Thanksgiving Is Ruined |
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September 30, 2017
John Ashbery’s
greatest interview ever?
Some of TiR’s
favorite quotes from it:
Susan
Sontag was at this writers' conference also—there were just four of us—and one
night in Warsaw we were provided with tickets to a ballet. I said, “Do you
think we should go? It doesn't sound like it will be too interesting.” And she
said, “Sure, we should go. If it is boring that will be interesting too” —which
turned out to be the case.
It's
rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what
your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk
about, at least I would like to think so. [quoting himself in 1964]
One
can accept a Picasso woman with two noses, but an equivalent attempt in poetry
baffles the same audience.
I
think that any true work of art does defuse criticism; if it left anything
important to be said, it wouldn't be doing its job.
I
think I am trying to reproduce the polyphony that goes on inside me, which I
don't think is radically different from that of other people. After all, one is
constantly changing one's mind and thereby becoming something slightly
different.
I
feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can
let down one's bucket and bring the poem back up. (This is very well put in a
passage that occurs early on in Heimito von Doderer's novel The Demons, which I
haven't to hand at the moment.)
TiR has alluded to
that last “bucket” quote, 12 years ago.
Should have foreseen that the great blog
of poet John Latta, several years after that, would do the wonderful job of
finding and posting the passage from von Doderer, here.
And of course, maybe the most charming quote:
I
try to dress in a way that is just slightly off, so the spectator, if he
notices, will feel slightly bemused but not excluded, remembering his own
imperfect mode of dress.
Yes, JA really did dress like that.
Sigh, we shall never see his like again.
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