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The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
Other Traditions
(The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading "in order to get started" when writing, poets he turns to as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery's scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery's efforts, and our own, to read them well. Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery's reflections on these poets of "another tradition" are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery's own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery's other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery's essential place in our own.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published October 30, 2000
7 people are currently reading
133 people want to read
About the author
John Ashbery
294 books480 followersFormal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975).
From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.
From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 24, 2014
A collection of home-spun lectures delivered by Ashbery while he held the Charles Eliot Norton chair. Assuming very little innate knowledge on the part of his listeners, he talks about five "minor" writers very important to him and who he reads to jump-start his own writing. The writers include - John Clare (rustic English somewhat late romantic), Thomas Lovell Beddoes (also a somewhat late English romantic, but also a scientist and occultist), Raymond Roussel (French generator of strange impersonal texts), John Wheelwright (eccentric fur-wrapped Bostonian poet), Laura Riding (thorny poet and fictioneer with a giant thought-filled head), and David Schubert (wonderful, though sad and tragic, American poet). That most of these went mad and/or killed themselves is not immediately apparent in the warmly affectionate tone of the book, and in how inspiring it often is. That such weirdos and underdogs manage to survive through the centuries will always make a certain kind of person feel good, even as life continually torments.
November 27, 2018
Everyone knows fame is arbitrary, and for poets, it seems doubly so. One could be forgiven for positing that for every great poet who achieved fame and renown while living, there must be dozens, if not hundreds, who toiled away and died in obscurity. Surely, then, anthologies must be stuffed with poets who are rescued from oblivion by heroic research.
Sadly, not so. The Emily Dickinsons of the world are the exception, and the strongest predictor of enduring literary reputation is circulation of one’s work prior to death. For the corpus to be received by later generations, it must first be acknowledged, and the job of the successful poet is to make this as inevitable as possible. Enduring poetry seems to embed within itself its own marketing pitch--a claim for its uniqueness, its specialness--while obscure poetry, even very good obscure poetry, seems to suffer from a kind of camouflage that makes it accidentally blend in with other, blander contemporaries.
The recently late--and widely celebrated--poet John Ashbery is undeterred. In his excellent book Other Traditions, he is like a tour guide who insists on skipping all the famous landmarks in favor of local haunts. It’s not that Ashbery should have anything against major poets, being one himself; but he may feel (with justifiable snobbery) that a voice as unique and important as his could not possibly have been descended from the merely conventional. Ashbery’s poems indeed play with the fires of obscurity and difficulty; despite his popularity, no one would call him accessible. And like Dante guiding us through Hell, there is no better poet with whom to tour the literary underground than John Ashbery. This tour is a tour de force.
Here we feast on the suffering of obscurity: English Romantic John Claire’s poverty and megalomania; 18th-century Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ ungainly and histrionic verse plays; American Modernist Laura Riding’s philosophical ravings against poetry in all its forms, including her own; Boston Communist John Wheelwright’s willful poetic difficulty, harnessing the oil-and-vinegar mix of Trotskyism and Anglicanism; French Surrealist Raymond Roussel’s lifetime of critical humiliation; and lastly American prodigy David Schubert’s monsterous and haunted unfulfilled promise. Several of the poets in this book were considered sexually deviant by the standards of their time (though some remain obscure even in this intimate regard), and though Ashbery does not dwell much on this matter, not fitting into existing social categories is a recurring theme. Ashbery admires the poets before him who were forced to live life on their own terms and who responded to their headwinds with defiance.
Everywhere Ashbery finds poetry--glorious, strange, dreamlike poetry--that seems to ebb and flow in and out of the margins of the book, welling up into something monumental. The poetry he finds is so bizarre and so moving it’s as if Ashbery is summoning creatures to speak for him from another plane. Then, just as you are becoming charmed, the spell is broken and the chapter ends, leaving you wanting more.
After spending some time in this world, reading “normal” poetry feels easy--and boring, as if all the work has been done for you. The thrill of obscurity and difficulty is gone, but so is the relatableness. These “weird” poets feel more human because their legacy is so fragile. Lacking the gift of self-promotion, their poetry seems to drown in that ever-sought but never recovered modern holy grail: Authenticity.
