For National Poetry Month: "Some Trees," by John Ashbery

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April is National Poetry Month. And today – April 18 – is “Poem In Your Pocket” day. Today’s the day to carry your favorite poem with you, and give it to people, and let people know.

 

 

I don’t have a single favorite poem. It depends on my mood, which is sometimes a little somber. But it’s April, so let’s have a brighter one today – a very early one by John Ashbery:

 

 

 

Some Trees

 

These are amazing: each 
Joining a neighbor, as though speech 
Were a still performance. 
Arranging by chance

 

To meet as far this morning 
From the world as agreeing 
With it, you and I 
Are suddenly what the trees try

 

To tell us we are: 
That their merely being there 
Means something; that soon 
We may touch, love, explain.

 

And glad not to have invented 
Such comeliness, we are surrounded: 
A silence already filled with noises, 
A canvas on which emerges

 

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. 
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, 
Our days put on such reticence 
These accents seem their own defense.

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It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having; or, Rhapsody on a theme by John Ashbery

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So (I says casually), did you see the photo on the front page of the New York Times on Friday? Snow in Jerusalem. Crazy, right?

 

 

And how about that heatwave in Australia? Pretty awful.

 

 

Not to mention the soaking rains they’ve been having in the UK.

 

 

And did I mention that it’s gonna be close to sixty degrees here in Providence over the next few days? In mid-January. Seriously, it feels like late March / early April outside.

 

 

You know where I’m going with this.

 

 

We’ve done it to ourselves. We didn’t mean to do it, but we did it. We have steadily warmed our climate, and now abnormal weather is the new normal: storms, droughts, temperature extremes. 2012 was the warmest year on record in the United States, by the way.

 

 

So what can we do about it?

 

 

Little enough. The damage is already done. The carbon dioxide is already out there, and the ozone is already torn up.

 

 

Good night and good luck, human race.

 

 

(But let’s end with something nice. I started with a John Ashbery quote, so let’s have the whole poem, and think – or hope – that humanity might not die out completely, or might at least leave behind something beautiful.)

 

 

(Something like this:)

 

 

 

 

It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
People have been making a garment out of it,
Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
You are wearing a text. The lines
Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
Any other literature than this poetry of mud
And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know. 

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Robert Bly

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I have met a few poets.

 

 

Richard Eberhart I met in the late 1980s, a frail old man. I shook his hand after one of his readings and told him how much I loved “The Groundhog.” He smiled and nodded politely, but he seemed pleased.

 

John Ashbery was (and still is) very cute, and giggled when I told him how much I admired him.

 

 

Marge Piercy, back in the 1970s, was a cloud of black hair, lost in a dream. I was introduced to her, but I doubt that she noticed.

 

 

Seamus Heaney, like Marge, was drifting in limbo when I met him.

 

 

Poets are crazy, right? The muse drives them over the wall and up the mountain and back again. Some of them (like Ashbery and Eberhart) are the Apollonian type, writing Poetic Poetry, full of rhyme and meter and control; but the madness and the beauty crept into their poetry too. “There was no sign of the groundhog,” wrote a young Eberhart, and that line broke my heart. “A chorus of smiles, a winter's morning,” wrote a young Ashbery, and it was a vision of beauty and perfection.

 

 

Then there was Robert Bly.

 

 

He did a reading in early 1978 at Gonzaga. He was huge and tall and loud and mostly drunk. He “tuned up” by reading/reciting other poetry, which is an idea I like very much; I remember he did a few Emily Dickinson lyrics. Why not? Then he started putting on masks and stalking around the hall making menacing gestures at people. I suppose this was part of the whole “Iron John” thing, and coming to terms with one's manhood, and voodoo priesthood, and the sunset of the Beat Poets. It was creepy and compelling, though.

 

After the reading I was introduced to Bly. I'd won the University's poetry award that year, for a forgettable little lyric that was a mishmash of Ashbery and Eliot and who knows who else.  He belted down another drink and loomed down at me and ate a fistful of peanuts. “Were you born at the winter solstice?” he bellowed down at me.

 

“No,” I whispered. “July.”

 

He snorted and looked away.

 

I don't think he was very impressed with me.

 

 

Herewith his best lines:

 

“The world will soon break up

into small colonies of the saved . . . “

 

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Sunday blog: John Ashbery’s “More Pleasant Adventures”

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I met John Ashbery at a reading once. He was small and frail and very cute with his big owlish glasses on, and I told him how much I enjoyed his poetry, and he sort of giggled.

 

I love his earlier poetry especially, and some of his more recent stuff.

 

This poem, written in 1983 and featured in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, I love entirely.

 

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More Pleasant Adventures

The first year was like icing.
Then the cake started to show through.
Which was fine, too, except you forget the direction you’re taking.
Suddenly you are interested in some new thing
And can’t tell how you got here. Then there is confusion
Even out of happiness, like a smoke—
The words get heavy, some topple over, you break others.
And outlines disappear once again.

Heck, it’s anybody’s story,
A sentimental journey—“gonna take a sentimental journey,”
And we do, but you wake up under the table of a dream:
You are that dream, and it is the seventh layer of you.
We haven’t moved an inch, and everything has changed.
We are somewhere near a tennis court at night.
We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.
We can always be found with our associates.
Haven’t you always wanted to curl up like a dog and go to sleep like a dog?

In the rash of partings and dyings (the new twist),
There’s also room for breaking out of living.
Whatever happens will be quite ingenious.
No acre but will resume being disputed now,
And paintings are one thing we never seem to run out of.

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