Sorry, men hvad med mit undskyld, Janus?

Og det behøver jeg sgu da heller ikke, når Janus kodals ny bog, Undskyld, som jeg omsider har fået i hænderne fra mikro-forlaget OVO, er hans klart bedste siden Fyrsten Zibebes beskendelse - luksuriøst opkørt og alert, Havesk og Franksk, mest Kodalsk - men lad mig bare overfortolke et næsten tilfældigt digt, dette, til også at være en bagvendt undskyldning til mig for det vandpjaskeri dengang, så er det på plads for ever and ever:

"Undskyld, jeg ikke forfølger ideen
                  om et klovneskab
en næse der forstyrrer alt
                          jeg siger
som en sivende syre gennem
       personlighedens hinder
  stabil som en religiøs indsigt
 som et ægteskab indgået i graven.
Min er tvivlens tilstand
         flaksende og ufri i tvelyset
bagstiv som en flagermus i brunst."

- Og så kan jeg selvfølgelig i gårsdagen anledning blive nødt til at citere dette, heldigvis:

"Forresten, fik jeg fortalt om den aften i Soho
hvor vi var inviteret hjem til en amme
som havde malet et portræt af Ashbery?
        Fra svalegange i hendes lejlighed
så jeg at hun havde alle de rigtige bøger
opstillet i rødbrune eksklusivbind.
Ashbery skulle se maleriet for første gang
                        og kiggede væk resten af aftenen.
Det stod og skinnede på et staffeli i køkkenet
mens vi spiste de steaksandwiches
                       damen havde lavet.
Ashbery blev fuld, vrængede som et barn
               lavede kradsemærker i luften
                  tabte sin drink.
Jeg kyssede med damen
hen over tallerkenerne med afskårne
fedtkanter og rester af rødløg.
     Undskyld, jeg namedropper
men jeg kan se det virker. "

90 x 90 til den 90-årige

På lithub.com har de bedt 90 "friends, collaborators, and admirer" vælge en yndlings-Ashbery-linje og skrive 90 ord eller mindre om den, her er LINK til det hele, og her er de første 6 linjer + kommentarer:

"Damiano Abeni 

Seeming is almost as good as being, sometimes

–“Commotion of the Birds,” Commotion of the Birds (2016)

In this line of the title poem of his latest collection to date, lightness and heaviness are perfectly balanced, in a 100 percent Ashbery mode: you can look at it and simply laugh, enjoying the baffling irony of “almost” and “sometimes”; or you can gloomily think of our narcissistic era of fakeness and instant gratification, and perceive that maybe, just maybe, he’s telling us that Western “Civilization” is doomed. And you’ll be right and wrong at the same time, as always happens when you fall into John’s magnificent web.

Michael Almereyda

Anything can change as fast as it wants to, and in doing so may pass through a more or less terrible phase, but the true terror is in the swiftness of changing, forward or backward, slipping just beyond our control.

–“The Lonedale Operator,” A Wave (1984)

The sentence appears at a point in this fairly discursive prose poem when the narrator, recounting the first film he ever saw, flashes forward to describe a movie encountered when he was older. His memory blurs, incurring a sudden slide and plunge into wider speculation. A sense of wonder and dread fill the poem like dark water filling a ship. As ever, Ashbery simultaneously describes reality and calls it into question, drawing us to consider a larger order—or disorder—encircling our tame and tidy thoughts and spiraling beyond them.

Charles Alteri

That there is so much to tell now, really now.

–“As We Know,” As We Know (1979)

I love this line because of the brilliant contrast between “now” as a descriptive term and “really now” as an expression of urgency that brings out the full capacity of “now” to carry both the present tense and the act if seeing as that incorporates and wills an entire life. This line defines an inwardness without psychology or any assumptions about selfhood.

 Rae Armantrout

How they found you, after a dream, in your thimble hat,
Studious as a butterfly in a parking lot.

–“The Other Tradition,” Houseboat Days (1977)

I tried to choose just one line but it seemed impossible. The action is always somewhere in between, in transit, like the “studious” butterfly that settles briefly then veers off. A butterfly is never jaded. These lines might describe an Ashbery poem. They arrive in the wake of some event, perhaps momentous, perhaps quotidian. Who knows now? They (and we) are off to something else—the next parked car. John is the least pompous poet in the world. Here he / you / we are Thumbelina, in our thimble hats. At this scale, attention is intense and distributive.

