SOURCE: An interview in New Orleans Review, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 59-63.

[In the following interview, Ashbery discusses influences on his work, his creative process, and his poetic philosophy.]

[Munn]: Besides writing poetry, what are your current projects?

[Ashbery]: I was fortunate enough to get a Mac Arthur fellowship, which has relieved me of the necessity of earning a living for five years at least. But during this time it seems that have agreed to write a number of articles, essays, art reviews, and so on, all of which procrastinate about, and can't seem to do anything with the time I am procrastinating about these other things. Basically I have written more or less the same amount of poetry I normally would have if I had been working at a job. I'm trying to get out from under these other commitments, and when I do that I would like to try to write some different kinds of things. I wrote some plays years ago in the fifties which I never really did anything with, although I still like them. And I would like to go back and do something in that form. And also I would like to write some fiction, which I haven't really done, except for a novel I collaborated on with the poet James Schuyler, called A Nest of Ninnies, which was published—which I don't really consider to be a novel. It was really a kind of game we played to amuse ourselves, never expecting when we began it at a very young age, both of us, that anyone would ever publish it. I'd like to try to write some fiction with the idea of publishing it rather than from the standpoint of its never seeing the light of day—which was the understanding I wrote the other one out of.

I've never enjoyed writing art criticism. For a long time it was the only way I seemed to be able to make a living, especially when I was living in France for ten years. There I wrote for the International Herald Tribune for five years. And although this wasn't enough to live on—they only gave $15 an article when I began working for them; it was up to $30 by the time I left five years later, so I actually got a 100% raise somewhere along the line—nevertheless, this enabled me to write other things about art and I was able to subsist that way. But I have always been a somewhat reluctant art critic. And now I would like to think that I'm not going to write any more art criticism. To celebrate this I have completed a book of my art writing. As long as I was in the business of writing it, I didn't want to publish it, because I was afraid some reviewer would come along and attack it and I would lose my job. But I no longer have this to worry about.

I'm interested in your selection process for the Selected Poems? How did you decide what to include and exclude? Did others take part in determining what finally went into your Selected Poems?

No, I selected them myself. I've had friends and other people—who knew my work—not be happy with the selection because of things I've left out. No one has yet complained about anything I have included, but I suppose there are complaints on that side too. But there were some poems that I realized were fairly well known, so far as any are, which I never really liked and therefore didn't include. There were others which I did like but which seemed somewhat repetitive of other poems which I like slightly better. I didn't intend this to be a sort of codex or ultimate choice, since my other books are in print, and I had no intention of disavowing any of the ones that are not included in the book.

If you were to put together a collected works, are there any poems that you would exclude? I'm thinking of the later W. H. Auden, who rethought his career. Would you rethink yours or throw out some poems or re-edit?

I think this is about as much of a collected poems as I'll ever do, and so, in a sense, I've already done or not done whatever that is. And I don't think I've been too harsh on my early work, one reason being that I felt that Auden did a kind of disastrous number on himself, leaving out many of his most cherished poems. This seems to be a congenital affliction of writers who reach a certain age. Henry James also kind of massacred or re-did some of his early works which were better in the original version. So I'm leery of doing this. I don't think, I hope, at any rate, that I wasn't too harsh on early works, which I can see flaws in but which nevertheless seem to have a kind of redeeming freshness, which maybe later works, which are in some ways better, wouldn't have. It's kind of a narrow line you have to follow in doing something like that, I guess.

So you don 't feel a strong self-censoring or self-editing impulse, then, as you look back at the earlier work?

Well, much of it had already happened before the books were published. It takes a long time for a book of poetry to come out. Sometimes the poems in it are five years old or more when a book finally appears, so you've had ample time for self criticism or winnowing out. I certainly have written a lot more than I have actually published.

Critics have seen sources or analogues for your poetry in a considerable range of poets, and even composers and painters: Rimbaud, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, the current Language poets, John Cage, and Jackson Pollock are just a few. You have expressed an early admiration for Auden and Elizabeth Bishop. How important do you feel it is for readers such as us to be familiar with these earlier poets in order to get at your work?

I would hope not at all. Because even though I've been influenced by many different poets and artists and things not even related to the arts, I would not like to feel that a knowledge of any source material is necessary or even desirable before reading my work; I think that's true of any writer that one admires. It's interesting afterwards if you wish to go back and see where these things originated, but I hope at any rate that it's not a condition of reading my work.

Do you have any tips if there were someone in the audience who was just beginning to read your work? Is there any advice you might give them to facilitate their way into your work?

