David Yezzi, in his New Criterion review of Ashbery's Other Traditions notes Ashbery's skepticism about his own projects and compliments JA's "lucid and charming" prose. Ashbery's memory was prodigious and he spent much time translating Raymond Roussel and writing about him. While Ashbery was notoriously quick;there are many anecdotes, some of them retold in my book The Last Avant-Garde. It would not have been diffiuclt for Ashbery, having prepared his thinking in advance, to write out the lecture in the back seat of a four-hour car drive — as he told Jim Tate — DL
<<< [In Other Traditions,] each writer has been chosen in support of an ars poetica: “For me,” Ashbery writes, “poetry has its beginning and ending outside thought.” Accordingly, [John] Clare receives praise for his “nakedness of vision” and his ability to begin a poem anywhere and end it anywhere: “Like Kierkegaard, Clare could have said of himself: ‘It seems as though I had not drunk from the cup of wisdom, but had fallen into it.’” Ashbery hails [Thomas Lovell] Beddoes’s work for being fragmented, [Raymond] Roussel’s for “the hiccuping parenthetical passages that continually frustrate and sidetrack the reader, until, ready to expire like an exhausted laboratory rat in a maze, he finds himself miraculously at the end of his wanderings, though scarcely the wiser for them.” To describe [John] Wheelwright, whom Ashbery often finds unintelligible, he relies on the wit of W. S. Gilbert: “If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me/ Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!” It should be said that, even as it champions obscurity, Ashbery’s prose remains lucid and charming.
Riding, who “sought to reduce poetry to the bare bones of thought,” and Schubert, who mimics “the texture of thought itself” (Rachel Hadas’s phrase), come close to Ashbery’s project as he himself describes it: “I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry.” Ashbery goes on to quote George Moore on the brand of pure poetry that he champions, a poetry devoid of ideas which nevertheless mimics the process of thinking: “Time cannot wither nor custom stale poetry unsicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” This seems true in the short term, but ultimately false. Poetry steeped in the conventions and thoughts of its day becomes dated and declines only until sufficient time passes for that poetry to be treated as the product of an entirely different age, at which point it may attain a new timelessness. While poetry cannot be wholly confined to the rational, it cannot lie entirely outside of it either. One suspects that poems meant to contain just the right particular thoughts will fare better in the long run than those that deliberately eschew thought altogether.
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from The New Criterion, February 2001
https://newcriterion.com/article/ashbery-yezzi-2263/