Sadly, not so. The Emily Dickinsons of the world are the exception, and the strongest predictor of enduring literary reputation is circulation of one’s work prior to death. For the corpus to be received by later generations, it must first be acknowledged, and the job of the successful poet is to make this as inevitable as possible. Enduring poetry seems to embed within itself its own marketing pitch--a claim for its uniqueness, its specialness--while obscure poetry, even very good obscure poetry, seems to suffer from a kind of camouflage that makes it accidentally blend in with other, blander contemporaries.
The recently late--and widely celebrated--poet John Ashbery is undeterred. In his excellent book Other Traditions, he is like a tour guide who insists on skipping all the famous landmarks in favor of local haunts. It’s not that Ashbery should have anything against major poets, being one himself; but he may feel (with justifiable snobbery) that a voice as unique and important as his could not possibly have been descended from the merely conventional. Ashbery’s poems indeed play with the fires of obscurity and difficulty; despite his popularity, no one would call him accessible. And like Dante guiding us through Hell, there is no better poet with whom to tour the literary underground than John Ashbery. This tour is a tour de force.
Here we feast on the suffering of obscurity: English Romantic John Claire’s poverty and megalomania; 18th-century Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ ungainly and histrionic verse plays; American Modernist Laura Riding’s philosophical ravings against poetry in all its forms, including her own; Boston Communist John Wheelwright’s willful poetic difficulty, harnessing the oil-and-vinegar mix of Trotskyism and Anglicanism; French Surrealist Raymond Roussel’s lifetime of critical humiliation; and lastly American prodigy David Schubert’s monsterous and haunted unfulfilled promise. Several of the poets in this book were considered sexually deviant by the standards of their time (though some remain obscure even in this intimate regard), and though Ashbery does not dwell much on this matter, not fitting into existing social categories is a recurring theme. Ashbery admires the poets before him who were forced to live life on their own terms and who responded to their headwinds with defiance.
Everywhere Ashbery finds poetry--glorious, strange, dreamlike poetry--that seems to ebb and flow in and out of the margins of the book, welling up into something monumental. The poetry he finds is so bizarre and so moving it’s as if Ashbery is summoning creatures to speak for him from another plane. Then, just as you are becoming charmed, the spell is broken and the chapter ends, leaving you wanting more.
After spending some time in this world, reading “normal” poetry feels easy--and boring, as if all the work has been done for you. The thrill of obscurity and difficulty is gone, but so is the relatableness. These “weird” poets feel more human because their legacy is so fragile. Lacking the gift of self-promotion, their poetry seems to drown in that ever-sought but never recovered modern holy grail: Authenticity.
July 22, 2020
But the poem is just this
Speaking of what cannot be said
To the person I want to say it.
- David Schubert
November 26, 2024
Lovely and enjoyable. A good introduction to these poets that will make you want to read them. I particularly enjoy Clare, Beddoes, and David Schubert.
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February 21, 2017The book presents six poets, British and USAmerican, whom Ashbery designates, in a self-deprecatory way, as minor (he wouldn’t dream of writing on major poets, he says), and he follows WH Auden's relatively neutral distinction between major and minor, of which perhaps a most telling feature is that in a so-called minor poet you won’t perceive a formal development over time. There’s something about how the writing inheres as writing, the way the language is written as poetry, that makes the writing itself anomalous yet distinctive. "Among the minors, with one exception I have chosen to talk in this series about the jump-start variety, poets I have at some period turned to when I really needed to be reminded yet again of what poetry is."
