By Maurice Mierau
Since the world did not end I’ve decided to keep all my commitments.
John Ashbery, b. 1927
In my last column, posted during Winnipeg’s traditionally searing July, I promised to write about a John Ashbery reading I attended this summer. It turned out to be both spectacular and odd.
The reading was scheduled for 7 pm on July 12 at New York City’s Poets House, on the Manhattan waterfront. I exchanged messages with someone at the House who recommended arriving half an hour early; his name was Joe and the tone of his reply was so relaxed that the vertical letters in his email all appeared sideways. However, the transit schedule and my fear of the unknown led me to disembark from the ferry more than two hours early.
The NY Waterways ferry landed within a collected poems’ throw of the House, which is housed splendidly in 11,000 square feet of glass-enclosed space in the centre of New York’s financial district, overlooking the Hudson River. Poets House was founded by Stanley Kunitz and arts administrator Elizabeth Kray in 1985. It moved from Soho to its current, palatial digs, in summer 2009.
Once I found the place, and confirmed the reading’s start-time, I reached for my pocket and realized that I had no pen (panic! How to make notes?). Fortunately in New York you can buy anything from a street vendor, and I bought a ballpoint pen for what Yanks call a single.
Then I found dinner at a food truck, Valducci’s Pizza: a thin crust slice with the best tomato sauce in the world (my claim, not theirs) and no other topping. Walking back to Poets House I noticed the offices of the Action Center to End World Hunger, surely a manifestation of American optimism at its finest. Or maybe they ate routinely at Valducci’s.
By now it was only 5:15 pm, and so I decided to give myself a tour of Poets House. The main floor shelves were stacked with a summer exhibition of international poetry, including a lot of Canadian stuff. The CanLit selections appeared a bit random, from cliché-drunk spoken word (pardon the redundancy, and you can decide for yourself here) to Amanda Jernigan’s brilliant selection of The Essential Richard Outram, to Winnipegger Méira Cook’s latest book of poems (A Walker in the City).
The library at Poets House contains 50,000 volumes of poetry. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and prepared to lose myself for a while. Just as I pulled out my premium ballpoint to note some anthology titles, a line began forming behind me. By accident I’d landed in eleventh place. A large woman wearing a broadly-striped blanket was arguing vociferously that she was in fifth place and not sixth. The wan poetry fan in front of her gave way almost immediately.
I asked the man next to me, who wore a scarf and skinny 1980s jeans, whether the line was for the Ashbery reading. Yes, he said. My watch said 5:55 pm. Within minutes the line went to the far end of the library and snaked around, doubling itself down the stairwell like a tapeworm. The blanket-wearing woman now in fifth place talked noisily about readings and classes by famous poets that she had attended.
At 6:30 an extremely thin young man with long hair, plaid shirt, and an unintended crop top began seating us on the main floor. Chairs faced the middle of the room from three directions, with the prime seats in the middle marked as Reserved (for board members, who arrived fashionably late after the reading began). Ashbery entered then, being pushed on his wheelchair, with various interns shooing people out of the path. While the audience sat waiting, the thin young man adjusted a ceiling light above the podium for Ashbery, leaning off the top of a ladder like a circus performer. Good thing those board members weren’t there yet—liability!
By this time the audience had reached over 150 that were visible to me, with more people watching by video camera from the second level. Ashbery looked relaxed, spreading out manuscript papers and bantering with the thin young man. The crowd had much visual interest to me, a naïve Canuck from a small city: a postmodern promiscuity of fashion speech blared forth, and all types of humans were represented. The college boys in front of me were from the corn belt, and talked about how they’d come to NY just for this reading, how they’d written papers about Ashbery, how they’d read each other’s papers.
Ashbery looked frail in his wheelchair but he was 84 years old and still writing sharp poems. He read for a solid 45 minutes with a short break during which some of the audience turned over, probably replaced by denizens of the second level. The poems were all from his new manuscript, Quick Question, which just appeared this month with Ecco. Ashbery’s reading lacked any theatrical trappings, and the only introductions to poems were a few footnotes, usually to explain that a title (e.g. “Sons of the Desert”) came from a Laurel and Hardy film; Ashbery obsesses over much early film history.
I was surprised how funny many of the poems were. A random line: “Like a wind-up denture in a joke store, fate approaches…” Fate takes on only jokey, metaphorical weight in Ashbery, never anything political. What a relief! As with any reading this long, of poetry this dense, it became difficult to concentrate.
When Ashbery finished, his way had to be cleared once again. While Ashbery’s friend pushed his wheelchair, a photographer wearing multiple complex cameras duckwalked backwards, snapping pictures as if the poet were a runway model. It took me at least five minutes to round the corner to the exit, where the photographer stood cursing at Ashbery’s companion. “I’m a fucking professional, I cleared it with his publicist, and he takes a swing at me?” Ashbery’s diminutive friend, who looked and dressed remarkably like Curly of The Three Stooges, simply stared at the photographer, who was a foot taller than he was. The friend’s crewcut head and flat eyes radiated menace as he pushed the elevator button to take Ashbery to the reception upstairs. The photographer stormed out onto the street.
