PRESENT WAKING LIFE.(Fictional Work)

It's late already, five or five-thirty. John Ashbery is sitting at his typewriter but not typing. He picks up his cup of tea and takes two small sips because it's still quite hot. He puts it down. He's supposed to write some poetry today. He woke up pretty late this morning and has been futzing around ever since. He had some coffee. He read the newspaper. He dipped into a couple of books: a Proust biography that he bought five years ago but just started reading because it suddenly occurred to him to do so, a novel by Jean Rhys that he recently came across in a secondhand bookstore--he's not a systematic reader. He flipped on the television and watched half of something dumb. He didn't feel up to leaving the apartment--it was muggy and putrid out, even for New York in the summer. He was aware of a low-level but continuous feeling of anxiety connected with the fact that he hadn't started writing yet and didn't have an idea. His mind flitted about. He thought about a Jean Helion painting that he'd seen recently at a show. He considered whether he should order in dinner again from a newish Indian restaurant on Ninth Avenue that he likes. (He won't go out. He's seventy-eight. He doesn't often go out these days.) On a trip to the bathroom he noticed that he needed a haircut. He talked on the phone to a poet friend who was sick. By five o'clock, though, there was no avoiding the fact that he had only an hour or so left before the working day would be over, so he put a CD in the stereo and sat down at his desk. He sees that there's a tiny spot on the wall that he's never noticed before. It's only going to take him half an hour or forty minutes to whip out something short once he gets going, but getting going, that's the hard part.

His study is a small, unprepossessing room. On its white walls he has hung a few works by painters he knows--Jane Freilicher, Trevor Winkfield, Helion. An old Biedermeier daybed stands against the back wall, cluttered with boxes and piles of paper. On the wall that he faces when he sits at his desk hangs a framed collage of standard Victorian etchings--ladies in bustles and hats, cherubs, men with walking sticks. Stuck in the bottom of the frame is a postcard reproduction of Parmigianino's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," the sixteenth-century painting that he wrote his famous poem about. To the left of the desk, on a shelf, is a small collection of cheap china figurines, characters from nineteen-thirties comic strips; some have broken necks, their heads lolling. On the desk itself is a Penguin Rhyming Dictionary, which he used recently in translating some Baudelaire. The room is on the ninth floor and the window is closed because he has the air-conditioner on, but he can hear faint noises coming up from the street.

He has an indistinct, meagre notion in his head that he thinks might work for a short poem: a few unconnected words--detritus of his day--or an ordinary phrase that he's suddenly realized is quite weird ("cut the mustard," for instance--what does it mean to cut mustard, and why is it only ever used in the negative?). Or it isn't words that he has in his mind but a shape, a hazy sense of the physical thing, the page or stack of pages, that his poem will become.

Or else his mind is blank. He hasn't even the germ of an idea but he has to force himself to write something or he'll never get anything done. He stares at the paper in his typewriter and is reminded for the millionth time that one of the worst things about being a poet is that you're confronted by an empty page, a nothing-at-all, practically every time you sit down to write (unless you're in the middle of a long poem, which you aren't usually). He reaches for a book by one of the poets he keeps around for dehydrated moments like this one because they get his poetry going--Mandelstam, Pasternak, Holderlin. He leafs through it hopefully. They do the trick for him, whatever the trick is, perhaps because their poems seem to him to begin in the middle and wander around and finally break off without any kind of formal conclusion, and that somehow makes starting a poem of his own feel easier, as if he'd already begun it, or as if they had. (Several of Holderlin's fragment poems actually end in commas--an idea he liked so much that he stole it.) Music also helps to get things started, which is why he always turns it on when he writes (usually twentieth-century classical). He doesn't listen to it with his full attention, obviously, but he doesn't block it out either. He finds that the way it contains narratives and arguments without articulable terms--so that after you've listened to a symphony, say, you feel you've understood something but you can't say what it is--makes it similar to his poetry, which makes it somehow stimulating.

What he is trying to do (and here the metaphors get a little screwy, but these are the pictures that come to him) is jump-start a poem by lowering a bucket down into what feels like a kind of underground stream flowing through his mind--a stream of continuously flowing poetry, or perhaps poetic stuff would be a better way to put it. Whatever the bucket brings up will be his poem. (This image was suggested to him by a novel by the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer, a contemporary of Musil and rather like him.) Since he is always dipping the bucket into the same stream his poems will resemble one another, but because the stream varies according to climatic conditions--what's on his mind, the weather, interruptions--they will also be different.

There have been many times in his life when he felt completely stuck, when the poetry seemed to dry up completely, but the longest and worst began shortly after he graduated from college and lasted more than a year. Then he happened to go to a John Cage concert and heard "Music of Changes"--nearly an hour of banging on a piano alternating with periods of silence, as dictated by a score that Cage had put together using the I Ching so that it would be determined by chance rather than by his choice. The music seemed to him to be full of powerful meanings, and the idea of composing by chance made him think about writing in a completely different way. It made him want to go right back home and start work. Ever since, he has felt that what he calls "managed chance" is the right method for him.

The word "managed" is important: although he, like Cage, has experimented with the I Ching, he doesn't let it dictate poems the way James Merrill used a Ouija board. He summons chance but never entirely submits to it: chance occurrences are always filtered through his mind. He leaves the telephone on while he's writing, for instance, and if someone calls in the middle a bit of the conversation may end up in the poem. For poetic purposes he likes situations where he is likely to encounter the peculiar and the unexpected. When he was younger he used to spend his mornings strolling around downtown (he can write for only two hours a day at most, so there is always the problem of what to do with the rest of his time). He ventures into the nether regions of the newspaper and rummages in secondhand bookstores. When he teaches, he gives his students exercises that artificially induce this effect--he'll give them a text in a language that none of them know and tell them to translate it into English. (He used to use hieroglyphics but found that he was getting a lot of poems about eyes and fish, so now he uses Finnish.)