John Ashbery: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
John Ashbery (photo Giovanni Giovannetti / Effigie)
Where is poetry to be found?
Interviewer:
Three Poems is largely prose, prose poetry, rather than verse. Some readers would object rather strenuously to calling it poetry. Within this kind of form, I am wondering where, for you, the poetry specifically is to be found? What is the indispensable element that makes poetry?
Ashbery:
That is one of those good but unanswerable questions. For a long time a very prosaic language, a language of ordinary speech, has been in my poetry. It seems to me that we are most ourselves when we are talking, and we talk in a very irregular and antiliterary way. In Three Poems, I wanted to see how poetic the most prosaic language could be. And I don't mean just the journalese, but also the inflated rhetoric that is trying very hard to sound poetic but not making it. One of my aims has been to put together as many different kinds of language and tone as possible, and to shift them abruptly, to overlap them all. There is a very naive, romantic tone at times, all kinds of clichés, as well as a more deliberate poetic voice. I also was reacting to the minimalism of some of the poems in The Tennis Court Oath, such as "Europe," which is sometimes just a few scattered words. I suppose I eventually thought of covering page after page with words, with not even any break for paragraphs in many cases -- could I do this and still feel that I was getting the satisfaction that poetry gives me? I dont' quite understand why some people are so against prose poetry, which is certainly a respectable and pedigreed form of poetry. In fact, too much so for my taste. I had written almost none before Three Poems because there always seemed to be a kind of rhetorical falseness in much that had been done in the past -- Baudelaire's, for instance. I wanted to see if prose poetry could be written without that self-conscious drama that seems so much a part of ti. So if it is poetic, it is probably because it tries to stay close to the way we talk and think without expecting what we say to be recorded or remembered. The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me.
John Ashbery's work comprises volumes upon volumes of poetry. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitizer Prise in 1975, A Wave won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1984, and Girls on the Run (1999) was inspired by the work of artist/novelist Henry Darger. His Paris Review interview was published in 1983.
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