The surging crowd had already bought every Ashbery book on display, prepared to get their quota of one signature from the master. I wanted fresh air to absorb the intimidating and inspiring level of energy from this great American poet.
The ferry back to Hoboken was filled with young, drunken men in expensive suits. Presumably they had just finished another hard day of ruining the world’s economy for their own enrichment (or more likely for the enrichment of their managers). They did not look happy or reflective.
***
Nothing in TWR this year provoked letters of outrage, which is either editorial maturity or a sign of the magazine boring its readers. In December I received one letter from a gentleman in Ireland, who inquired whether the issue 1 review of Sex Lives of the Interlake Hutterites was a hoax, since he wanted to buy the book as a Christmas gift, and couldn’t find it online. Judge for yourself, but that thumbnail cover sure looked elegant. (Thank you to Suzanne B at Relish.)
One of the things I’m most proud of in the magazine is the poetry. This year was our best yet, with contributions by writers who are already nationally recognized in Barbara Nickel and Elise Partridge (follow the links), and some who should be soon: Lori Cayer of Winnipeg and Vancouver’s Russell Thornton.
Back in March, Jeff Bursey, one of our most prolific and engaging columnists, wrote an insightful critique of Herb Wyile’s book on Atlantic-Canadian Lit. And this spring our YA columnist Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch wrote a terrific piece recommending dystopian YA by Canadians you may not have yet heard about.
Among many outstanding book reviews in TWR this year, I want to mention Alison Gillmor’s review of David Bergen’s latest (better than anything that appeared in the so-called national media), Shawn Syms’ piece on Steven Heighton’s short stories, Jonathan Ball’s review of Carmine Starnino’s Lazy Bastardism, and last but certainly not least Shane Neilson’s review essay on Chris Gudgeon’s novel Song of Kosovo.
I wish we could publish more essays like Kerry Clare’s on Canadian nationalism as expressed in Lit from issue 7, and more satire like the venerable Agnes Smyth-Jones’s Things That Piss Me Off. Stay tuned for Nathan Dueck’s tweet-ventriloquism of a certain government minister, and see you in the New Year…
A Poetry Reading and a Dozen Links to 2012
Columns
By Maurice Mierau
Since the world did not end I’ve decided to keep all my commitments.
John Ashbery, b. 1927
In my last column, posted during Winnipeg’s traditionally searing July, I promised to write about a John Ashbery reading I attended this summer. It turned out to be both spectacular and odd.
The reading was scheduled for 7 pm on July 12 at New York City’s Poets House, on the Manhattan waterfront. I exchanged messages with someone at the House who recommended arriving half an hour early; his name was Joe and the tone of his reply was so relaxed that the vertical letters in his email all appeared sideways. However, the transit schedule and my fear of the unknown led me to disembark from the ferry more than two hours early.
The NY Waterways ferry landed within a collected poems’ throw of the House, which is housed splendidly in 11,000 square feet of glass-enclosed space in the centre of New York’s financial district, overlooking the Hudson River. Poets House was founded by Stanley Kunitz and arts administrator Elizabeth Kray in 1985. It moved from Soho to its current, palatial digs, in summer 2009.
Once I found the place, and confirmed the reading’s start-time, I reached for my pocket and realized that I had no pen (panic! How to make notes?). Fortunately in New York you can buy anything from a street vendor, and I bought a ballpoint pen for what Yanks call a single.
Then I found dinner at a food truck, Valducci’s Pizza: a thin crust slice with the best tomato sauce in the world (my claim, not theirs) and no other topping. Walking back to Poets House I noticed the offices of the Action Center to End World Hunger, surely a manifestation of American optimism at its finest. Or maybe they ate routinely at Valducci’s.
By now it was only 5:15 pm, and so I decided to give myself a tour of Poets House. The main floor shelves were stacked with a summer exhibition of international poetry, including a lot of Canadian stuff. The CanLit selections appeared a bit random, from cliché-drunk spoken word (pardon the redundancy, and you can decide for yourself here) to Amanda Jernigan’s brilliant selection of The Essential Richard Outram, to Winnipegger Méira Cook’s latest book of poems (A Walker in the City).
The library at Poets House contains 50,000 volumes of poetry. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and prepared to lose myself for a while. Just as I pulled out my premium ballpoint to note some anthology titles, a line began forming behind me. By accident I’d landed in eleventh place. A large woman wearing a broadly-striped blanket was arguing vociferously that she was in fifth place and not sixth. The wan poetry fan in front of her gave way almost immediately.
