this poem. He was Iranian and was a Persian rug dealer. I wonder.
00:29:09
Speaker
I don't know. It seems not impossible to me, yeah. But okay, and so maybe we can say, well, since we've already introduced the topic of biography, and I know, I mean, clearly this is not a case in which we'll, I mean, the poem won't let us do a kind of
00:29:26
Speaker
dumb biographically reductive reading. But having said that, it invites and I think probably rewards a certain amount of biographical attention. So
00:29:43
Speaker
Andrew, what are some ways that we might think about who this one is for Ashbury? Well, for those of you who haven't really spent much time with Ashbury, he is not an autobiographical poet and he talks a lot about the fact that he's not in interviews. He says things like, you know, my biography doesn't come into my poetry much. I'm not particularly interesting. You know, my own biography has never interested me very much as material for literature. So he kind of
00:30:10
Speaker
He's always saying things like that. And his poetry is famously sort of indeterminate about who or what it's about. And he uses pronouns in a way that are very vague, one, you, we, you never know exactly what you're referring to. And he also creates what he says someplace, paradigms of common experience, or another place he talks about one size fits all confessional poems, or he calls one of his poems that a one size fits all confessional poem. So I think on one level, this poem is sort of like a
00:30:38
Speaker
a paradigm of a kind of common experience, which is being close with somebody, having them die, and then living on after they died and feeling yourself aging and growing further and further away from that person. The arc of the poem is about grief and it's about surviving in the wake of somebody's
00:30:59
Speaker
departure and then at the end about sort of looking back to the past and remembering some point of origin with that person perhaps. So on one level it's sort of vague and anybody can sort of relate to that. Live long enough and you'll have that experience. Right. And I think that's why it's a poignant poem, a poem of middle age, a poem of aging which we can talk more about.
00:31:19
Speaker
But my interest in the poem also initiated with my interest in how Ashbery does write about his life and does, as he says someplace, I don't write about my experiences, I write off of my experiences, which is an interesting distinction. But he sort of uses them as a point of departure and often kind of disguises them or allegorizes them. So just by changing the preposition from about to off,
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's nice. It gives us a sense of like, well, life has an occasion for poetry or something, rather than subject matter necessarily. I think that's key to Ashbury. And so I was interested in this poem as an elegy. And this goes way back to the first book that you mentioned and actually my dissertation before that, that I was really interested in the
00:32:06
Speaker
interplay of kind of friendship and competition and rivalry between various post-war American poets, and particularly Frank O'Hara and John Ashbury were of interest to me. And for those of you who don't know, Frank O'Hara, who was one of his closest friends and a fellow New York school poet, tragically died at the age of 40 in 1966 in a tragic accident on a beach.
00:32:29
Speaker
in Fire Island, New York. And so this was a terrible blow for everybody who knew O'Hara. And it was a particularly, I think, very terrible grief that Ashbury felt, losing his best friend at the age of 40 in a bizarre accident. And so
00:32:44
Speaker
I started to look for signs that Ashbery, who's notoriously doesn't write about his life, was actually writing off of his friendship and experience with O'Hara and the loss of a close friend and a fellow poet, which I think is key for this poem.
00:33:01
Speaker
Actually, this is going back to my initial interest in this poem was, well, I think I already liked the poem, but then I was writing about this issue of friendship in O'Hara and Ashbury, and Marjorie Perloff said in her book on O'Hara, one poet who did not write an elegy for Frank O'Hara, which a lot of people did, even though he wrote the beautiful introduction to collected poems was John Ashbury.
00:33:21
Speaker
right he didn't she said he didn't write and and i started to find these examples of poems that i thought were elegies for her and right so i made i made a case that this poem um on just on one level doesn't need to be read this way it can be read in lots of different ways but for me it's particularly moving to think of it as a as an elegy for a fellow poet who has died young
00:33:43
Speaker
And we can strengthen the case, although maybe in a moment we want to interestingly complicate it or something by reminding our listeners of the title of the poem, right? Right. So for me, that was a clue. I mean, Ashbury's poem titles are notoriously
00:34:04
Speaker
um in you know um well they're notorious misleading they don't necessarily connect to the poem they sometimes are a kind of red herring or they point in a direction away from the poem like they're always complicated they're not just like how other poets give titles to poems but this one actually seems pretty closely tied to the poem in that it seems to be um about a pair you know one and the other
00:34:26
Speaker
And then the second stanza, it says, so I cradle this average violin. And there are references that make it seem like these are two street musicians. And so street musicians are like, you know, sidewalk buskers or people who are playing the subway or on the street. But I kind of see it as maybe a trope or a metaphor or a figure for like a fellow poets, a group of poets. And then, you know, in my book, I made the maybe a stretch, but, you know,
00:34:56
Speaker
the street and musicians made me think of New York like kind of urban artists, you know? And so I don't think it's too much of a stretch. I think that in a way it feels like a metaphor for, especially given what the poem is about for he and his friends, his fellow New York poets who are kind of street musicians in a way.
00:35:17
Speaker
And I think of O'Hara even more than of Ashbury as a poet of, I mean, among other things, of the streets of New York, right? Like writing about, you know, in his famous lunch poems, or the, I do this, I do that poems, right? Right, very much so. Right, about walking around on the streets of New York, right? Yeah, so if he has O'Hara in mind, the street would be close behind, right? O'Hara is certainly a poet of the streets, and then the figure- It's harder in many cases to even identify settings in Ashbury poems. They seem to take place
00:36:02
Speaker
for biographically-inflicted reading. Yeah, so I think you're talking about the fact that it also feels like it could be a sibling relationship. Yeah, maybe. Because I assume you could read it as a love poem. One died and the soul of the other was wrenched out. But there are signs to me that it's more about either friends or possibly siblings. And there is a reference in line, what, nine or so,
00:36:10
Speaker
on the page or something more than O'Hara's might.
