Ashbery Talking

John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, published in London by BTL (Between the Lines, 2003) is one of the best interviews I have ever read. Ashbery is open, willing to talk and seems not only really smart but sweet. Perhaps the fact that the two are friends or at least friendly acquaintances accounts for this, but Mr. Ford's smart questions also show a deep familiarity with Ashbery's work. It does seem like a conversation. The 80-page bibliography, which makes up the last part of the book, looks exhaustive and the selections from reviews are cleverly chosen. In fact, a quote from the somewhat notorious first review of Some Trees by Wm. Arrowsmith in the Hudson Review which is intended as negative, seems eerily the reverse:
“What does come through is an impression of an impossibly fractured brittle world, depersonalized and discontinuous, whose characteristic emotional gesture is an effete and cerebral whimsy.”

I particularly like this bit by Ashbery where he talks about the way he writes:

“ How dos a poem begin, and end, for me these days? Well, very much as it always has. A few words will filter in over the transom, as they say in publishing, and Ill grab them and start trying to put them together. This causes something to happen to some other words that I hadn't been thinking of which may well take over the poem to the pint of excluding the original ones. What prompts me to start is a vague feeling that I ought to write a poem, and what 'urges' (rather too strong a word) me to stop is a sudden feeling that it would be pointless to continue.”