Closing some Ashbery tabs

Adam has a lot of John Ashbery ping ponging around his head lately. He connects some of his earliest experiences with Ashbery here in order to close literal* and metaphorical tabs.

Ted and I are reading John Ahsbery's 1984 poem "At North Farm" every day this month. We've talked about it on the newest episode of the podcast. "At North Farm" was first published in the April 9, 1984 issue of the New Yorker.

I discovered that I first emailed Ted about the poem in 2010. Before I pushed this Ashbery poem on Ted, I also sent the sestina "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" and the wonderful “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” a few times.

I don't recall my introduction to Ashbery but I recall early on trying to make some sense of him in a few different places. In 2011, I wrote in an email, “I have a John Ashbery book that is mostly baffling, which is frustrating until I learn I'm supposed to be baffled.” I included a link to a piece that argued, "To read an Ashbery poem with the intent to explicate in the traditional sense is to make a daring, perhaps foolhardy, leap of semantic faith."

I read Meghan O'Rourke's "How to Read John Ashbery" many times. It helps when the other appreciators admit, "This can make for strange reading. Ashbery becomes a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter, so that the poems are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long. Sometimes (as you can imagine) this is infuriating. But in the best of Ashbery, the excess verbiage helps make the moments of lyric focus all the more propulsive and startling, like coming across a lost tune as you spin the dial…"

It was years before I learned that like me, John Ashbery has always tinkered with collages. Only yesterday I discovered there's a virtual tour of his New York house. I promise you will be taken aback by how the much detail was put into this tour.

* Those literal computer tabs? I realized they’re metaphorical too.