00:36:28
Speaker
about an obscure family being evicted into the way it was and is. And I started to realize that Ashbury, when he writes about what seemed to be friends, he often is simultaneously writing about siblings and brothers. And Ashbury had a very
00:36:53
Speaker
tragic event in his childhood where he had a younger brother who died. Ashbury was, I don't know, about nine or so, or maybe the brother was nine. I'm not sure of the exact ages, but he lost his brother. And he never talked about it for decades until close to the end of his life. He gave some interviews where he mentioned it. And that seemed to me maybe another subtext here that he frequently is thinking about friendship and siblinghood. It kind of blur together. And he said some kind of poignant things about
00:37:21
Speaker
the loss of his brother and how he died at the age of nine. I felt guilty because I wasn't getting along with him. I'd have been nasty to him. So that was a terrible shock. And someplace else he talks about like a kind of, um, uh, that he had like a mythical kingdom in the woods with his brother and friends, but then his brother died and the group kind of broke up and he always kind of wanted to get back to that early childhood, um, missed a mystical kingdom. Yeah. Mythical kingdom. So, um,
00:37:48
Speaker
And he's got that poem later in his life, or the history of my life is it? Yeah, which has a relevant line. It sounds a lot like this poem. It says, once upon a time there were two brothers, then there was only one myself, which is one of the more autobiographical lines in his whole body of work. And so one died and the soul of the other was wrenched out in life. Once upon a time there were two brothers, then there was only one myself. So it does seem like a poem about losing someone close to you that could either be a friend or a brother.
00:38:16
Speaker
And actually I have an observation now to make about the coming back into this poem about those lines.
Themes of Time and Transition
00:38:24
Speaker
So one died and it's not and the soul of the other was wrenched out. The syntax is slightly more confusing than that, right? It's like one died and the soul was wrenched out. And then we get a line break so that if you were to
00:38:40
Speaker
you know, pause, you know, upon a first reading of the poem there, you might think that, oh, what's being described as the soul leaving the body of the one who died, right? But then it's only after the line break that you get, of the other in life. So one died and the soul was wrenched out of the other in life. So
00:38:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's nice. I hadn't thought about that, but it does. I think Ashbury does this quite frequently where it's sort of the meaning shifts with the line. And so you do get this almost like a, I don't know, like from a cartoon or something of like, you know, Bugs Bunny or something when he dies and like the ghost kind of goes up, you know, one died and the soul was wrenched out. But you listeners can't see this, sort of
00:39:18
Speaker
simulating what it might look like for a soul to leave a body with her hands. So just imagine us doing that. And then in a way, it's like there's something odd to me about the way syntax is working, especially in the first part of the poem. So one thing we haven't said for people who aren't looking at it is that the poem is in two stanzas that are two blocks of lines.
00:39:43
Speaker
So if I refer to the first half and the second half, that's what I have in mind. Where it's like, I don't know, it keeps getting away from you or something. It's hard to read the syntax that is.
00:40:00
Speaker
But maybe what it's doing is sort of simulating what it's like to outlive someone or to survive. I think so, yeah. That kind of winding syntax is sort of similar to the experience of the other who needs to keep walking streets and seeing on and on.
00:40:17
Speaker
Making their way into the future alone without the other. So yeah, I think that's intentional There's some other weird things with syntax to like missing the plush leaves the chattels and barrels. I don't get that line. Yeah, we can come back to it But yeah, no, I think I think that makes sense to me. Um, so, you know, I I think it's
00:40:38
Speaker
about um a really crushing experience right from the first lines that the the other um he keeps using these words one and other but the the other in the first stanza uh has to endure in the wake of somebody dying and um and and uh walking the streets wrapped in an identity like a coat sees on and on the same corners volumetrics shadows under trees yeah
00:41:04
Speaker
talk about, I mean, I'm so I'm so I'm interested in wrapped in an identity like a coat. I'm interested in the weird word volumetrics. Yes. You know, so I mean, it seems like it's this like journey against sort of the lone survivor who I don't know if it's kind of a weariness of sees on and on or maybe also like can see
00:41:29
Speaker
see further than he used to be able to see. Sort of like with experience comes wisdom or greater vision or something like that. But wrapped in an identity like a code is a kind of a somewhat typical Ashbury sense of like selfhood is not fixed or essential. We don't have a core of a self in Ashbury. It's always kind of mutable and in flux. So you can put on an identity like a code, but it's not permanent. So I feel like it has something to do with that.
00:41:58
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds right to me. Not permanent, but also wrapped in an identity like a coat suggests that you'd be cold without it. Though you could take it off, you're kind of clinging to it for the time being rather than just loosely wearing it or something.
00:42:18
Speaker
Right. Protective. I mean, it seems like it has something to do with sort of how to go on without the other wearing this sort of protective identity, you know, who I am now without you, something like that. Seeing the same corners maybe is like I'm still walking the same streets that we used to be street musicians on. Right. It does sound like an urban landscape. Corners, volumetric shadows under trees. I'm imagining like a New York City street with trees, you know,
00:42:44
Speaker
planted by design or something, not a forest or something. Yeah. And we're definitely not in, we're in the city here, which again, maybe is a sign of New York schoolness. Maybe it's just a nod to the title of, these are street musicians and one, only one musicians left and he's seeing the same places they used to be or whatever. But there's that really weird word volumetrics. I was thinking that, you know, what other poet can get away with using the word volumetrics here, which means like,
00:43:10
Speaker
It's such a strange word and he often will just surprise you with an unexpected word that you might not even think fits but it's a word that has to do with like you know volume or measurement but it's not usually it's an adjective I looked it up and I was like because it's like you know you know volumetric
00:43:30
Speaker
What was I found an example Picasso metric beaker or something? Yeah, something like that or Picasso loved playing volumetric Representationalism off of flatness right like an adjective for something that's like three-dimensional But he says so you see on and on the same corners volumetrics Like not analyzing it somehow. Yeah, but it's sort of like seeing this kind of weird
00:43:53
Speaker
3D landscape maybe to me. I don't know, it reminds me, and maybe this is just me and having read a lot of Ashbury, but he was really interested in the painter, Decurico, who has this sort of haunting street scenes that have like kind of cones or geometric. Yeah, they almost look like people who can't picture a Decurico painting
00:44:19
Speaker
And Ashby didn't have one on a cover of a book, right? Shadow Train or, yeah. Or no, not that one.
