FREE TO BE A LONG WAY FROM HOME (from THE AUSTRALIAN)

The following, a love letter of a review of Ashbery Mode, from Tinfish Press, appeared on Valentine’s Day in The Australian:

Free to Be A Long Way From Home

By Gregory Day

3:00PM February 14, 2020

The English poet Mark Ford has been a champion of the poetry of John Ashbery for many years. He is the editor of Ashbery’s Collected Poems and has curated various archives and exhibitions of what many believe to be the most significant poetic voice to emerge from the US since World War II. 

Poet John Ashbery in 2010. Picture: David Shankbone

Due in part to techniques derived from collage, montage and pastiche, Ashbery is in many ways a poet’s poet, which in part explains Ford comparing the hold of Ashbery’s poetry over those “writing in his wake” to that of Milton’s in the decades after the publication of Paradise Lost.

And yet, looking at photos of Ashbery you’d never surmise such a towering presence. Even as he approached his death in 2017 at the age of 90, he looked always the side-parted boy, friendly, almost benign, rather than imposing.

He had somehow traditional east coast looks, a face that could quite easily have been cast as Reverend John Ames in Marylinne Robinson’s novel, Gilead. Whereas Milton, despite his liberal vision and fleshy lips, looks full of the clash and opprobrium of his times, if not downright stern.

Ashbery of course is a helluva lot more than genial and his work has been purpose-built to escape the arthritis of category and canonisation. So I won’t be fighting that battle here. He did say after all that “to create a work of art that the critic cannot even talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern”.

So in discussing Ashbery Mode, a new anthology in which Australian poets have been commissioned to write for, about, or in the mode of Ashbery, it is worth noting that there has not been another modern Australian poetry anthology published in book form whose theme is that of a single poet. Plenty of academic essays, symposia, conferences, yes, but no book of poems that I know of. Until now.

Ashbery Mode, edited by Michael Farrell.

It is perhaps testament to the fact that Ashbery’s “mode” was oblique, not so much open as ajar, that the zone this book inhabits is decidedly springy and generative. Accordingly, the terrific thing about the project, conceived and edited by Australian poet Michael Farrell, is that it has unleashed so many brilliant lines.

For Ashbery language was both friend and paint, fodder and gem, it was an implement to wield, a fabric to tear, a concrete object, a trope, but essentially a material to manipulate into infra-human tableaux.

When reading him, as Javant Biarujia implies in his wonderful poem, Exercise in Franglais, “the mot juste – if not the Kleenex – was just out/ of reach …”

Another pertinent line from Ashbery Mode is Ali Alizadeh’s: “the poem/ must become an instrument for breaking the world/’s systems of knowledge and facts”.

That splitting of the possessive ‘‘world’’ is like a micro-manifesto of Ashbery but is nevertheless well included. As is Farrell’s introduction, in which he assembles a helpful local context with which to enter this rather laterally antipodean book.

Farrell informs us for instance that Ern Malley, the Australian hoax poet created by James McCauley and Harold Stewart in 1944, was loved by Ashbery, to the extent that he continued to use Malley’s poems in writing classes 30 years after first reading him.

Farrell suggests also that another Australian poet, John Tranter, has been instrumental in making Ashbery and his poetry known not only in Australia but in the extrageographical zone of the internet, largely through the online magazine, Jacket.

It is a mark of his rare aesthetic status that Ashbery comes both from on high and from a place rather more effortless. He admits to something remarkably akin to Fiona Hile’s line in her poem, Consumption, that “the ticklish cruelty of novelty leaves/ me all un-new”.

Such are the creative binds, even of this kind of play. Intrinsic to the Ashbery Mode though, either in upper or lower case, is the wit of selection. The way disorientation cohabitates with clear imagery.

We look not for the mot juste but the capricious tendency, the enigmatic seam, and the joke. And we find it in the most refreshingly adjacent ways, as far from breakfast radio as one could imagine. In this way Ashbery’s mode often comes as a great relief, or, as the man himself said in his last book:

“It’s good to be modern if you can stand it./ It’s like being left out in the rain, and coming/ To understand you were always this way: modern.”

Bella Li, in her rather uncanny simulation of Ashbery in the poem Just Then, shows one approach to the commission. Chris Edwards’s reconstitution of lines from Flow Chart is another, while Mark Mahemoff’s Dear Superman is perhaps riskily sincere, but intimate and touching nevertheless.

Tim Grey cites Ashbery’s own description of Rimbaud’s work: “absolute modernity was for him the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second. The self is obsolete”, and this gets to the heart of the matter.

In the homeland of narcissism Ashbery scooped out the self and put it to one side. It’s amazing what turned up in its absence. Passing spaces. The most ordinary exotica. The jolt of what’s next.

Which leaves us thinking then about America v Australia, not in a winnable or contested kind of way but in the sense that Ashbery called in the margins. Us among them. Or so it seems.

In this quality, despite him being a queer hero of sorts, he was always modelling the majority. The insight to be found in the phenomenologies of exclusion, the gifts we’re given and that we can’t quite understand let alone keep. This is freedom, I suppose, and lightness, but nothing so glaring as Walt Whitman would recognize. Not so much a song of the self as a song after the self.

The question then might become, where the hell was Ashbery writing from, if not from himself or from America? I’d say he was writing from a Rousselian land bearing more resemblance to here than there. Wherever that is. I suppose though that what was most American about him was having the confidence not to name it. Well, as they say, you can take the boy out of art but you can’t take art out of the boy. Or even out of Australia.

Gregory Day is a writer and poet.

Ashbery Mode

Edited by Michael Farrell. Tinfish Press, 130pp, $US20