John Ashbery’s Norton Lecture at Harvard, March 7, 1990
Following are my notes from Ashbery’s talk about poet John Wheelwright in Sanders Theatre for an audience of about 70 people. From the podium, Ashbery read his paper about a poet who figured in his formation.
About John Wheelwright: “Automatic writing is therapeutic as it uncovers what is in the mind.”
In 1923, Wheelwright appeared in a collection titled Eight More Harvard Poets.
Wheelwright: “Spiritual, then Marxist and Revolutionary.” His writing was “obscure.” The reader “can’t grasp his meaning most of the time.”
“Higher mathematics, elegant language — his conviction is contagious.”
Wheelwright was from Milton, Mass., in an old New England family. He was born in the late 1800s. Jack Wheelwright grew up in Medford. His background was Unitarian, Anglo-Catholic, Trotskyite socialist, Christian Marxist. “His family declined into gentle poverty.”
JW “constantly reworked his poems.”
“His work has the form and content of rebel poetry, proletarian poetry.
“Correspondence with Cubist impulse.”
“The urge to see all sides.” Modernism in light of Proust, de Kooning, James Joyce.
“Wheelwright elides transitions.”
“Disassociate the associative and associate the disassociated.”
He welcomes change. “It wakes you up.”
“Psychological knowledge of the soul.”
JW was “a dandy, a nonconformist, of ambiguous sexuality.”
JW: “Try everything once.”
Ashbery reads the poem “Why Must You Know.”
Standing at the podium reading his paper, Ashbery looks like a bank vice-president, 60-ish, white-haired, with glasses, wearing a gray jacket and trousers. He has a flat voice, a young man’s tone, slightly eating his words, a lip-smacking sound, when he reads Wheelwright’s poems. At the podium, he wipes his eyes, face, nose, mouth with a handkerchief. He doesn’t look at the audience. He uses French terms. At his feet is a Penguin book bag. With a seriousness that seems a little odd, he reads the old poems. His comments are intelligent, not that this needs to be noted.
Audience members may be baffled by this presentation, asking Why? Who? What is the about? Ashbery could be talking to himself about the life and work of a tragic minor poet, a poet in the margin, an enigmatic poet of the first half of the 20th century, offspring of the regional aristocracy. Wheelwright didn’t have a job. His father was an architect, the family involved in some kind of business. JW wrote, traveled, and politicked. He was killed by a drunken driver in 1940.
“Chaotic language and imagery. Art as a benediction and judgement. Art by the one for the many.”
Ashbery closes with a reading of JW’s “Train Ride” and receives extended applause, a long ovation. He walks off stage and is gone.
(This account transcribed from a small spiral-bound notebook from 1990 on 5/15/2024.)
The text of this lecture and his other Norton Lectures is included in Other Traditions (Harvard University Press, 2001). Here is more information from the book cover copy and review excerpts on the amazon.com book listing.
“One of our foremost (and most difficult) living poets...[Ashbery] has always been reluctant to offer exegesis of his twisting, witty, but obscure verse. Called upon to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, he does the next best thing, discussing his interest in six minor poets who have spurred his own writing...Ashbery finds in them [a] common denominator:...each of them is someone for whom the mere act of versifying is its own end, with the flash of language in motion often taking precedence over 'meaning'--a quality that could fairly be ascribed to Ashbery himself...An impressive performance by a central figure in modern American poetry.”―Kirkus Reviews
“[Ashbery] has chosen [the six poets] for the inconsistency in the quality of their work, often due to turbulent lives, and often the cause of their obscurity. But he unearths their shining moments, examples of their best, most lasting poems. He untangles their lives from their work, their obscurity from their talent and their importance to us from their obscurity.”―Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[This is Ashbery] at his most accessible. Each of the six poets [he] discusses...is one of his favorites, one he turns to for a 'poetic jump-start' at times of creative ebb. Ashbery celebrates obscurity, championing the work of minor poets...The chapters are chronicles of disappointment, madness and suicide, all leavened by Ashbery's wit, his obvious pleasure in revealing the eccentricities of his subjects. The critical readings of the poems themselves are tougher going, as Ashbery attempts what may be impossible: the explication of the indeterminate.”―Taylor Antrim, New York Times Book Review
“Ashbery can be a difficult writer to get to grips with. His long unspoolings of memory, bewilderingly jarring fractured narrative, swings and lurches from one register to another, and a vocabulary which can range from the high-flown to the demotic within a single sentence, are both unsettling and invigorating.”―Michael Glover, Financial Times
“Whether it is due to bad luck on the poet's part or simply a lack of merit, the strength of minor poetry, Ashbery would say, lies precisely in its imperfection. [His] Norton Lectures attempt to solve that puzzle, namely, the degree to which originality is the product of a peculiar kind of inability...Other Traditions is an entertaining and shrewd little book. To begin with, the life stories of the six poets he discusses are all amazing. Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur and the lectures are full of delightful anecdotes...The lectures also provide abundant hints about Ashbery's own method. As he readily admits, poets when writing about other poets frequently write about themselves.”―Charles Simic, New York Review of Books
“These lectures perform an invaluable service, in that they create a new context for the reconsideration of neglected poets. Ashbery offers thumbnail biographies of each poet while focusing on the way in which the poems themselves lead their own life. With the exception of Clare, little of the work that Ashbery discusses is easily accessible. Some has rarely appeared in print...The lectures in Other Traditions are the record of abiding passions...Ashbery's lectures reveal his extraordinary curiosity and stamina as a reader; he is willing to wade through tedious stretches of verse and revisit a poet's work frequently, with nothing to go on but the memory of having once been stirred.”―John Palattella, London Review of Books
From the Inside Flap
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 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.
About the Author
John Ashbery has published more than twenty books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Flow Chart, and is the winner of every major American poetry prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal.