LAUREATE EX MACHINA: How John Ashbery composes poetry

John Ashbery, Planisphere, HarperCollins, New York, 2009

Many of you will have seen my review of John Ashbery’s latest book, Planisphere, which appeared on this website in late September. I had no qualms then, and I have none now, in saying that the book is rubbish. True enough, there are some edible morsels (the titular poem almost-quite-nearly makes one feel) but one must be able to stomach the smell of the garbage heap to find them. Such was the tenor of my criticism, and though unapologetically harsh, it was honest. It may seem easy for someone in my relatively obscure position to criticize a monolith like Ashbery. I have been accused of dragging him from the heights of Parnassus in order to hoist myself up. The only response I need make to such base accusations is to indicate the oeuvre itself.

But the review has been written and I shall let it stand. I am inflicting you, dear reader, with this history in order that my present confusion might be more substantial. For it was only several days since the publication of this review that I received a phone call from Georges Borchardt, literary agent. Borchardt has an impressive client list that includes Ian McKewan, the estate of Samuel Beckett, and of course, John Ashbery. Borchardt had read my review. I asked him what he thought and he only laughed his high staccato laugh and mumbled something which I couldn’t make out. Then he offered me the opportunity to interview Ashbery the following Tuesday in his Chelsea apartment.

Ashbery has won nearly every major poetry award that exists and some that don’t. I write for Flatmancrooked, a quality, but let us be honest, relatively unknown literary journal. My publication credits can be counted on one hand. Why on earth had Ashbery’s agent contacted me? Was he contractually obligated to conduct an interview and he wanted to do it as low profile as possible? Was he going to berate me, secure agreement to print a retraction? Or perhaps he and Borchardt would make me conveniently disappear? Every explanation I could fathom seemed equally implausible.

And so, with no explanation, I could only bury my curiosity and confusion under a mountain of study. Fate had smiled on me, perhaps; my unabashed honesty was finally paying off. I had five days until the interview—five days to devote myself entirely to preparing for my antagonist. I read Ashbery’s collected poems. I read numerous essays (by Perloff and Hoagland, Longenbach, and others) and every interview he’d ever given. I compiled a list of questions so long and of such depth that it took me an entire day and most of a night to whittle it down to something manageable. I memorized that list.

And so, on Tuesday, at 1:00 pm, when I arrived at Ashbery’s apartment and his doorman led me to the elevator, I was astoundingly prepared. If he or Borchardt expected to find a naïve, poorly-informed and under-read fledgling MFA graduate, they were grossly mistaken. Having so recently been steeped in his work, I was ready to confront the eccentric interior, not only of Ashbery himself, but of his house. The inside of his domicile, no doubt, would somehow reflect the every-day surrealism of his mind.

But when his partner, David Kermani, took my coat, I found myself in a rather ordinary and pleasantly decorated living room. Spacious, well-lit, two easy chairs facing a large window and the Hudson River beyond. Books on one wall and many stacked on the floor. The paintings I didn’t recognize, but I recalled Travis Nichols’ interview from the February ’09 issue of the Believer. They must have been by Winkfield or Freilicher. I looked for his typewriter. It was in the alcove where Nichols had said, but there was no postcard of Parmigianino’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The typewriter looked like a set-piece.

And here I learned a lesson about putting up defenses. I was armed to the teeth with incisive and uncomfortable questions. I was armored with the hardcovers of Ashbery’s own books. I was an awkward and shuffling medieval knight approaching a child who was content to scrawl out his imagination with a crayon. You can imagine how much of a fool I felt, how disarmed I was when I saw the poet.

Ashbery was like an old bottle of champagne—his eyes like the foil on the label, brushed free of dust and sparkling—the rest of him drab. If there was activity inside him, the possibility of a dramatic, pressurized outburst, he concealed it well. He spoke with a measured grace and confidence. He offered me tea. My confusion came flooding back and I began to doubt whether all my preparation had been useful.

He sat back in his chair and looked at me in silence for a few moments before speaking.

“You didn’t like my book very much.”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“Are you a poet, young man?”

“With all due respect, sir, aren’t I supposed to be interviewing you?”

“Quite right. Quite right.” Ashbery was distant, distracted, as if he wasn’t sure why I’d come. Or was I projecting this onto him? His eyes refocused on me. “Well, get to it then.”

I had dozens of things to ask, but I hadn’t thought about the progression, the order, the arc of the interview. I had no idea where to start. I mumbled.

“You know what you want to ask. Just ask it.”

“It’s very impressive,” I said. “Your ability to be meaningless.”

“Thank you,” he said.

His response seemed almost designed to shut down the conversation. He didn’t ask me to explain myself, but I didn’t know how else to reply. “When authors try to write a character with aphasia, they inevitably fail. The tendency and facility to create meaning is so great, that we slip into sense-making during moments of inattention.”

He sat there silently. I continued. “I can’t say I find such writing worthwhile, but—you know that. And I can’t expect you to explain why this is something people want to read. I just want to know how you do it.”

He stared at me very attentively, as if he were looking for my tells in a game of cards. “How I do what?” he asked.

I could feel him cataloguing my ticks and habits, how I crossed my legs, how often I readjusted my glasses. “How you manage to write such gibbering, vacuous, and inexplicably lauded poetry.”

Ashbery looked at me approvingly and then slowly stood up. “You’re sure you wouldn’t like some tea?”

I accepted, then, and he limped over to the kitchen where his partner had left a pot steeping. Some time during my awkward exchange with the poet, David had left the room. “I’m going to show you something,” Ashberry said, returning with two mugs, “that I’ve not shown to anyone. Ever.” He sipped his tea and motioned for me to do the same. It burned the roof of my mouth.

Ashbery showed me something. And for the last week and a half, I agonized over whether I should reveal it to the world. Not only could doing so potentially ruin my future career, but it would almost certainly ruin Ashbery’s reputation. My dilemma was compounded by the fact that Ashbery, seemingly, desired to reveal it. Why else had he taken me in to that room in the first place? I hardly slept. I went back to his poems. I found a few more gems that had slipped by me, that I’d deemed unemotive nonsense. I had to choose, ultimately, between following an old man’s last wish and ruining him, or keeping his secret against his will. There was also the third possibility that it was all an ingenious and diabolical artifice, that Ashbery had conducted me effortlessly into his stratagem. Perhaps my current agony, my chronic indecisiveness, was the end in itself.

Utterly lost, I called up Peter A. Stitt, a critic and the editor of The Gettysburg Review. I had met him at a Paris Review soirée the previous year. He had been kind to me, and we spoke a few times after that, but we did not know each other well. Stitt had interviewed Ashbery for the Paris Review in 1983. He was surprised to hear from me, but forthcoming with advice. It wasn’t long after speaking with him that I made my decision. The truth must be revealed.

When Ashbery led me into the back room, opening the white paneled double doors, I found myself in a clean, carpeted library. Bookshelves lined the walls floor to ceiling. This was to be expected in the house a poet. But there was no other furniture. No desk. No chairs. And Ashbery only had ten books or so. I do not mean in total. There were hundreds and hundreds of books, but Ashbery had dozens of copies of only a select few. And odd choices. Two whole bookshelves were filled with The World as Will and Representation. Next to that, close to a hundred copies of NTC’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions. Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae. The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test.The Aleph. The poems of Auden. The letters of Flannery O’Connor.

Ashbery walked toward the center of the room and pulled a cream-colored sheet from a tall, rectangular object. And there was the Machine. It was a head taller than Ashbery and must have been many times his weight. He motioned me forward and I slowly circumambulated the thing while he powered it on. It was dimensionless. Or perhaps extra-dimensional. He would open a vertical panel here and there to adjust a few knobs, and the shape of the machine, perceived from a single angle, would appear more hexagonal than rectangular, now star-like, now cruciform, depending on which panels were open and which folded in on themselves.

