Much On The Cliffs: The Philosophies of John Ashbery

Stein, Beckett and Bishop would be influences also - I don't know Bunnymen but Bartheleme's stories are very funny/strange...

Are you in prison? I hope you are all right Seems you are enjoying Ashbery etc I was once obssessed by Ashbery for some years - haven't looked at his work for some time.I liked his "Self Portrait .." & "Houseboat Days" - he writes in way analagous to composing music often writing while music is on...I think he is also very much a film buff. Cheers.

Three Poems is the volume I had the most essential response to [ followed by April Galleons] studying it for months as I tried and failed to get my own work off the ground [ only later to understand the value of bringing the craft to the edge of the nearest cliff] Bartheleme cited it as a primary influence and the connection to Stien is inescapable. JA was also an art critic of some repute and seems to share some DNA w/ Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg. [Those WERE the days]

Yes he was an art critic which is presumably why he wrote "Self Portrait..." which (the main poem of the book) is a meditation on the portrait painted in convex mirror by the great mannerist painter Pargianino...he refers to art a lot in his work. But then he has stuff about Daffy Duck or things such as "The Universe farted." and so on! But Three Poem he wrote while listening to Eliot Carter. Ashbery has wide musical tastes.

He is an original. When I first got back to writing I found House Boat Days and I wondered what it was all about - in the end I learned to just read him without worrying about what he meant per se... I also got onto Bartheleme and Borges and later Stein. Lautreamont is important -it took me sometime to find out who all these people were..I like Rauschenberg but I like all kinds of art -I would say Ashbery does also. Also other artists & writers of that time but also more recent and more ancient.

Eliot Carter? Thanks quagapp, I will make sure to search this person out.

There is an interview with Carter on here - he 100! But he won the Pulitzer, as did another favourite musician (of Ashbery and myself) Charles Ives. Carter's music takes a bit of getting used to but I like it if I concentrate on it. BTW I feel that one book of JA's that I feel is somewhat overlooked is his - in my view - quite brilliant "A Vermont Note Book" with Joe Brainard.

Ashbery was influenced by Frank O'Hara who was his friend in NY as was Koch and Schuyler et al (where for example he was urged by O'Hara to watch a Donald Duck movie - and that night he dreamt about Milton an in the dream Daffy Duck became the devil - so his poem "Daffy Duck in Hollywood"). Also he was in France where he studied the strange surrealist writer Raymond Rousell - he thought of of doing a thesis about. Rousell.

How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher of the penitentiary?

From the great poem in 'The Tennis Court Oath'

oh, just long enough