I asked the man next to me, who wore a scarf and skinny 1980s jeans, whether the line was for the Ashbery reading. Yes, he said. My watch said 5:55 pm. Within minutes the line went to the far end of the library and snaked around, doubling itself down the stairwell like a tapeworm. The blanket-wearing woman now in fifth place talked noisily about readings and classes by famous poets that she had attended.
At 6:30 an extremely thin young man with long hair, plaid shirt, and an unintended crop top began seating us on the main floor. Chairs faced the middle of the room from three directions, with the prime seats in the middle marked as Reserved (for board members, who arrived fashionably late after the reading began). Ashbery entered then, being pushed on his wheelchair, with various interns shooing people out of the path. While the audience sat waiting, the thin young man adjusted a ceiling light above the podium for Ashbery, leaning off the top of a ladder like a circus performer. Good thing those board members weren’t there yet—liability!
By this time the audience had reached over 150 that were visible to me, with more people watching by video camera from the second level. Ashbery looked relaxed, spreading out manuscript papers and bantering with the thin young man. The crowd had much visual interest to me, a naïve Canuck from a small city: a postmodern promiscuity of fashion speech blared forth, and all types of humans were represented. The college boys in front of me were from the corn belt, and talked about how they’d come to NY just for this reading, how they’d written papers about Ashbery, how they’d read each other’s papers.
Ashbery looked frail in his wheelchair but he was 84 years old and still writing sharp poems. He read for a solid 45 minutes with a short break during which some of the audience turned over, probably replaced by denizens of the second level. The poems were all from his new manuscript, Quick Question, which just appeared this month with Ecco. Ashbery’s reading lacked any theatrical trappings, and the only introductions to poems were a few footnotes, usually to explain that a title (e.g. “Sons of the Desert”) came from a Laurel and Hardy film; Ashbery obsesses over much early film history.
I was surprised how funny many of the poems were. A random line: “Like a wind-up denture in a joke store, fate approaches…” Fate takes on only jokey, metaphorical weight in Ashbery, never anything political. What a relief! As with any reading this long, of poetry this dense, it became difficult to concentrate.
When Ashbery finished, his way had to be cleared once again. While Ashbery’s friend pushed his wheelchair, a photographer wearing multiple complex cameras duckwalked backwards, snapping pictures as if the poet were a runway model. It took me at least five minutes to round the corner to the exit, where the photographer stood cursing at Ashbery’s companion. “I’m a fucking professional, I cleared it with his publicist, and he takes a swing at me?” Ashbery’s diminutive friend, who looked and dressed remarkably like Curly of The Three Stooges, simply stared at the photographer, who was a foot taller than he was. The friend’s crewcut head and flat eyes radiated menace as he pushed the elevator button to take Ashbery to the reception upstairs. The photographer stormed out onto the street.
The surging crowd had already bought every Ashbery book on display, prepared to get their quota of one signature from the master. I wanted fresh air to absorb the intimidating and inspiring level of energy from this great American poet.
The ferry back to Hoboken was filled with young, drunken men in expensive suits. Presumably they had just finished another hard day of ruining the world’s economy for their own enrichment (or more likely for the enrichment of their managers). They did not look happy or reflective.
***
Nothing in TWR this year provoked letters of outrage, which is either editorial maturity or a sign of the magazine boring its readers. In December I received one letter from a gentleman in Ireland, who inquired whether the issue 1 review of Sex Lives of the Interlake Hutterites was a hoax, since he wanted to buy the book as a Christmas gift, and couldn’t find it online. Judge for yourself, but that thumbnail cover sure looked elegant. (Thank you to Suzanne B at Relish.)
One of the things I’m most proud of in the magazine is the poetry. This year was our best yet, with contributions by writers who are already nationally recognized in Barbara Nickel and Elise Partridge (follow the links), and some who should be soon: Lori Cayer of Winnipeg and Vancouver’s Russell Thornton.
Back in March, Jeff Bursey, one of our most prolific and engaging columnists, wrote an insightful critique of Herb Wyile’s book on Atlantic-Canadian Lit. And this spring our YA columnist Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch wrote a terrific piece recommending dystopian YA by Canadians you may not have yet heard about.
Among many outstanding book reviews in TWR this year, I want to mention Alison Gillmor’s review of David Bergen’s latest (better than anything that appeared in the so-called national media), Shawn Syms’ piece on Steven Heighton’s short stories, Jonathan Ball’s review of Carmine Starnino’s Lazy Bastardism, and last but certainly not least Shane Neilson’s review essay on Chris Gudgeon’s novel Song of Kosovo.
I wish we could publish more essays like Kerry Clare’s on Canadian nationalism as expressed in Lit from issue 7, and more satire like the venerable Agnes Smyth-Jones’s Things That Piss Me Off. Stay tuned for Nathan Dueck’s tweet-ventriloquism of a certain government minister, and see you in the New Year…