A poet’s career in reviews

Nobody but a reviewer will be likely to read John Ashbery’s captivating book of bite-size essays on poetry and painting straight through from beginning to end. Some pieces look tastier than others right away (“The Figure in the Carport: Kenward Elmslie,” “Larry Rivers Was Dying. He Asked to See Friends,” “Further Adventures of Qfwfq, et al.: Italo Calvino,” “Brooms and Prisms: Jasper Johns,” “Frank O’ Hara’s Question,” etc.). But don’t take the bait. Arranged as they are by date of publication, the essays produce, in time-lapse glimpses, the equivalent of a memoir of how Ashbery turned himself into Ashbery.

By coincidence, “Selected Prose” was published almost simultaneously with a monumental biography of Willem de Kooning, which reads like a long footnote to Ashbery’s short book. De Kooning was born in 1904, Ashbery in 1927, but the postwar transformation of art in America -- make that art in New York -- affected them in similar ways. Both received elite training that was meant as preparation for respectable occupations in life. Both were indifferent to respectability. But each found idiosyncratic ways to deploy his traditional education in the acquisition of radical originality, at first under the influence of a charismatic mentor. For Ashbery, this was the poet Frank O’Hara (“his culte du moi is overpowering,” Ashbery remarked). They met at Harvard. “There was a lot more to twentieth-century literature than Harvard was then letting on,” and O’Hara had discovered where it could be found: in surrealist poetry, the fiction of Flann O’Brien, Jean Rhys and Ronald Firbank, and in modern music and painting. It was O’Hara who taught Ashbery how to ask, “Can art do this?”

Ashbery had to earn a living, so he began writing reviews: at first in New York, during postgraduate study at Columbia, then in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. He was precociously good at it; “Selected Prose” spans his whole career to date, 1957 to 2004. And since he gravitated to avant-garde works, readers will be grateful that his approach to all assignments was the same: What makes this thing tick? Excellence of certain kinds “confuses people,” Ashbery observes, so he gets around our defenses by writing as if he were holding a conversation with himself. Uninhibitedly fascinated by eccentric technical strategies, “the gimmick at the core” of a work of art, he lays out his findings in witty asides. On a poem by Raymond Roussel, which has to be pieced together by reading alternately backward and forward, Ashbery says, “It adds up to a tumultuous impression of reality which keeps swiping at one like the sails of a windmill.”

Roussel is a frequent point of reference in this book, the paragon of solitary, unappreciated commitment. His contemporaries derided him -- they waited for Roussel’s work “with impatient malice” -- yet throughout his life Roussel continued to produce writings based on rules of draconian difficulty, self-devised. “He sometimes spent an entire day trying to compose a sentence,” struggling for extreme concision, Ashbery reports. Such “awe-inspiring” efforts “somehow leave one feeling good, which is after all what poetry should do.”

Ashbery spent several years in Paris, working on a doctoral thesis on Roussel, then gave it up and returned to New York in the early 1960s, where he rejoined his pals in hanging out with painters. Yet how could the methods of painters be useful to poets? Ashbery’s elegiac essays on O’Hara, who died at age 40, tell how. O’Hara, like the action painters and the contemporary musicians he admired, viewed the work of art as a record of the creative impulse that prompted it; you shaped a poem or a painting as you went along. “What mattered was that chance elements could combine to produce so beautiful and cogent a work,” Ashbery explains. This was highly personal poetry but differed from the self-referential work of the contemporary confessional poets (Robert Lowell) or the Beat poets (Allen Ginsberg). O’Hara’s was unlike any previous poetry, Ashbery says, because “he borrowed freely from everywhere,” producing “big airy structures” that were “like the inspired rambling of a mind open to the point of distraction” or like “a bag into which anything is dumped and ends up belonging.”

“Belonging” could operate like a black box in that sentence, but “Selected Prose” provides nonpedantic and precisely relevant commentary on how many ways there are for words to belong in a poem -- or not belong. And because Ashbery’s own poetry is at least as daunting as any he dissects, watching him prod the insides of other people’s work reveals a lot about the gimmicks at the core of his own. By the end of the book, Ashbery has laid out not only a course in contemporary poetics but a portrait of the artist teaching himself to become a thoroughly Modernist poet -- in small bites, easy to savor, easy to digest. *