review by Martin Stannard
PARALLEL MOVEMENT OF THE HANDS – Five Unfinished Longer Works, John Ashbery (Emily Skillings, Editor) 265pp. pub. Carcanet (UK) Ecco (USA)
These days the John Ashbery phenomenon, somewhat thanks to the internet, is even more of a phenomenon than it might otherwise have been. As if an Ashbery academic/critical industry keeping lots of sometimes probably quite dull people in university positions were not enough, thanks to today’s technology one is able, among other things, to take a virtual tour of his house in Hudson, which is kind of fun, and might give you some ideas for interior décor. I often think back to the mid-1980s when I wrote my Masters dissertation on the New York School poets and their relationship to English poetry, and there was just one book of critical essays about Ashbery to which I could refer, which was one more than there was on either Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch or James Schuyler. These days, with Google and all the rest, I don’t know where one would even begin with the background research.
But enough of that, except that this posthumous publication of five “unfinished” long-form works adds to what is already a huge body of work, and as such probably needs to justify its existence beyond simply giving us some Ashbery we haven’t seen before. We already have a lot of Ashbery poems. One might be excused for raising an eyebrow at the publication of something unfinished that dates back to the early 1990s (30 years!) even if the editor (Emily Skillings, Ashbery’s assistant from 2010 until his death in 2017) goes to great pains to point out that all the pieces presented here were “stored and kept just several yards from where Ashbery wrote poetry and correspondence” and “Though these projects hadn’t been prepared for publication . . . they also hadn’t been sent to the archives or put into storage. They may have been suspended – paused on their way to inclusion in a book – but they hadn’t been abandoned.” The cynic may ask, How come this stuff, which is so old, was never finished? Perhaps deep down the poet felt it wasn’t quite up to scratch but for some reason was unwilling or unable to let it go? But the editor has that one covered too, by stressing how important the notion of art as “unfinished” is in Ashbery’s life and career. That’s fair enough, but there’s “unfinished” and then there’s “30 years unfinished”. It has to be said that Skillings deals further with the cynic’s concerns, saying that “In the absence of any explicit instructions from Ashbery regarding these poems, and after consulting with many friends of the estate, I arrived at the conclusion that these projects . . . deserved to be seen”. Given that those “many friends” included David Kermani, Ashbery’s husband, and others who were very close to the poet, we should probably usher the cynic from the room, even if we can still hear some mumbling.
Click here for the rest of Martin Stannard's piece.
https://www.littermagazine.com/2021/09/review-parallel-movement-of-hands-by.html