Well, much has always been made about how difficult my poetry is. I never thought of this until it was first pointed out to me. It has been many times since. This has become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, I think. This reputation of being difficult I think discourages people from looking at my work. I found in a number of cases that people who somehow have never heard of me and who don't even read poetry and happened on it have read it with enjoyment and not found it puzzling or enigmatic. I'm thinking particularly of a handyman who occasionally worked for me who heard indirectly that I was a writer and went to the library and found some of my books. Then he began collecting them, even insisting on first editions, even though I don't think he ever [had] read anything before, not any book. I could see that he was really very fervently involved in these poems. That doesn't happen, everyday, of course, but I think it can happen, and perhaps one suggestion would be to pretend that you haven't heard that it's very difficult, to read it and see what happens. And also not to worry if you don't understand it. It doesn't make that much difference. There are other things in life. And not to look for a structure or a framework underneath it. But as they say, go with the flow, which I hope is there.

From your example, you almost suggest that those of us who have sought a structure and applied the traditional ways of looking at poetry might actually be handicapped a little bit, and this other person you were talking about had an advantage by coming to it without preconceptions about how he should read.

That could be. He was perhaps an extreme example, but other people more literate than he have occasionally come up to me and said, "People are always saying your work is so difficult, but I think it means something to me." I've never quite understood about understanding anyway or about the meaning of poetry. Eliot, I believe, said that you don't have to understand poetry to enjoy it, and I think that's true. And I think the converse might be true as well. In fact, it's necessary not to understand it in order to enjoy it. I don't get much pleasure out of poems that offer no resilience or crunch, where you can tell almost from scanning the poem exactly what the message is, something like "The Star Spangled Banner," even though that has a few obscurities in it. In fact, I find that much socalled clear poetry is full of murkinesses that I seem to be the only one to pick up on.

Maybe this next question will lead into the murkiness in what's often thought to be more clear poems. Some of your poems might be characterized and have been characterized as anti-voice poems. By that I mean that your poems resist being thought of as speech originating from a presumed personality, attitude, or clear situation. I can think of a few poems of yours where you seem to have a poetic speaker who is a relatively consistent "I" and is also grounded in a time and place. "The Instruction Manual" is one. "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" may be another. "Evening in the Country" and "Ode to Bill" also seem to have that sense of the present speaking voice, relatively coherent. In any of these poems, were you aware—and this is a psychological question which may not help us with these poems—of the Wordsworthian, Yeatsian, and maybe Frank O'Hara background—the personality poet? Were you consciously playing off that in these sorts of poems?

I don't think I was even in those examples that you just cited. I've never really had much of an idea of who I am, and I feel that Rimbaud put it very well when he said, "Je est un autre": "I is an other," meaning using " I" in the third person as someone who's not speaking that statement. I am constantly using different voices without being aware of it, of different people who seem to be talking in these poems without bothering to indicate to the reader where one stops and another one starts up again because I'm interested in a kind of polyphonic quality that attracts me in music. I seem to be somewhat notorious for what I have come to think of as the floating pronoun. I coined this from my own practice. I didn't mean it to be that way. But it often seems to be enough to know that "you" is someone that the speaker is addressing, that "he" or "she" is someone who is neither of these two people, that "we" could be a number of people, including the speaker of the poem, the person he may be talking to, and all possible readers as well. For me this is actually enough. And it seems to be an attempt, possibly a misguided one, at a kind of more realistic approach toward what one learns, what one sees, hears, and what happens, what one's mind does during the course of a day, something like that. I'm interested in the movement of the mind, how it goes from one place to the other. The places themselves don't matter that much; it's the movement that does.

I have one more question before we turn to reading and talking about "At North Farm," You have written in a considerable variety of forms, some of which seem to be your own nonce forms or free verse, others of which are traditional or derived from traditional forms—quatrains, couplets, prose poems, and sestinas, for example. You have spoken yourself of "the tyranny of the line" ["The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery, " with A. Poulin, Jr., Michigan Quarterly Review 20 (1981): 254]. One way of looking at your work might be to see it as a continual struggle with or response to form. Please excuse the baldness of this question: Why write a sestina?

Well, that's a very complicated form which I first discovered in Auden and in Elizabeth Bishop, although many poets, particularly twentieth-century ones, have used the form. And that's a kind of a special case, really. I often use this as an assignment for students because the complexity of the form involves making so many conscious decisions that one's unconscious is kind of left free to go ahead and proceed with the poem, which is as it should be. Eliot said something like meaning in poetry is like the piece of meat that the burglar throws to the watchdog so that he can get at the treasure or whatever he's looking for. Frequently, it has a kind of therapeutic effect on students. When they get all done and realize that they have fitted all the pieces into place and stand back, they suddenly realize that they have written a poem while they thought that they were just solving a puzzle. There are not too many forms that I find useful for that kind of exercise. The canzone, which is actually a more constrained version of the sestina, has sometimes produced interesting work in class and the villanelle, which I have assigned. I have never actually been able to write a successful one myself, but I've had students who have done so. But when you get into the sonnet and things like that, these are forms that are really too loose to have this liberating effect that I'm looking for, especially in teaching. I don't use these forms such as the sestina very much for myself anymore. I probably did when I was younger, when I was finding it more difficult to write and used them as a kind of exercise to get going.

