Lance Mannion: "Mother, I'm a Poet!"

Posted Wednesday morning, March 24, 2021.

The poet John Ashbery in New York City, 1971. Photo by Gerard Malanga, via LitHub.

Another case of one thing leading to another: a few weeks ago my pal and favorite living American poet Steve Kuusisto wrote, poetically but factually, about rutabagas. At about the same time I happened to find my old signed copy of John Ashbery’s book of poems “The Double Dream of Spring”, which I acquired---book and signature---when Ashbery came to read at Iowa sometime while I was at the Workshop between 1983 and 1985. It---the book with the signature had been cleverly hiding in a corner of a bookshelf since we moved here from Syracuse seventeen years ago. It’s a thin book with a gray binding and black lettering, seemingly deliberately designed to blend into the shadows. But it peeked out at me like Harry Lime in “The Third Man” when I was rearranging that set of shelves to make room for some of the two hundred or so new books I’ve piled up in the last year. Since I hadn’t read it in years, possibly not since I left Iowa, I immediately sat down to dig in. My memory was that Ashbery---as a reader and a poet---had left me cold. His poems were overlong, abstruse, too full of literary games for my money, and humorless. When he died in 2017, thinking I should blog about him, I dutifully bought “Where Shall I Wander”, the only one of his books Barnes & Noble had on hand, and wasn’t much warmed up. I put it on my bookshelf, the same one where “The Double Dream of Spring” was hiding and forgot about it. I didn’t expect my temperature to rise now, though it immediately started to when I saw Ashbery’s plain, unaddressed, business-like signature, probably exactly like the one he used to sign checks, and happy memories of my time at the Workshop flooded back. But when I searched the table of contents for familiar titles, looking for a poem to begin with, one jumped right out at me: “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”. With Steve’s rutabagas in mind, I turned to it right away. And loved it. Warmed me right up. And made me laugh. It’s a short mock-epic about Popeye the Sailor Man’s friends anxiously waiting for him to come home from wherever he had sailed to. I didn’t remember Ashbery as showing any sign of a sense of humor when he read at Iowa, in his poems or in his demeanor. I don't remember him reading "Farm Implements and Rutabagas" or if he did he read it in such a that he killed the joke. But maybe was he or I was having a bad day. Or I was. I could be moody in those days. I did a bit of Googling, looking for some critical enlightenment, and I found this, a reminiscence by Ashbery’s good friend and once upon a time apprentice, the poet Douglas Crase, like Ashbery a Pulitzer Prize winner himself: “Driving By the Lake With John Ashbery”. I learned a lot about Ashbery, including the fact that not only did he have a sense of humor, it was a very wicked one, borderline mean. He could even be cutting with his beloved mother, who could be equally cutting with him. Which makes me wonder how I’d have dealt with him and he with me if we’d said more to each other than “Would you sign this, please, Mr Ashbery?” and “Sure.” At any rate, I got a real kick out of this anecdote from Crase’s essay:

There would be other lessons that art was a jealous mistress, but none more memorable than on the morning I arrived in Pultneyville to pick him up for our first ride farther east along the lake. It was October, bright and chilly, and his mother, then seventy-nine, was raking leaves in the front yard. She was not making much progress. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and her nose was dripping. As John came out of the house she said to him—and she had a voice that could rise in a nasal whine to match his own—“John, if you were any kind of a son at all you’d help your mother with these leaves.”

John, his hand already on the car door, turned briefly back and replied in exasperation, as though she should have known better, “Mother, I’m a poet!”

So he was, I can now see and appreciate, and, after having read all of “Double Dream” and a generous selection from the Library of America’s two volumes of his work, a prolific one. But, still on the subject of one thing leading to another, in my Googling I turned up a review of Ben Lerner’s novel “The Topeka School”, from which I learned that Lerner, a poet as well as a novelist, has been strongly influenced by Ashbery, to the point of titling his first novel after one of Ashbery’s poems, “Leaving the Atocha Station” and giving Ashbery an offstage cameo in “The Topeka School”. According to Andrew Epstein, the author of the review, a professor at Florida State University and who has written extensively on Ashberry and hiis work, allusions and references to and quotes from Ashbery’s poems pop up throughout both books. So now I’m reading both novels.

Meantime: I considered ending the post by quoting “Leaving the Atocha Station”---Ashbery’s poem, not Lerner’s novel; it's short, but not that short----but it's long, abstruse, constructed as a linguistic game, and it leaves me cold---again, Asbery’s poem, not Lerner’s novel, which I’m enjoying, warmly. So here’s “Farm Implements with Rutabagas”. It still cracks me up. Particularly this bit from the first line: “‘Popeye sits in thunder…’” Although, to be a stickler, the Sea Hag wasn’t part of Popeye’s extended family. Or maybe she was in the comics. Ashbery would have known that...

The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant
To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched
Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder
Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach
When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”
But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder
And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment
Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country
One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment
And all that it contains, myself and spinach
In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder
At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched
Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”
She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”
“But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”
Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant
Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach
Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched
One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country
Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,
The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched
His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.