Felix Bernstein

To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there

–“Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” Shadow Train (1979)

You exist to prop up the will to be seen seeing therefore I am seeing you where you are not: where you tapped in, leaving the levels of the memory palace always in place so as to lead back to the double inside, which remains outside of where the split would have been, had you not been. You’ve shored up there—where things don’t squirt all over, or miss each other, but only tap—not to memorialize the other, or memorialize the poem, but to make the poem itself another.

Anselm Berrigan

My favorite JA lines include (all from Wakefulness [1998]):

a) Take this, metamorphosis. And this. And this. And this.
–“Baltimore”

b) No matter how you / twist it, / life stays frozen in the headlights.
–“Wakefulness”

c) All the wolves in wolf factory paused / at noon, for a moment of silence.
–“Laughing Gravy”

d) If everybody is so intent on illustrating what they know, / why is the ant syllabus closed
–“Deeply Incised”

Only the shy should choose. Rudy Burckhardt was fond of b, but I’m a sucker for c."

Gammel hilsen fra Nellie

- fra Niels Franks Genfortryllelsen, 1988:

"John Ashbery 

Først kommer den du elsker, så kommer kærligheden som en hofte du løfter ind til dig, som en hånd du løfter ind. Til sidst kommer billedet af dig selv midt i denne vandhimmel: Stjernerne ved hvem du er, en krop der synger nede i vandet."

Ørkenøjeblikke

Digt fra John Ashberys digtsamling FRA SIDSTE ÅR, Commotion of the Birds, som jeg købte som e-bog i går aftes og dybt fornøjet har læst lidt over halvdelen af denne morgen:

"DESERT MOMENTS

We watched his regular camera
until it became nervous.
There were other horns inside for us,
things the pasta brought, never to be paced over.

My gosh! The president of the United States!

Years and years went by like that.
It was impossible to keep track of them.
I'm all about truth, and meaning. In the end
they said they were delighted with what they found.

Circuits are busy. Of course, we are not going to sit here
and wait. I have met you in the small shops,
a large cookie presence. I was "robust."
Save me the czardas

at Puke University.
I'm glad he goes in there.
That was the president, you clucks.
Why is it taking so long?

We might come closer (the eldritch mother's refrain
over 23 years ago).
Oh, that's whar that is.
Then suddenly, it's forty years later,
and I was like, "Holy shit!
I'm just happy to be alive!"

It's almost like you've done someting
totally preppy. Your hands are a little dirty,
though.
Yrs and oblige,
Holofernes J. Cringleaf.

"Dear Smitten ...""


- Ashbery tildeles National Humanities Medal, 2012 

ASHBERY 90 !

Den amerikanske, vildt dejlige og dizzying digter John Ashbery bliver 90 i dag - collager han lavede i sandsynligvis de tidlige 2000-år  HER) 

Hvordan man lærer at tale sort

- fra Evan Kindleys anmeldelse i New Republic af Karin Roffmans The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life:

"Ashbery was attracted to boys from the time he was in kindergarten, and anxieties about his homosexuality and its possible discovery were a constant feature of his childhood and adolescence. He made only careful, coded references to homosexuality in his journals and letters, which Roffman has patiently deciphered with the help of the author himself.
After an early sexual experience in 1941, when he ejaculated for the first time after fooling around with a male friend during a sleepover, Ashbery jotted a “poem-note” in his diary “made up of phrases from their conversations that he did not want to forget”:

tulip garden
                       old dutch
                       home all our own until
                       recall once more
                                   fashion in shows
                       dog cast in
                                   days before
            were almost learning to forget
            happy             fear came from
                                               a trough
                       kin

It’s remarkable how closely this fragmented, unsyntactical text, written when Ashbery was thirteen and had yet to encounter any modernist poetry, resembles his avant-garde experiments with verbal collage in The Tennis Court Oath and other books. Compare, for instance, this excerpt from “Europe,” written two decades later when Ashbery was living in Paris at the epicenter of the global avant-garde:

                       songs like
                       You came back to me
                       you were wrong about the gravestone
            that nettles hide quietly
            The son is not ours.

Roffman argues, plausibly, that Ashbery’s practical need to disguise his homosexuality led him to cultivate his taste for ambiguity and indirection, and she analyzes many of his early poems along these lines. This way of understanding Ashbery’s cryptic aesthetic isn’t new—it’s been around since at least 1994, when John Shoptaw’s On the Outside Looking Out argued for a “homotextual” interpretation of his work—but Roffman opens up a whole new archive of powerful biographical evidence supporting it."

