WNET (Koch & Ashbery) – John Ashbery

“JA: ‘I met Kenneth (Koch) when I was first a student in Harvard in 1947 and I met Frank (O’Hara) a couple of years later. We all wound up in New York more or less by accident , and got to know other poets here like Barbara Guest, James Schuyler.. But I think our poetry is pretty independent of each other.’ One critic has described John Ashbery as today’s (1966) most radically original American poet. Another description of his poetry is that he uses words much as a contemporary painter uses form and color, words chosen as conveyers of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. Born in Rochester, New York, and educated at Harvard, Columbia and New York University, John Ashbery has been the art critic for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and is currently an executive editor of ArtNews. His first book of poems published in 1953 contained drawings by the artist Jane Freilicher, whose studio this is. ‘Jane was the first painter that I’d met in New York (through Kenneth Koch) and, I think perhaps the first who I felt..who’s work I felt had something to do with my own, since at that time.. (well, it didn’t yet, but after a while I began to think about it and it did it). She was painting very free, sort of expressionist portraits. And I liked very much the idea that you could seem to add or take away a great deal from them without it changing the whole thing very much which was a sort of reassuring state of mind for an artist to be in, I think. In a way I’m trying to get meaning through perhaps unconventional methods, that is perhaps trying to influence the reader to see a different meaning through shape and the sound of the words. For instance, a word which might suggest another word but has absolutely nothing to do with it, therefore has a kind of heightened power of expression, which the reader, even when he’s not aware of it, somehow affects his impression of the poem.’ John Ashbery’s most recent collection of poems is the book Rivers and Mountains published in 1966 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. This is the first of twelve poems in the book. … ‘In a way my poetry has sort of followed a circular route. This poem, which I think is one of the best of my early poems is not too unlike the ones I’m writing now, but I feel that things have undergone a change nevertheless which I’ll try to explain. When I was living in Paris for ten years I had first felt very much deprived of hearing American speech every day, which comes into my poetry quite a lot and it’s very vital to it . I certainly believe what Mallarmé says about purifying the language of the tribe, I always felt that was….. And, as a result, I felt my poetry, the first poetry I wrote in France was kind of anaemic and didn’t satisfy me at all.’ …”
Allen Ginsberg Project
On Ten Years of “Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets”
Criterion – Night on Earth: New York—Jim Jarmusch, Poet
YouTube: Jim Jarmusch on John Ashbery & the New York School Poets
1960s: Days of Rage – Locus Solus (journal)