00:44:26
Speaker
He does use a decirico now, I can't remember. Anyway, OK, that's not the point. But what I was going to say is they almost look like if an artist were doing a kind of preliminary sketch of something and was just sort of putting in the kind of perfectly geometrical volumes before then, rendering them. But it's as though they've been left that way. So the landscape is sort of dreamlike and surreal.
00:44:53
Speaker
but perfectly geometrical. Right. Yeah. That's the vibe that I was getting there. Yeah. That makes sense to me. So shadows and gold. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, so then I was just going to say, like, so if if we begin, if we begin very much in a kind of urban, a sort of surreal urban landscape that's been, you know, somehow that's being seen and registered and experienced through the experience of grief. Um,
00:45:21
Speaker
very quickly we move on out of the city and into the suburbs, no? So how can we account for that, Andrew, given what we've been saying about?
00:45:32
Speaker
significance of the poem's urban kind of setting to begin with. Well it seems to me like well farther than anyone was ever called through increasingly suburban areas in ways with autumn falling over everything seems to indicate a kind of like trajectory for this poem away from the city away from the other who's now dead or the one and and into something that's increasingly suburban
00:45:56
Speaker
which I don't think is accidental. I think it's sort of about growing up and settling down when you see the word suburban. I think both literally leaving the city behind, but also, you know, the sort of template of
00:46:13
Speaker
growing older and moving out of a city and into a home in the suburbs, that this speaker or the other here is going on that journey, right? And it seems it's almost like a Star Trek line, like, you know, to boldly go where no man has gone before farther than anyone was ever called.
00:46:34
Speaker
Yes, except it's like an ironic reversal of that, right? That's what I was thinking, yeah. To timidly go where every man goes before. Exactly, yeah, through increasingly suburban airs and waves. And then you get this, what I feel like is a dominant note in this poem with autumn falling over everything.
00:46:52
Speaker
It's a very autumnal poem. Towards the end, there's the or the second half, there's the line, the year turning over on itself and remember. So I feel like it's a really autumnal poem. And maybe not everybody feels this way. But autumn has its kind of built in melancholy and loss and aging. So I feel like it's autumnal for those reasons. And this is a poem about somebody feeling called
00:47:18
Speaker
to move on uh go farther than anyone's ever gone before maybe farther than any of his friends when he was younger had gone before you know he feels like he's going far away from something right and it's into suburbia and into autumn and um uh i know that you know the poem soonest mended but it's a it's a famous um ashbury poem that also uh kind of was written before this one but it also is a poem sort of about middle age and about
00:47:46
Speaker
I don't have it in front of me, but learning to conform basically and settle down. The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out. Right, and the brushing of the teeth and all that. This feels like a similar gesture of with some mixed feelings. Putting away childish things and growing up. Well, I was just going to say,
00:48:09
Speaker
So if we've been trying to keep thinking about Ashbury's biography, not as a key to the poem, but as a kind of occasion for it, the occasion it supplies is sort of complex, because on the one hand, you could think of him as a poet who had this kind of youthful and formative and exciting experience in New York with this group of fellow travelers
00:48:38
Speaker
And then O'Hara was the only one of them who died young, but perhaps in other ways Ashbery might feel like he was the one of them who went on in some ways. He certainly became the most famous. Yes.
00:48:58
Speaker
But sorry, one of the complications I was going to say is just like, it's not as though he began in the city. As you told us before, he like began in the country and then moved to the city and then has the sort of suburban, I don't know, suburban. Eventually he moved to Hudson, right? Yes. Okay, so say more. Yeah, no, I just think that
00:49:16
Speaker
that in some ways, Ashbury is often narrativizing his own career as a poet, but in vague and allegorical ways. And I think here he, and so I think he is talking about
00:49:31
Speaker
being separated from his initial coterie. And at some point right around this time, he gave an interview where he said, you know, we all started out together, but somehow I separated myself or got separated from the others.
00:49:47
Speaker
meaning his group. And critics were doing this. Harold Bloom, for example, was saying Ashbury is much better and doesn't deserve to be considered along with that group, the New York School of Poets. So, you know, I think he's always thinking about sort of groups and his relationship to those groups and to his group of friends. I mean, I studied with Bloom and we read Ashbury and I can't imagine Bloom ever having taught O'Hara. And he probably never mentioned
00:50:16
Speaker
And you probably didn't mention the New York school as a movement or anything. No, Ashbury was a part of the School of Stevens. Right. You know, that was what mattered to Bloom. Fucked out of the avant-garde collective. And so I feel like this poem, at least on one level, is about kind of the movement from youth to age, but also from kind of avant-garde collectivity to
00:50:38
Speaker
being anointed as the one, you know, canonical poet, and also moving from a kind of, yeah, I guess it's sort of the same thing, but from like an avant-garde marginality to centrality. So I think suburban here means a lot of things, but I think one thing means is like physically leaving the city, maybe settling down elsewhere. He did buy a house in Hudson, New York around this time and split his time between New York and there, but also sort of metaphorically, like a kind of a
00:51:06
Speaker
um safer tamer more prosperous place that this this uh survivor has found himself um and it's and it's uh autumn leaves falling over everything and uh he's and and then you get this reference a little bit further not to go to the next little bit but of an obscure family being uh well the autumn falling over everything the plush leaves the chattels in barrels of an obscure family being evicted into the way it was and is
00:51:34
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to ask you about those lines because I struggle with them and I think I could use some help kind of making sense of them.
