The poetry of John Ashbery, who died Sept. 3 at age 90, had a singular and lasting influence on me from when I first started writing. Later, I was fortunate to meet him enough times to call him a friend.
Like so many people, I felt heartbroken to learn Ashbery had died, even though he lived what we can all agree was a good long time. His death isn’t just the loss of a genius poet, but also spells the end of an epoch. With a few exceptions, Ashbery was the last living member of a generation of American poets constellated with greatness (Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg were born within just a few years of him). This ought to be nothing to be sad about: The next great American poets are probably already writing, or at least have been born. But for so many poets alive today, Ashbery has always been there, a major force and guiding light in this country’s poetry since the publication of his first book, “Some Trees,” the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize (selected by W.H. Auden) in 1956, and certainly since the appearance of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” two decades later, in 1975.
It is easy to say incorrect things about Ashbery’s poetry. Some will tell you his poems are difficult, elusive, even meaningless. This is not true. They are difficult because they are doing something with language that is unfamiliar. The poems search for meaning, and even a kind of truth, in a way that we are unused to. I remember at first it took me some time to let go of some things I believed about poetry, so I could begin to experience his poems. What is most difficult about Ashbery’s poetry is not understanding, but accepting it.
Ashbery’s poems are written for the most part in what Marianne Moore called “plain American which cats and dogs can read,” though as in the poems of Dickinson and Whitman and just about every interesting poet since, many exciting unusual words appear in them, too. They sometimes have no obvious subject matter or situation or single speaker, though sometimes they do. His syntax could be at times plain, at others twisting, and is always accurate, especially on rereading. His poetry unfailingly rewards the attentive and open reader; it is unfriendly to the distrustful one, or the one who pops into the poem to pick up some convenient wisdom along with some milk for the cat.
Continue reading over at the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of the poetry collections “The Pajamaist” (2006), “Come On All You Ghosts” (2010) and “Sun Bear” (2014). His book of prose, “Why Poetry,” was published in August.