Most exceedingly proper in Ashbery’s approach to tradition (other or same) is in how he says what he says and means what he means to mean about the poems. He invokes "meaning." He writes about what the poem means, going word to word, line to line over parts of it. Ashbery provides careful, attentive, fine readings of lines, and doesn’t mind paraphrasing as close as he needs to in order to mean what he means to. He answers the question, What does this line mean? “Focus on the text alone and answer the question....”(that’s me gently mocking a generic teacherly approach to “meaning,” not saying that that's what he does - he doesn't - and I’m not quoting him.) Ashbery strikingly differs, however, both from an ordinary way of answering this most basic of questions, and from a souped-up poststructuralist way (the latter would locate singularity in its own reading of the line, not in the line itself—so the line could have quite dull and uninteresting features, even preferably so). Ashbery’s readings of these poets’ lines offers an exit from as much as an entrance to meaning. It’s not, in other words, that their poetry is “ambiguous.” It’s that their language somehow exits agreed-on meaning-making at-face-value procedures. And so his attention is directed at trying to explicate exactly where and how that happens. So, "other" in that sense. “In that sense….”
If one listens to the Vancouver 1985 New Poetics Colloquium talks, which predate Ashbery's lectures, one hears how this ordinary sense of "meaning" is being invoked often against their will (the weight of a hermeneutic, institutional, tradition) only to be exceeded and challenged.
Most exceedingly proper in Ashbery’s approach to tradition (other or same) is in how he says what he says and means what he means to mean about the poems. He invokes "meaning." He writes about what the poem means, going word to word, line to line over parts of it. Ashbery provides careful, attentive, fine readings of lines, and doesn’t mind paraphrasing as close as he needs to in order to mean what he means to. He answers the question, What does this line mean? “Focus on the text alone and answer the question....”(that’s me gently mocking a generic teacherly approach to “meaning,” not saying that that's what he does - he doesn't - and I’m not quoting him.) Ashbery strikingly differs, however, both from an ordinary way of answering this most basic of questions, and from a souped-up poststructuralist way (the latter would locate singularity in its own reading of the line, not in the line itself—so the line could have quite dull and uninteresting features, even preferably so). Ashbery’s readings of these poets’ lines offers an exit from as much as an entrance to meaning. It’s not, in other words, that their poetry is “ambiguous.” It’s that their language somehow exits agreed-on meaning-making at-face-value procedures. And so his attention is directed at trying to explicate exactly where and how that happens. So, "other" in that sense. “In that sense….”
If one listens to the Vancouver 1985 New Poetics Colloquium talks, which predate Ashbery's lectures, one hears how this ordinary sense of "meaning" is being invoked often against their will (the weight of a hermeneutic, institutional, tradition) only to be exceeded and challenged.
May 20, 2009
JA lectures on a handful of lesser-known, unknown, poets, and shows them respect. Close-reading sometimes, revealing differing kinds of poetic hazards, opening for us a can of quirks, JA shows us, also, ourselves as we've tried to write and write earnestly.
'Minor' poets, lacking the 'grace of God' and just the two or three wrist-turns it takes to be 'major', get known or get kept at all only by the diligence of scholars or the acknowledgment extended by the brotherhood.
If you write and are not known at all -- any out there? -- try this close look. Its shiny surface brought out features I could swear I recognized.
'Minor' poets, lacking the 'grace of God' and just the two or three wrist-turns it takes to be 'major', get known or get kept at all only by the diligence of scholars or the acknowledgment extended by the brotherhood.
If you write and are not known at all -- any out there? -- try this close look. Its shiny surface brought out features I could swear I recognized.
November 27, 2013
This is a fantastic collection of deceptively short essays. Ashbery provides a great deal of insight into the work the poets he selected for his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert), the reader wants to run out and beginning reading each poet's collected pons. Indirectly, the reader cannot help but feel that Ashbery is revealing much about his own seemingly sphinx-like aesthetic orientation.
January 30, 2014
Poet John Ashbery talks about some of the poets whose work has influenced him. For this book he chooses 'minor' poets, and the result is interesting and very readable. For a longer discussion of this book, check out my blogpost on it here: http://outsideofacat.wordpress.com/20...
February 2, 2012
Ashbery hints broadly here how these poets, or at least his readings of these poets, have been instructive and influential in his own poetry. A late-comer to the genius of Ashbery, I find it fascinating to get a glimpse of the poet's mind at work, engaging other people's poetry.
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March 1, 2013811.5209 A8198o 2001
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews