“We had macaroni for lunch every day,” John Ashbery read, “except Sunday, when a small quail was induced / to be served to us”
This produced laughter from the audience. Mr. Ashbery looked up from the page at us, and delivered the last two lines:
“Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.”
But we were there — at least three hundred of us, possibly more — we’d come to see him, to hear him tell us these things, and more things. Every chair was taken in Wollman Hall and those audience members who’d arrived not late, but not early, either stood or sat on the floor. The poem, titled, “The Room,” begins:
“The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.”
At the start of the evening, in his introduction, the poet and scholar David Lehman said that he’d studied Ashbery’s poetry as an undergraduate at Columbia University. And while Mr. Ashbery read from Notes From the Air, the two men sat side by side at the table, as intimately unacquainted as people sharing a table at the public library, each reading from his own copy of the same book, one aloud, one silently, and Mr. Lehman seemed a student again, absorbed in the poetry of one of his favorite poets.
Mr. Ashbery, in a white shirt, read not slowly, not quickly, and rarely looked up.
After reading from his published poems, Mr. Ashbery pulled loose pages of new poems from a well-handled manila envelope. Now, it wasn’t going to be possible for any of us to follow along, either from a book or from memory.
To hear a poem being read without having had time with the poem on the printed page is to feel mildly unmoored, and in between poems, when Ashbery looked up, his gaze was as piercing as it was opaque, which lent to the sensation. But his gaze is a private gaze that allows for privacy; one needn’t be seen drifting in public.
He read a new poem titled, “He Who Loves and Runs Away,” and then searched in silence for another poem to read. As he leafed through his papers, we watched in our own silence, staring at him so intently as though it was our duty to keep him from vanishing between poems.
“I wanted to read something, but I can’t find it,” he finally said.
He moved on to his translation of Reverdy, and then he talked some about his poetry, and took questions.
Of the poem “The History of My Life,” he said, “The poem sounds like straight autobiography, and actually it is, but I didn’t realize it when I was writing it. I had been writing about my own life without knowing it.”
Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.
I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even. There was I: a stinking adult.
I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in. No soap.
I became very weepy for what had seemed
like the pleasant early years. As I aged
increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,
thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud
came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years.
About the strange non-engagement between dreams and life: “We dream, we get up, we go about our business and a few hours later, we’re back to being invaded by dreams. The president dreams, the pope dreams. But we go about our lives as though these dreams never happen.”
Ashbery had read a pantoum, the title poem of his collection, Hotel Lautreamont (which also appears in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.) About this unusual form Ashbery said, “The pantoum is weird and rather frustrating — you have to abandon what you wanted to write and let [the form] write it for you. This is one of the only poems I have written on a computer, and I found it rather helpful.” He usually types his poems on a manual typewriter.
About starting poems in the middle: “The middle is where everyone starts writing. It’s not as though there is a threshold called The Beginning. The same can be said for the end — there’s no formal ending.”
John Ashbery looks forward to visiting the Poussin exhibit at the Met where he might see Poussin's Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.