Memory and Legacy in Ashbury's Work
00:51:43
Speaker
I don't think they're that glossable in terms of especially the plush leaves, the chattels and barrels. There's no, there's no comma there. It's a strange, almost like a little like friction or static in the poem for a second for me. But I do think that these are the belongings of an obscure family. They're the leaves and barrels, leaves. I don't know. I think I said that in my
00:52:06
Speaker
reading of this that maybe the leaves have something to do with the pages of a book, like Leaves of Grass, in the sense that this is also a story about poets and about having an obscure family being evicted with their leaves and their stuff in barrels. Maybe has something to do with, again, that obscure family
00:52:28
Speaker
could either be his own family or the family that the one and the other belong to. But it also could be another playful wink at something like the New York School as a group. And it's no longer what it was. Obscure in the sense of nobody knew who they were, if you're thinking about the New York School. Obscure also that they were charged with being obscure-antist and difficult.
00:52:55
Speaker
That's just one way of reading it. But I think it's just, you know, I think it feels to me like another image of kind of there's just a lot of different moments in this poem of again, that autumnal mood of leaving, of being kicked out of, you know, there. I also think there's another interesting line break of an obscure family being evicted when you get to the end of that line, you think of, you know, a poor family being shoved out onto the street, but then you move to the next line, it's into the way it was and is. Yeah. They're kind of being shoved out into
00:53:24
Speaker
into reality or something. As you noted, there aren't any commas in the plush leaves, the chattels, and barrels line, which seems like
00:53:39
Speaker
The poem is breaking its own rules. This is a poem that's difficult in many ways and in many of the ways that are characteristic of Ashbury. But it's well behaved with its grammar and punctuation as Ashbury poems tend to be. So in that sense, he's like, there is a kind of conservatism to Ashbury's compositional style, even if, in other ways, obviously, he's a very avant-garde poet.
00:54:06
Speaker
So, but the fact that there aren't those commas tempts me to try to read the plush leaves as like, to read leaves not as a noun, but as a verb. It feels like it's saying the plush leaves the chattels. Yeah, whatever that would mean. But like, so like the person leaves the something in something else, right? But it's not person, it's plush. And I'm not sure what to do with that.
00:54:31
Speaker
I don't know, but he does have these moments where he, I like the way you put it, but breaks the rules of the, you know, and that's what I meant sort of like, like a moment of static, like maybe the emotion is kind of strong there. And so it just kind of goes a little haywire. Yeah. Yeah.
00:54:48
Speaker
And I like being evicted into the way it was and is. It suggests that what that family is being kicked out of is an interval of comfort that had been a kind of
00:55:03
Speaker
an illusory sort of respite from the way things actually are. Yeah, like a haven from the way things were and will be, you know, yeah. Right. And so if what's being, if the occasion here is like grief of some kind, then we can say like, well, you know, we've now entered the period
00:55:24
Speaker
following the loved one's death in which that person doesn't exist, but there was a period before their birth in which they didn't exist. And so the way it was and is, maybe. Or if it's about a collective moment of togetherness and harmony, which I think comes back at the end, so we'll just preview that. But if there was a moment, like a shining moment, that mythical kingdom of our youth,
00:55:50
Speaker
it didn't exist before and it doesn't exist after. It's like a temporary, temporary haven, something like that, refuge. And then at the end of that stanza, there are revelations at last. Never trust Ashbury if he says revelations at last.
00:56:09
Speaker
Ashbury is another very typical move of his is to sort of kind of promise moments of epiphany or revelation or where everything will become clear and then kind of ironize it or undercut it or pull it away from you. So just my spidey sense goes up when Ashbury says revelations at last, because you're not going to really necessarily get some kind of final answer. But it does build to a kind of conclusion.
00:56:36
Speaker
I feel like we probably should pause for a second on just another really odd word choice, but the other beached glimpses of what the other was up to.
00:56:50
Speaker
Beached is a strange word to use as a verb there. You know, a beach, a ship maybe, but how does the other beached glimpses it almost like with Ashbury, sometimes he's sort of substituting words that you kind of expect it to be a different word. Yeah, the other it almost feels like it should read the other glimpsed beaches.
00:57:11
Speaker
which would be a normal, like, verb noun. Caught glimpses. Caught a glimpse of something, right? But a beached glimpses. I don't know what to make of it, except it's another just strange, unexpected moment. But yeah, I because I was troubled by this, too, I looked up beached in the beach as a verb in the OED. And there is that, of course, that like primary sense of, you know, you beach, it's sort of to run something onto a boat normally onto a beach. Yeah. There's also a kind of
00:57:41
Speaker
a now obsolete, I think, sense in which that word is used in, I think it's obsolete, is used in falconry as like giving to like whet an appetite by giving a little bit of a meal as a kind of preview or something.
