Chinese Whispers

Description

You turn to your neighbour and cup your hand and say into his ear what you've heard. He does the same to a girl on his right. With each repetition the message gets a little further from the original intention. But as the intention recedes, the whispered phrases approach what they intend themselves. A poem, for instance, may start as a poet's statement. But a poem is less and more than an initial statement. It may start from a poet, but it doesn't finally belong to the poet. John Ashbery's new collection includes sixty-five poems. In each, a verbal nucleus, the original incitement to commit poetry, undergoes twists and modulations and arrives at a final, altered, form. The changes come about because the train of ideas proliferate, departing from the platform of a word or phrase. Each poem is a veritable Gard du Nord.

John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York. He grew up in Rochester and spent most of his time living with his grandparents. Ashbery had to leave the city and move to the country at the age of seven when his grandfather retired from his post as professor at the university. He went to Deerfield Academy at 16 and felt out of place in this '...sort of jock, upper-class WASP school.' (John Ashbery, 'How far to go too far,' The Guardian, G2, 24 July, 1997, 12.) He continued his education at Harvard where he met Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara and, along with James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, they became known as the 'New York School of Poets.' This was not an official 'school,' but a group of like minded poets seeking to undermine the serious and academic poetry written after the war in America. In 1955 Ashbery was awarded the Fulbright scholarship enabling him to go to Paris and he also had his first book of poetry accepted by W H Auden who, at the time, was the editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series. The collection of poems produced during Ashbery's time in Paris, The Tennis Court Oath, were extremely experimental and were not well received by critics. When his scholarship money ran out, Ashbery became an art critic and translator. Ashbery finally returned to New York after the death of his father in the mid-sixties and has remained in the city since then.

'Praised as a magical genius, cursed as an obscure joker, John Ashbery writes poetry like no one else.' 'The language of [John Ashbery's] books is informed by his roving enthusiasms for particular composers. His tastes are both eclectic and out-of-the-way.' (Michael Glover, 'A blue rinse for the language,' The Independent, 13 November, 1999) 'The careering, centrifugal side of Girls on the Run is one of its most effective tools in creating its special ainbience of good-humoured menace ... Ashbery has made the slush of signification, the realm where words slip, slide, perish and decay, uniquely his own.' (David Wheatley, Review of Girls On The Run, John Ashbery, Times Literary Supplement, 30 June, 2000) 'In his seventies John Ashbery offers a sprightly and energetic alternative. Instead of being sluggish he demands that the self must be even more alert, more vigilant, more attentive to the world around it, not indifferent to and weary of it. Alert, vigilant, attentive ... Wakefulness, the brilliantly evocative title of Ashbery's collection.' (Stephen Matterson, 'The Capacious Art of Poetry,' Poetry Ireland Review 62, 114)