John Ashbery Other Traditions.(Review)

John Ashbery Other Traditions. Harvard University Press, 160 pages, $22.95

In his recent paean to the New York School poets, The Last Avant-Garde (1998), David Lehman describes the composition of John Ashbery's Charles Eliot Norton Lecture on Raymond Roussel. On the morning of the talk, Ashbery phoned the poet James Tate to say that he couldn't swing by to pick up Tate in Amherst on the way to Harvard in part because, as Lehman writes, Ashbery "hadn't yet written the lecture." "Fortunately," Lehman purrs, "this lazy man is quick: The lecture on Roussel--one of the highlights of Ashbery's Norton series--was written that day in the back seat of the car motoring from Manhattan to Cambridge."

This encomium to Ashbery's facility seems to have eluded the publicists at Harvard University Press, for nowhere can it be found in the promotional materials for this book, which collects all six of Ashbery's 1989-90 Norton Lectures treating poets from "other traditions": John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. (Perhaps to set the record straight, Ashbery, in his preface, admits only to putting on some "finishing touches ... in the back seat," though the friend who drove him is thanked.)

Beginning as I have with a biographical anecdote jibes with Ashbery's own method: each lecture provides a tidy account of those details from the lives that most bear on the work. Taken whole, his poets constitute a haunted bunch: madness (Clare, Schubert), suicide (Beddoes, Roussel), possible attempted suicide (Riding), accidental early death (Wheelwright). Ashbery, though, is less interested in these poets' hardships than in their obscurity, that is, in their status as minor or little-known poets as well as in their stylistic tendencies toward difficulty and opacity.

"Criticism is doubled edged" noted Longfellow. "It criticizes him who receives and him who gives." Ashbery intended his lectures to cut both ways: "I'm therefore going to talk about poets who have probably influenced me" Any lineage of influence always functions as a two-way street; artists to some extent create their precursors. In these lectures, Ashbery's own work stands as the telos for the other traditions of his title.

Each writer has been ...