[At this point, by agreement, he read the first poem in his A Wave, "At North Farm."]

     At North Farm

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

I'll tell you a little bit about how I happened to write the poem, although I would caution you against thinking that this is the key to the poem, because it doesn't have any key, like all poetry. Frequently, I find that questions in a situation such as this are actually someone asking for the recipe, and the recipe is always in my head. I can't give it to anybody, just like one's grandmother. The title, "At North Farm," although it could [have] come from anywhere, actually was suggested by the Finnish epic folk poem the Kalevala, which you may know from some of Sibelius's tone poems. They were based on a fascinating body of folklore, copied down in the nineteenth century but actually much older. North Farm in the epic is a place near hell but not in it, and it's always referred to with the epithet "gloomy and prosperous North Farm." And as I recall there are always a lot of beautiful serving girls there, whom the hero, Lemminkainen, is very attracted to; he is always dropping in at North Farm to see what's cooking. So the "gloomy and prosperous," I think, gives you a little note to the stasis in the second part of the poem. Although nothing grows there—it's not fertile—nevertheless it's full of the evidence of fertility, such as these sacks of meal, fish in the streams, and so on.

The first part of the poem, I think, seems to me to come from some cinematic memory, maybe Lawrence of Arabia, somebody galloping across a desert stream. And "will he know where": this person is heading in your direction, but there's some doubt as to whether you are actually going to meet up and whether you will receive the thing that he has for you. It might also have been a kind of memory of that legend that's mentioned in the beginning of "Appointment in Samarra," by John O'Hara, where the man says he has to go to Samarra to avoid death, and death comes and says, "I have an appointment with him there." At any rate it's something ominous, I think, and it reflects a relationship that I had at the time that I wrote it with a person whom I felt to be sort of fascinating but somewhat alarming at the same time. There are a lot of people like that one encounters in the course of one's life—not too many perhaps. I think the idea is that somebody, maybe one of these maids-in-waiting, is waiting back there at the farm where nothing ever happens, where it's fertile but somehow sterile, waiting for this kind of electrifying arrival of a messenger of something, we don't know quite of what. The dish of milk is traditional in fairy tales, something you set out at night to pacify the elves so they won't spoil your crops. It's an image I also use in another poem called "Hop O'My Thumb." A lot of my imagery comes from fairy tales and things I read when I was young, which impressed me more than much of what I've read since. The line in the other poem is "Nocturnal friendliness of the plate of milk left for the fairies / Who otherwise might be less well disposed."

I wrote this poem with great ease. And I enjoyed writing it a lot. I enjoyed the feeling. I was somehow able to use clichés, like "at incredible speed," "birds darken the sky," "travelling day and night," that sort of thing, that kind of very colloquial, not quite clichéd speech which I found at that moment very appealing. I frequently find colloquial, overheard speech to have a kind of beauty that I'd like to steal and put in my poetry. This was one case where I felt that I had been able to do that. At the end, this ambiguous person seems to be the thing that everything hinges on—"That we think of him sometimes"—which is immediately contradicted by "Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings," again a further feeling of contradiction. So it's left up in the air whether the person is going to arrive and what will happen when he does; and that's very often the case.

It sounds as though I'm a victim of too much reading when I'm hearing Yeats and Keats all through the second movement. I'm thinking particularly of Keats' "high-piled books, in charactery, / [which] Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain, " and the closing stanza of "To Autumn," which has that sublime stasis, that end of the season fruition. And maybe even Yeatshighpiled "The young / In one another's arms, birds in the trees /—Those dying generations—at their song, / The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas "—that sense of richness and the sensuous life, which is there, but that's certainly my head.

That might well be. We all have read these poems. They are all part of our subconscious, if not our conscious. I'm frequently finding that I'm rewriting something that I read thirty years ago and had completely forgotten. Perhaps indeed the Yeats line was in the back of my mind. I was also thinking of the Welsh epic poem the Mabinogion, where there's a scene [in which] I think a lot of soldiers are disguised as sacks of meal as in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the unfortunate warrior comes and accosts this man surrounded by sacks of meal. He is about to put him to the sword and the man says, "There is in this sack another type of meal," and then at that point, as I recall it, the armed men all jump out of the flour sacks. But even though this is material that I used, I don't know that it proves anything. It doesn't make the poem any better or worse. That's why I don't have footnotes or explanations as to where all these things came from. I don't think it matters.