Jeg kan god lide den diskrete, men klare biografistiske skepsis, der afslutter anmeldelsen:

"A writer like Ashbery is, in one way, a scholar’s dream. His work is full of cross-references to be tracked down and mysteries to be decoded, and it is in consistent dialogue with both its contemporary historical moment and with the literary canon (however eccentrically that canon is defined). On the other hand, a sense of privacy and inscrutability is intrinsic to the experience of reading him: An Ashbery whose work had been fully explicated wouldn’t be Ashbery at all. The Songs We Know Best lets us see, clearer than ever before, how the poet’s mind works, and how it developed. Still, you can’t help remaining a little nostalgic for the mystery."

Jubelolding på farligt asyl

Apropos digteralder, så har jeg i flere dage haft et New Yorker liggende, du var så sød at købe til mig i Magasin, da jeg var influenzanedlagt; jeg har læst både de det ene og det andet og bladret ivrigt, men det var først i dag, jeg midt inde i en artikel om squash, spillet, ikke frugten (er det en frugt?), fik øje på et splinternyt, blæret og veloplagt uforståeligt digt af lyslevende John Ashbery, født 1927, året før Per Højholt og Knud Sørensen:

DANGEROUS ASYLUM

As famous as a broken disc,
thansk for coming this way.
That's why I have to do it,
to be a goon that matters
into another person's life.

(at være en idiot der betyder noget
ind i en anden person liv LB)

You have a lousy voice, but
a good tenor. There, I've said it.
You'll have to quickly get back
on the job, brothers brothers.
In her transparent hair
she is, well, just a person,
Bruce confessed.

And that stuff is now getting cold.
I'll be there for you;
they want to cut them off from other
poppy-seed cakes,
getting - getting old again,
frustrated bobby-soxer.
Hold that opera - you made the lyrics.

You remind me of you.
We had been up to the Speculator once before.

Off you go then.

John går brisevejen (med fodnoter)

Jeg elsker den måde, bøger sniger sig ind i mit iBooksbiblotek på; jeg havde bestilt 87-årige John Ashberys nye, genialt betitlede digtsamling Breezeway*, som lige præcis ikke var udkommet, midt i en mindre e-bogs-indkøbs-raptus (det er det FARLIGE ved e-bøger; de er morderisk nemme at indkøbe), og havde så godt som glemt min bestilling, da bogen få dage senere pludselig stod og lyste op i sit frimærkeformat på skærm-reolen, jeg fremprikkede den straks og begyndte at læse og forstod frydefuldt alting og ingenting som sædvanlig, ingen nonsens er sødere og selvfølgeligere - dette er titeldigtet:

Someone said we needed a breezeway
to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.
Aals it wasn't my call.
I didn't have a call or anything resembling one.
You see I have always been a rather dull spirited winch**
The days go by and I go with them.
A breeze falls from a nearby tower,
finds no breezeway, goes away
along a mission to supersize red shutters.

Alas if that were only all.
There's the children's belongings to be looked to
if only one can find the direction needed
and stuff like that.
I said we were all homers not homos
but my voice dwindled in the roar of Hurricane Edsel.
We have to live out our precise experimentation.
Otherwise there's no dying for anybody,
no crisp rewards.

Batman came and clubbed me.
He never did get along with my view of the universe
except you know existential threads
from the time of the peace beaters and more.
He patted his dog Pastor Fido.
There were still so much to be learned
and even more to be researched.
It was like goodbye. Why not accept it,
anyhow? The mission girls came thorugh the woods
in their special suitings. It was all whipped cream and baklava.
I there a Batman somewhere, who notices us
and promptlylooks away, at a new catalog, say,
or another racing car expletive***
coming back at Him.

*
A breezeway is an architectural feature similar to a hallway that allows the passage of a breeze between structures to accommodate high winds, allow aeration, or provide aesthetic design variation. Often a breezeway is a simple roof connecting two structures (such as a house and a garage); sometimes it can be much more like a tunnel with windows on either side. It may also refer to a hallway between two wings of a larger building -- such as between a house and a garage -- that lacks heating and cooling but allows sheltered passage.
One of the earliest breezeway designs to be architecturally designed and published was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1900 for the B. Harley Bradley House in Kankakee, Illinois. However, breezeway features had come into use in vernacular architecture long before this, as for example with the dogtrot breezeway that originally connected the two elements of a double log cabin on the North American frontier.

In automotive design terminology, the name breezeway has been used to describe the reverse-slanted, power-operated rear window ("backlite") which, when opened even slightly, provided through ventilation. Typical models with this feature are late-1950s Mercury Turnpike Cruisers and Park Lanes.


**
A winch is a mechanical device that is used to pull in (wind up) or let out (wind out) or otherwise adjust the "tension" of a rope or wire rope (also called "cable" or "wire cable"). In its simplest form it consists of a spool and attached hand crank. In larger forms, winches stand at the heart of machines as diverse as tow trucks, steam shovels and elevators. The spool can also be called the winch drum. More elaborate designs have gear assemblies and can be powered by electric, hydraulic, pneumatic or internal combustion drives. Some may include a solenoid brake and/or a mechanical brake or ratchet and pawl device that prevents it from unwinding unless the pawl is retracted.



***

Og John Ashbery har skrevet et digt om blogs - BL.A.

eller rettere om ikke at prøve at fange DET på en blog, Bl.A.
(med 1 linjes linjeafstand og i 2 STROFER)
i det nye New Yorker:

GRAVY FOR THE PRISONERS

I wouldn't try to capture it
on the page, or in a blog, the *inauspicious
leaving of a day. Closer to a dream
than the hum of streets, and people
who once walked along them.

Yeah, I know. Know what I'm saying?
The grounds were ultimately too large for the compound.
A tree takes flight, and patterns are *coaxed
into recurring on adjacent walls,
out of thin air.
No such titan ever visited
during my days as*aedile. Yet *wisps
still buttonhole us in random *moats:
Was it this you were expecting,
and if not, why not*?

*lidet opløftende
*lokkes
*Aedile (Latin: Aedilis, from aedes, "temple building") was an office of the Roman Republic. Based in Rome, the aediles were responsible for maintenance of public buildings (aedēs) and regulation of public festivals. They also had powers to enforce public order.
*græstotter
 *voldgrave
*godt spørgsmål!



Jane Freilicher,  John Ashbery (c.1954), pen and ink on paper, 13.75 ins x 13.875 ins, Private Collection,

Verdens bedste tidsskrift (med verdens dårligste navn)

er givetvis Art and Literature, med den blærende undertitel "An International Review" der udkom i 12 eksklusive numre 1964-67 redigeret af bl.a. og ikke mindst (i Frankrig dengang bosatte) John Ashbery. Jeg købte den anden dag 3 velholdte, aura-emmende numre, nr. 3 og 5 og 6, til den latterlige pris af 100 kr. pr. stk. i det cool Kirkegaards Antikvariat i Gunløgsgade, ingen ende på de gloriøse navne, der bidrager eller er oversat (af gloriøse oversætternavne), John Cage, André Masson, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Robert Rauscenberg, Öyvind Fahlström (husk at se hans kostelige Bob Hope/Mao-demo-film på Louisianas Pink Caviar-udstilling), Boris Pasternak, David Hockney, Kenneth Kock, Donald Barthelme, Gerard Malanga (Warhols senere indpisker som følsom poet), Antonin Artaud, Max Jacob, Jasper Johns, Laura Riding, foruden Ashbery selv, både som digter og som oversætter, bl.a. af Max Jacobs forunderlige prosadigte fra Raflebægeret:

THE  CENTAUR

Yes! I have met the Centaur! It was on a road in Brittany: the round trees were spaced out over the embankment. He is a café-au-lait color; he has conspucient eyes and his croup is more like the tail of a serpent than the body of a horse. I felt too faint to speak to him and my family, watching us form a distance, was more frightened than I. Oh sun! What mysteries you illuminate around you.

Og fra samme nummer, nr. 3, Autumn - Winter 1964, 2 af John Cages "26 statements re Duchamp" (dengang stadig levende Marcel)

The check. The string he dropped. The Mona Lisa. The musical notes taken out of a hat. The glass. The toy shotgun painting. The things he found. Therefore, everything seen - every object, that is, plus the process of looking at it - is a Duchamp.

Duchamp showed the usefulness of addition (moustache). Rauschenberg showed the function of subtraction (De Kooning). Well, we look forward to multiplication and division. it is safe to assume that someone will learn trigonometry.

- snotgrøn redaktørmisundelse!

Hermed hjemsøgt af mangel på titel

- utypisk enkelt digt i 83-årige John Ashberys seneste, dybt sprudlende digtsamling, Planisphere fra 2009:

ZERO PERCENTAGE

So call it untitled, but
don't imagine you'll be left off the hook:
The title will find it as surely
as a heat-seeking missile locks on
an asteroid. Down below, armies
and oceans of taxis will squawk unfeelingly.
The title always wins.

- og hurtigt på dansk

NUL PROCENT

Så kald det uden titel, men
tro ikke du ikke hænger på den:
Titlen vil det finde det lige så sikkert
som et varmesøgende missil fikserer
en astroide. Nedenunder vil hære
og oceaner af taxier ufølsomt skrige op.
Titlen vinder altid.

(jeg citerer og oversætter et andet digt fra samlingen ovre på Hvedekorn hjemmeside )