00:58:01
Speaker
I was trying to shoehorn that meaning into this, but yes, I agree. It's clearly there's something unusual about it. The fact that that word comes on the line break seems
00:58:15
Speaker
Yeah. Well, like it feels like the other is, the other is beached, like a whale is beached. The other beached. The other beached. But then you get glimpses of what the other was up to. Right. And there we depart from the more sensible language of the one and the other. Now they're both others somehow. And actually you don't know which one's glimpsing which one. Right. Right. Because of that. Obviously the one who's
00:58:39
Speaker
Well, I don't know. I was going to say the one who survived might have glimpses of what the one who died is up to in the sense of like they're not up to much because they're dead. Right. But then there's also a kind of supernatural idea that the the one who died in the first line is catching glimpses of what the survivor is doing. Right. Right. I don't think you know, which somehow they're glimpsing, they're catching glimpses of what
00:59:05
Speaker
each other are doing even though one of them's dead and one of them's alive. Yeah, we don't know, but I guess what we do know for whatever it's worth is what the consequences of that sort of moment of recognition are, which is that they grew to hate and forget each other.
00:59:20
Speaker
Yeah. And it's a strange end to the stanza because it feels like the stanza has been so much about like a close loved one or friend that's lost and your soul is wrenched out of you, but it ends and kind of moving on into the future, but it ends with this image of, you know, hatred and forgetting. Well, your first book is called Beautiful enemies and it's about friendship, right? So, yeah. So I'm sure you have something to say to us about rivalry might
00:59:46
Speaker
Sort of create these negative effects alongside. Yeah, that is a lot about what I talked about about this kind of strange mix of enmity and affection that colors these friendship between poets I mean, I think they loved each other but there was also a kind of fear of being too close and especially fear on the part of Ashbury or her of writing too much like one another or being lumped together and
01:00:08
Speaker
And so, they do often come back to kind of negative effects of pushing away from friends, of kind of clearing space for one's own individuality. So, I feel like, you know, this is an image of that a little bit and also maybe just over time growing to, you know, the initial grief and closeness maybe fades and maybe there's resentment or there's, you know,
01:00:32
Speaker
forgetting, right? You know, we move farther and farther from those that we once were close to. So there's a bunch of different ways of reading it. It also, you know, echoes an early poem of O'Hara's about a brother and sister that has a line in it, and thus they grew like giggling fir trees. And it's so similar that it struck me as like, it was about a brother and sister and O'Hara writes, and thus they grew like giggling fir trees. So they grew to hate and forget each other.
01:00:57
Speaker
that maybe he's sort of alluding to an O'Hara poem about sibling closeness, but kind of like reversing it about growing to... I would say either alluding to it or he is unconsciously reproducing it or somewhere in between those two possibilities, maybe, have consciously echoing it.
01:01:19
Speaker
and changing its tone and meaning almost entirely, right? Yeah, obviously much more negative. But I feel like it's something about growing further away from the person that one was close to over time. Right. Because there's been some separation or something. Yeah. As though it's a kind of necessary kind of coping strategy or something. Right, yeah.
01:01:46
Speaker
Okay, so then we get to the break between stanzas and the second stanza begins, so I cradle this average violin, right? And that's the first I in the poem, the first person. And we got those vague pronouns in the first stanza, one, the other.
01:02:05
Speaker
I'm trying to think, yeah, there's no I. And then it suddenly moves from, I think, the past tense to the present. So I cradle, like, we suddenly are in the present and we get a kind of direct Ashbury first person line. So I cradle this average violin that knows only forgotten show tunes. Almost as though the kind of relationship between those two halves feels almost to me like the octet and sestet of a sonnet. I mean, the stanzas are longer than that.
01:02:32
Speaker
Like there's a turn there, right? There's a very clear turn and it's arranged, I think very carefully arranged into these two stanzas and I was thinking about the fact that it's a poem about a pair of people. There's a pair of stanzas. I don't think that's accidental, you know, that it's sort of one and the other and how they relate and these two stanzas with a kind of gap in the middle and a turn.
01:02:53
Speaker
turn away from the first one in a way. And also I noticed that the first one is 12 lines and the second one is 11 lines. Which is kind of neat. If it's a poem about subtraction and loss to go from 12 to 11 is interesting. The two pairs don't totally match.
01:03:19
Speaker
So you get this sort of first person steps forward and says, you know, and it's a little hard to know how to read. So like, is it there for because of everything in the first stanza? But we're just here I am. So so I cradle this average violin that knows only forgotten show tunes. But what sense might that might make as a description, a self description of Ashbury's? Yeah. I mean, it feels like a meta poetic, you know, here I am with my
01:03:44
Speaker
with my instrument and it's, you know, obviously kind of calls back to the title in a way that Ashbury poems don't always do, but it seems like a sign of a musician, you know, cradling this average violin. But as a statement about himself as a poet, Ashbury is often
01:04:01
Speaker
ironic and anti-heroic about his own poetry that he's just sort of bumbling along trying to figure things out and you know art has its limitations you can't stay there forever and art itself is sort of limited you know there's a kind of ironic amusement about yeah um
01:04:17
Speaker
And a skepticism of heroic claims about art and poetry in his work as a whole and his own work as a kind of, you know, I'm just doing the best I can sort of thing. So I feel like it's a typical moment of self-deprecation. I've got this average violin and all I know are old tunes, you know, sort of forgotten show tunes. Yeah. And maybe there is this sense in which like his poems are, you know, like, um,
01:04:41
Speaker
I'm thinking of that phrase, which Karen Roffman has used now as the title of her biography of his early years. The songs we know best. Yeah. The sense that Ashbury has in his mind like a kind of repertoire or songbook or something that's old fashioned actually, and that he's kind of
01:05:06
Speaker
always like riffing on it or humming along to it or approximating it in some kind of performance. Yeah. And he often will write poems that seem to, again, sort of self-deprecatingly acknowledge that everything's already been said before. I've already written all my poems before here I go writing another poem. Often, we haven't talked about this, but often the first poem in his books are very important.
01:05:32
Speaker
And I do think it's important that this is the opening poem of a new collection that they often take stock of where he's been. They often are about like, you know, I forget the line exactly, but like, you know, for this whole season, you know, the pages have been musty and now I'm turning the page and starting again, the first poem and self-portrait as one put into the packet boat. So maybe there's something here about
01:05:58
Speaker
He was just sort of like trying to rev himself up again to write the next poem. So right here, he's acknowledging all I all I have is this average violin and these old songs we know best that I keep riffing on over and over again. Also, there's something of that like sense of diminishment is also about.
01:06:16
Speaker
building on the sense of loss from the first half. You're not around anymore, my friend. I'm getting older and more suburban and all I've got is this average violin and old show tunes. Maybe it's a consequence of the losses of the first half. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm not capable of producing the same kind of music without my bandmate or whatever, as it were. Right. Yeah.
01:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's sort of how I read it. And then the violin knows only forgotten show tunes, but argues the possibility of a free declamation anchored to a dull refrain.
01:06:56
Speaker
Yeah, some very kind of Latin eight words and yeah, so say something about that. I mean, you know, it's also really I was thinking about how so they grew to hate and forget each other is like a very un-Latin eight, very like staccato single syllable lines. And this is very different.
01:07:16
Speaker
argues the possibility of a free declamation anchored to a dull refrain. It seems to me like something is going on there. I'm not sure how to read it exactly, but a tension between freedom and constraint or freedom and repetition of a refrain, perhaps in a show tune. But there's a possibility of saying something new and free here, but it also keeps coming back to the dull refrain. It's deeply derivative somehow. Right.
01:07:44
Speaker
But there's a tug of war there, like trying to say something new, but I'm also anchored or tied to this, you know, here comes the chorus again. Maybe in the same way that the year turns over on itself in November, right? Yeah, yeah.
01:08:00
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, go on. So yeah, I mean, I love the lines of the year turning over on itself in November with the spaces among the days more literal, the meat more visible on the bone. Again, feels like it's very much a poem about like autumn heading into winter aging, you know, Ashbury.
01:08:21
Speaker
is always writing about time passing and the pathos of time passing. And he said in some interviews around this time that he suddenly realized that as I've gotten older, it seems to me that what I've been writing about all these years is the passage of time during which I thought I wasn't writing about anything. He suddenly realized that it's the subject of his poetry. So this is an example of that, I guess. And the final words of self-portrait, you know, the poem whispers out of time.
01:08:50
Speaker
I know that you love the Chateau hardware too. It was always November there. Yes, another reference to November. I do love that one. It was always November there. And here it's the year turning over on itself. Although, as you said, it's also a sign of like,
01:09:06
Speaker
a cycle, not just, you know, the years turning over on itself, but it will turn again, I guess. Yeah, maybe we're making compost. Compost pile out of our leaves or something. Yeah. And I think there's such beautiful lines. I'm not sure what they mean exactly. The space is among the days more literal, the meat more visible on the bone. I don't know if you have any ideas about that. But I mean, it feels like it's about like this
01:09:30
Speaker
the space is among the days more literal seems like about gaps or emptiness or something, you know, maybe even the nights are longer. So the space as you get into winter, there's more night and more, more spaces between days. But
01:09:42
Speaker
Maybe so. I don't know about the meat more visible on the bone, but the spaces among the days, more literal, I guess I can imagine a sense in which, even if it's not about O'Hara, if there's the loss of a friend,
01:10:04
Speaker
you know, empties out your days, right? If it's a person with whom you'd otherwise be spending time or time on the phone or time devoting thought to, if nothing else. It feels like it should be, that's beautiful, I think, but it should be like tangible or visible. It's another place, he always slides in these words that don't quite
01:10:25
Speaker
fit. The space is among the days more tangible, but more literal. Although I feel like it has the same meaning of what you just said, but it opens it up a little bit more. It's a literal space. I was trying to think about that. I've always liked that line. It feels almost like from a fairy tale or something, but I don't know, the meat more visible on the bone.
01:10:45
Speaker
Or like a saying or something but while there is the saying of like, you know, let's put some meat on the bone or something, right? Let's add some substance to this abstract idea But you know if it's turning into November it's getting getting on towards winter and the meats more visible on the bone I guess my first instinct is it has something to do with like
01:11:09
Speaker
getting thinner and then having the meat, but I don't even know if that makes sense. Like if some, if an animal or a person is getting increasingly like depleted and thinner, would the meat be more visible on the bone? I guess maybe like you'd be more scrawny, like you'd see, but you really would see the bones more visible inside the meat. You know, like if you saw somebody's ribs or a dog's legs, you know, more bony, but it seems to have something to do with like, um,
01:11:35
Speaker
Well, I don't know. It's November. Maybe this is a Thanksgiving table or something. And the meat and the bone in question here is not a living animal or human, but a bird ready to be carved or something like that. And maybe if this returns us to the kind of sibling reading,
01:12:02
Speaker
the kind of familial dining table and the sharing of food and so on is more- And it doesn't necessarily even have to be sibling or familial, because it does immediately move into this image of an early moment of, well, literally dining together, picnicking, and just togetherness of collectivity. Yeah, I love that line, how we picnicked in Pine Forest. It's just so nice to say or to hear if nothing else. I know.
01:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, so those are the last five lines of the pump. Should we remind people of them? Yeah, I just absolutely love this ending. Our question of a place of origin hangs like smoke, how we picnicked in pine forests in coves with the water always seeping up and left our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere smeared on the landscape to make of us what we could.
01:12:51
Speaker
Yeah. So just beautiful writing, I think, but and also weird. And like it moves from a kind of high lyrical to sort of trash and sperm. Yeah. A lot of things are going on here. And I do like the the fifth to last line seems key to the whole poem. But like our question of a place of origin hangs like smoke. Hmm. Yeah. So tease apart some of those things. Yeah. Yeah.