I got the sense, walking around the Machine, that there was always another side yet to be seen. This feeling persisted no matter how many times I made the circuit, in either direction. Ashbery continued adjusting the controls. Several casings opened and cascaded down like a Jacob’s ladder, revealing further panels and openings.

There were only two exterior lamps, near the top, and in general, the Machine was quiet. If you leaned your ear against the hull, the internal clockwork was audible: gears meshing their teeth together, springs tensing and untensing. The Machine was at once absurdly complex and horrifyingly simple. There was but a single wide maw-like aperture set between the two lamps. And it was in here that Ashbery fed two books. The Origin of the Species and Finnegans Wake.

There was a great clattering, and smoke and steam burst from small lateral pipes in pressured blasts; a bolt rattled loose and Ashbery deftly caught it and screwed it back in—he looked at me as if to say that’s always happening. The clattering became a thrashing and suddenly a great torrent of confetti spewed from the rear of the Machine and collected in a bucket placed there for that purpose. The Machine quieted to a soft drone. Ashbery looked at me, then back to a flat rectangular panel in center. “Go ahead. Open it.”

I did. Inside, I could see the end of a sheet of paper. There were two manual thumb-rollers to spool it out. I turned them, but they stuck after a few inches. I looked back at Ashbery, but he seemed content to observe me dispassionately. He offered no instruction. I wrenched the paper and it came free after a few pulls. It was a kidnapper’s letter. As in, each letter was deftly cut and pasted, just a bit askew, onto the sheet to form a sentence. It read: “The wick in body and mind are soon snuffed; any animal breeder knows that’ll adulterate the marrow o’ man.”

“That’s it?” I said.

“What did you expect?”

“But it destroys the books. Two whole books. In shreds. For one sentence.”

“It has two clauses,” he offered.

“But why? It seems so—so terribly inefficient.”

Ashbery wrinkled his brow and exhaled slowly. “You can adjust the lexical coefficients and the parse randomizer, and you can tune the excision algorithm all you want, but you still have to deal with informational entropy.”

“What do you mean by…Why does it have wheels?” I asked.

He flipped out two handles from the rear and tipped the Machine back like a refrigerator on a dolly. The thing, it turned out, was surprisingly maneuverable. He explained that it had built-in audio recording equipment with customized distortion and fragmentation. On occasion, he would throw a sheet over the Machine and wheel it down the street, through Union Square, picking up snippets of conversation.

He opened a panel, held down a small red button for a few seconds, released it, then tapped an adjacent blue button. From somewhere deep inside the Machine, a tinny voice spoke. It was my voice—it had been my voice, partially. It said “Why, it shreds the terrible. Expect wheels.” (Sometimes, and Ashbery had no explanation for this, the Machine would spit out a string of words with no inputs at all. These malfunctions were often fruitful, so he’d never looked into the problem.)

I was at a loss for questions. Ashbery emptied the bucket of shredded paper, closed the Machine up, and led me back to the living room. “There’s still one thing I don’t get,” I said. “The Machine is so costly, so inefficient—it must consume a tremendous amount of books. Why build it in the first place? Is it really worth it?

“I didn’t build it,” he said.

“Then—”

“Oh, I modified it, augmented it. But I didn’t build it.”

As I was leaving his apartment, I said, “Thank you.”

He nodded—his expression was either appreciative or commanding—and slowly closed the door.

I still have doubts as to whether I have done the right thing in revealing this. Though I do not wish ill upon Ashbery, I am less concerned with the wishes of an enigmatic old poet than with the state of our Literature. I worry that I have kicked out a foundational stone and that, in time, the edifice will collapse. Perhaps, my greater worry is that the stone was never there to begin with, and I have merely waved my hand through the pillar, nullifying the illusion.

There are moments, splendid moments, when I am inexplicably certain that I have done right, and that our Literature is a hardy and enduring beast, little affected by our petty machinations and secrets. The first such moment was when I called Peter Stitt. This is what he told me: “We all know about the Machine. Anyone who’s anyone in this business knows about the Machine. But you can’t say anything. It’s simply not done.”

By Christopher Robinson