Shall we be really gone? The passing of John Ashbery
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| at Great Spruce Head Island |
Just last Friday I was
thinking: We won’t have John Ashbery with us too much longer. Then came the
news . . .
I cannot describe how this
feels. I can count now on one hand the number of poets that might be described
as belonging to the New York School or even the Second Generation that are
still with us. John Ashbery’s passing closes a circle. All this as I’m reading
and re-reading James Schuyler’s diary, letters—many citations and addressed to
John Ashbery. This summer I spent a week at Great Spruce Head Island and
visited the tennis courts where he played, walked the path from the boat house
to the big house that he must have trod, swam the coves he most likely swam in—during
a vital and sunny part of his life.
As I Googled him last Friday
and stared into images of a very old Ashbery I was reminded of that young man
who drove with Jane Freilicher to Mexico, who won a Fullbright and went to
France, who wrote impregnable poetry. Not many of us walked in his footprints.
Summer has ended.
Yet he was nothing like the
New York School. He was a universe unto himself. School is a misnomer—he was
part of a class, a group of mates that hung together. In James’s diary there is
a to and fro, a going back and forth on the Long Island railroad between
Manhattan and Southampton. Car rides with a Nest of Ninnies. Weekends in
Vermont. John Ashbery outlived them all=Frank O’Hara, James, Jane, Fairfield, Kenneth.
He was always there to give a tribute, to say a few words. Now that voice is
silenced.
How many people came and
stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech
that became part of you
Like light behind windblown
fog and sand,
Filtered or influenced by it,
until no part
Remains that is surely you.
-- “Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror” (thanks to Andrew Epstein blog Locus Solus for pointing me to these
lines)
Ashbery was our connection to
one of the most thrilling times in American poetry. I don’t want to say the last connection (thank you Ron Padgett)
but we are winding down.
Ashes to ashes.
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| Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery in Mexico, 1955. Photographer unknown. |
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