01:13:19
Speaker
I mean, you know, the whole poem, if you read it from the beginning as being a poem about two close people and one has died and what happens afterwards, then it sort of ends by turning back to some question of like where we started out from. And it's not my origin, it's our, it's not even the question of a place of origin, it's our question.
01:13:41
Speaker
And it's about how we, you know, it's very insistent on the we and the are in the end. So it feels like to me, again, he's thinking about whatever group it is, some early moment of togetherness, a group, a group of friends, a family, but
01:13:56
Speaker
it doesn't answer the question in typical of Ashbury, that it's sort of like, it's a question hanging like smoke, which is a lovely image of sort of this, I don't know how you could read a lot of ways, but sort of in substantial wispy, hard to grasp. Yeah.
01:14:12
Speaker
where did we come from? How did we start out? How do we get? Is there some way to go back to like what he calls in Soon as Men did the mooring of starting out that day so long ago? It's the same kind of gesture about like, yeah, where did we start out from? He's always kind of circling back to this kind of maybe primal or early moment. And it seems and that is sorry to interrupt you, Andrew. But that that is, I just want to note here, like,
01:14:38
Speaker
In some ways, that structure of the circling back is like this ancient, it's the Odyssey story. It's like, sorry, the Odyssey, not the Odyssey. But it's the Nosto story, right? The kind of- Homecoming. The idea of homecoming, of circling back, of the return. But as you say, it's always like, for Ashbury, it seems like it's,
01:15:05
Speaker
tends to be shadowy or attenuated or impossible in some sense. You can never quite get there. Or when you think you've gotten there, it slides away from you. Right. I mean, so the mooring of starting out is like a clever and oxymoronic kind of riff on the morning of starting out, where the mooring seems to be something that would attach you, that wouldn't let you start out from it. And here, yeah, it's like this
01:15:32
Speaker
It's this kind of flickering shadowy scene of origin. It's not all of us gathered around the table and mom and dad are there. It's not that. Yeah. And it's interesting that it's a place of origin and not a time of origin. He kind of spatializes. He likes to do this a lot, but spatializes time.
01:15:54
Speaker
Yeah. And so it's like a place of origin that he's going back to. And it is kind of a memory, I guess. It's a strange memory to end on. Very vivid. Like you said, I love the sound of how we picnic in Pine Forest. We're not in the city anymore.
01:16:11
Speaker
And I think that's interesting that it does go back to a kind of pastoral or non-city place, or at least in the woods. And it's sort of maybe typical of us to sort of throw us off and send us into the woods.
01:16:28
Speaker
It also sounds like a nomadic kind of existence, right? Yeah. Yeah. Sort of stopping to eat in the forest or something, that kind of thing. Yeah. And then leaving our stuff everywhere and moving on to the next place or something, you know. But it's this very kind of
01:16:48
Speaker
you could say quotidian daily kind of moment, a moment in the past that is rich with meaning for him, resonant with meaning, and is a place of origin for him and the other and whoever else he's talking about.
Reflecting on 'Street Musicians'
01:17:04
Speaker
But it's a memory of picnicking in pine forests in coves with the water always seeping up.
01:17:11
Speaker
And that line suggests to me like it's under threat. It's sort of like, you know, it seems like a stable, this maybe goes back to your point, but a stable kind of origin, but it's actually, for some reason it reminded me this time around of something to do with like the movie, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but the memories in that movie are kind of, you know, dissolving and fragmenting. But here's the water is seeping up in the cove where we once
01:17:37
Speaker
I can't talk about that movie without crying. Okay. Yeah. You know what I mean, though? Yeah. Oh, I know what you mean. Absolutely. You know what it was reminding me of? Not the picnic in Pine Forest, but the coves with the water always seeping up like you. It's reminding me of the prelude and Wordsworth and the dream of the Arab. You know, that moment of like the I'm not going to be able to quote it exactly.
01:18:05
Speaker
But there is something sort of like romantic and kind of dream-like. Definitely. And also this feeling that disaster is kind of lurking at the margins or something. There's something precarious about this kind of origin story. Right. I think it was both maybe precarious to begin with, and then it's also precarious or vulnerable as a memory that it's sort of being washed away.
01:18:35
Speaker
So I want to ask you, though, to say something about the kind of what seems to me like a sort of jarring shift of tone with the scatological like sperm and excrement everywhere. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I have thoughts about it. I mean, it definitely is jarring somehow. You know, he obviously is going from this sort of lyrical voice to to
01:19:00
Speaker
something sort of abject and surprising, low, you know, trash and sperm and excrement. Suddenly we're, you know, talking about, you know, poop. But I find it very beautiful anyway. And I think that I kind of see what he's doing here about this memory of this early moment in which, you know, we tried sort of desperately to leave behind something on the world, smeared on the landscape, which is smeared as
01:19:28
Speaker
sort of painterly almost, you know, we have smeared ourselves onto the landscape to make of us what we could. You know, I think it is bodily in a way that Aspiry sometimes is sort of acknowledging the realities of bodies that we, I don't know, there's a line that I'm not going to remember, but about policing our bodily functions and Chateau hardware, but something about bodily functions here, but also just like
01:19:56
Speaker
It is a deliberately ironic, I think, metaphor for art making or poetry making. I take it he's not so interested in like we left behind like our bags of Fritos and our shit, but like we tried to
01:20:12
Speaker
leave something, a mark on the world. Richard Poirier actually, who's a very interesting scholar of American poetry and the pragmatist tradition. He has a, he just has a passage very briefly in his book, The Renewal of Literature, which might be the first time I saw this poem, I'm not sure, probably not, but he does talk about Wallace Stevens and a really wonderful Stevens poem called Postcards from a Volcano about people trying to, that
01:20:39
Speaker
children picking up our bones will never know that we once lived here. It's about sort of leaving behind something for posterity. And then he says, Ashbury's poem Street Musicians is in this tradition, and then he just ends the chapter. But that idea of sort of trying to leave something of ourselves, trying to make, I just find the end very kind of moving to make us what we could. Sperm would be one way to sort of leave something behind.
