[I recently men­tioned to my per­sonal trainer, the poet Anthony Madrid, author of The 580 Stro­phes, that I was writ­ing about John Ashbery's Plani­sphere for the LRB. He sug­gested we read it together & com­pare notes. When I saw that his notes were grow­ing as exten­sive as my own, I asked him to write them up for this space. This is the first install­ment; I hope the loyal read­ers of DE are as pleased with the results as I am. —mr]

ONGO­ING PLANI­SPHERE NOTE­BOOK

Anthony Madrid

1.

People are much too free with the phrase “a great book of poetry.” They think if the book has ten really good pieces in it then it’s a great book.

They don’t talk that way about albums. For it to be a great album it can’t just have some hits. You have to con­sider the not-​hits, too. I wanna say: If you simply skip over the not-​hits with no regret what­so­ever, you can’t really call it a great album.

77 Dream Songs has twenty, maybe thirty jewels. Plenty of the not-​jewels are more or less unin­tel­li­gi­ble. Yet you regret skip­ping them. Some­how they con­tribute some­thing to the over­all pre­sen­ta­tion; you never wish ’em away. Shakespeare’s sonnets—same thing. Heaven knows one does pick up these books and skip to the best stuff. But one regrets it.

Now com­pare all that with, for exam­ple, Yeats’s The Tower. There, you have plenty of hits, but you skip over the other stuff quite, quite gladly. It’s boring. You have to assign the not-​hits to your­self like home­work. I do, anyway. Plani­sphere, mean­while, is almost exactly the reverse. The hits are in rather short supply—but you really do wish you could take in the whole thing, every time you read any of it.

Trying to pick out anthol­ogy pieces from Plani­sphere would be like trying to take excerpts from a CD of whale songs. You don’t put that stuff on for five minutes.

And actu­ally, you could say this is a large part of the nervi­ness of Ashbery’s work. He has dared—for fifty years—to be supremely unportable.

2.

On the other hand, if an editor were pre­pared to con­coct an Ash­bery “Selected” in total defi­ance of any and all expectations—principally the expec­ta­tion that such a col­lec­tion ought to con­tain pieces rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the poet’s oeuvre as a whole + a more or less even dis­tri­b­u­tion of poems, start­ing with Some Trees and ending with Plani­sphere—if, I say, an editor could forget about all that, he or she could deliver an Ash­bery hith­erto unsus­pected by his detrac­tors, and, to a lesser extent, unsus­pected by his admirers.

A fine samiz­dat project for some enter­pris­ing young citizen.

(I rec­om­mend includ­ing “The Youth’s Magic Horn” from Hotel Lautréamont, and “… by an Earth­quake” from Can You Hear, Bird. From Plani­sphere: “Default Mode.”)

3.

Actu­ally, now I think of it, another way in which Ash­bery is quite portable is on the level of the indi­vid­ual line or ‘bit’. Noth­ing easier than to gather neat but­tons at the button store. Here’s a grab bag.

I’m barely twenty-​six, have been on Oprah
and such. [p. 2]

Call me pota­toes
and soap. Call me soap and pota­toes. [p. 10]

They were living in Amer­ica fur­ther gone into teats. [p. 17]

Ow. In fact ouch. [p. 44]

Refus­ing to admit
some­thing is the matter with you is like taking
a life. There are no wit­nesses. [p. 46]

You say your cun­ning com­port­ment
is art­less? Well then so am I
for con­tain­ing you, champ. [p. 54]

A love like self-​love
upgraded to “pas­toral.” [p. 68]

Along­side, some­thing was run­ning.
It had a note in its maw. Hey,
give me that, like a good animal.
That’s fine. Now get lost. [p. 89]

… and the boy stands at atten­tion, dis­tracted,
in the sexual chapel sur­rounded
by cor­rect, cream-​colored leaves. [p. 92]

The playoffs—don’t get upset. [p. 96]

He was a very mobile person through­out his life,
instru­men­tal in help­ing pro­mote the Indi­ans. [p. 98]

What about poi­so­nous sea snakes?
I know one. I bet you do. [p. 107]

Then it’s back to basics, or in
my case foren­sics. What doesn’t
dapple you makes you strong. [p. 107]

Or ask Lep­orello. [p. 107]

It was time to drink,
and drink they did until the heav­ens reopened
and the stars were raked into a pile. [p. 115]

Why what a lovely day/street/
blank canvas/pause/orb/
old person/new song/milestone/
caned seat this is! [p. 119]

So we’ll go no more a-teething. [p. 125]

Clay­ma­tion is so over. [p. 130]

Here as I have erected
to do is a base­ball bat. [p. 132]

It wasn’t meant to stand for what it stood for.
Only a pup tent could do that. [p. 133]

If tact is a mortal sin
we shall not miss. [p. 135]

The above nosegay was not cre­ated casu­ally. Those twenty-​one items were culled from a batch more than three times that length: a com­pre­hen­sive tran­script of all the pas­sages that are neatly under­lined in light green ink, in my copy of Planisphere.

Anyone who has read the book is bound to view the above selec­tion with a pleas­ant com­bi­na­tion of recog­ni­tion and bewil­der­ment. Anyway, about half the time R. reads me choice bits out of his copy, I think Ah?? now how did that get by me?

After all, though, it’s not too hard to figure thát one out. Book’s a forest litter.

+++

Anthony Madrid is the author of The 580 Stro­phes. His man­u­script, The Get­ting Rid of the That Which Cannot Be Done With­out, was a final­ist for the 2010 Fence Modern Poets Series. His poems are forth­com­ing in Poetry, Boston Review, and about forty mil­lion other jour­nals.