01:21:02
Speaker
biologically to sort of gestures obviously towards biological reproduction. Though for Ashbury and O'Hara, queer poets, sperm wasn't going to have that function. And excrement is another way of leaving something of yourself behind. Yeah, I like that reading, Andrew. So something to do with, again, kind of like
01:21:28
Speaker
unheroic, maybe somewhat ironic, but about the gestures that we made way back when in our attempt to kind of make something of ourselves and to leave something of ourselves smeared on the landscape. To make of us what we could. Yeah. To make of us what we could. I mean, I think there is a kind of, there's a possible queer reading of this poem about a kind of early
01:21:52
Speaker
queer collectivity that was a memory of this kind of early moment. This comes up in a number of poems where he sort of figures a kind of idyllic
01:22:06
Speaker
what's the word I'm looking for, almost Arcadian kind of moment of brotherhood and fraternity among friends and brothers, but it's sort of coded as an early gay enclave that was always under threat and was policed and repressed and so on, but was a kind of idyllic moment of
01:22:29
Speaker
Connection and I feel like this there's one reading of this poem that might gesture in that direction and yeah sperm being related to that as sort of a non-procreative but but also You know pleasure hedonism as well. Yeah, well, you know, right So, I mean, I feel I feel like this is all implicit in what you've you've just been saying But right it's as it's as though like the sperm which you know in a kind of normative situation like might be taken to
01:22:59
Speaker
you know, be sort of instrumental of the biological reproduction and social reproduction and in the ways that we're accustomed to. Here is sort of like repurposed as like, I liked what you said earlier about like almost like painting, like paint on the wall. So there's this kind of like, maybe what's being described here is a kind of redirecting of certain like bodily
01:23:22
Speaker
functions into art making or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he could have said.
01:23:32
Speaker
to be equally formal, he could have said, are trash, urine, and excrement, or piss, or pee, or something. But it's, I think, very noticeably and jarringly sperm there. And I think it has a lot of different meanings there. But I guess one could see this as a weird turn into the gross and abject. But it does seem to try to recuperate it with this idea of sort of, I was thinking this time, it's sort of like a poem about littering at the end. Like, why'd you leave all your stuff in the pond for us?
01:24:00
Speaker
an eco-reading of it or something. But I don't really take it that way as the main point. But it is some kind of maybe also useful abandon because it's also like I remember way back when when we picnic in Pine Forest and we sort of
01:24:14
Speaker
just lived freely and left our kind of waste behind. But the purpose of it wasn't just to be messy or to ruin the landscape, but to actually to make of ourselves something, to make of us what we could, a kind of almost like desperate attempt to change the look of things, as Stevens puts it in postcard from a volcano.
01:24:34
Speaker
I love it. And it sort of, well, it leaves open the question of like, well, what could we make of us, right? It doesn't say, right. Yeah. I just turned the page in my copy of Houseboat Days and the next poem in the book is called The Other Tradition, right? Which is, so that's interesting, right? That's how I think it lends credence to this way of reading.
01:24:52
Speaker
Yeah, and that poem is all about sort of, you know, and at least on one level, a kind of avant-garde tradition that actually is sort of, and it's also about a group of people who shared time together in working in this other tradition. So yeah, I do think it's ultimately, at least in part, a poem about growing up and away from
01:25:16
Speaker
a kind of early moment, I think, I can't remember what you called it, but like sort of a salad days or like early happy moment of heady collaboration and excitement in New York. And then growing older, growing more settled down and feeling sad and autumnal about everything. And then just sort of turning back and trying to remember this earlier moment and not being able to quite grasp it, but remembering some kind of exciting moment when we first set out to make of something of ourselves.
01:25:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's great. No, that that's beautiful. And what I wish I wish we could do is like just now turn the page. Let's talk about the next one. We'll be here for the next 30 hours. A four day podcast.
01:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, why not? Let's really test the medium. That would be like an everyday life project. Okay, good. Unfortunately, I mean, probably we can't do that. I'm getting hungry.
Closing Readings and Reflections
01:26:14
Speaker
But Andrew, it's been such a pleasure to get to talk with you. And I wonder if just one last indulgence I can ask of you is to is to read the poem from beginning to end one more time so that our audience can hear it in your voice. Sure, I'd be happy to. Street musicians.
01:26:30
Speaker
One died and the soul was wrenched out of the other in life, who, walking the streets, wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on the same corners, volumetrics, shadows under trees, farther than anyone was ever called through increasingly suburban airs and ways with autumn falling over everything.
01:26:51
Speaker
The plush leaves the chattels and barrels of an obscure family being evicted into the way it was and is. The other beached glimpses of what the other was up to, revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.
01:27:07
Speaker
So I cradle this average violin that knows only forgotten show tunes, but argues the possibility of free declamation anchored to a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself in November, with the spaces among the days more literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
01:27:23
Speaker
Our question of a place of origin hangs like smoke, how we picnicked in pine forests, in coves with the water always seeping up, and left our trash, sperm, and excrement everywhere smeared on the landscape to make of us what we could.
01:27:40
Speaker
Andrew Epstein, thank you so much for reading the poem and thank you for the conversation and for all the conversations we've gotten to have and will have about poetry. I really appreciate your friendship. Thank you. This was a real pleasure. Okay. Well, thanks everyone for listening and stay tuned. We'll have more episodes for you soon and I hope you all take care. Bye now.