On September 19th, as part of the LIVE from the NYPL series, Reader contributor Adam Fitzgerald joined forthcoming contributor, John Ashbery, Poetry Foundation President Robert Polito, and Timothy Donnelly at the New York Public Library for a highly animated cross-generational discussion on the arc of modernism in poetry. Both Fitzgerald and Donnelly expressed their mutual indebtedness to Ashbery, considered by critics to be one of the most prominent figures of late twentieth-century poetry and a model for subsequent generations. Fitzgerald is the author of the recently published, critically acclaimed book The Late Parade and teaches creative writing at Rutgers. Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit and The Cloud Corporation Wave, as well as winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
The poets took turns reading their own work, before discussing with one another their shared poetic forbears, as well as poetry’s evolving relationship with mass culture. A few excerpts from the conversation follow below.
ROBERT POLITO
I wonder if I could get each of you to talk about what it means to be, or what it feels like to be, part of a poetic generation. In a way, you’re each from three very different generations, and this seems like a very good moment to be a poet. There are lots of magazines and small presses, there are lots of readings like this, and I think a lot of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties have kind of disappeared. I’ll start with Adam. How do you think of yourself inside a generation in contrast to, or in continuity with, earlier generations, specifically Timothy’s and John’s?
ADAM FITZGERALD
I would say that, for example, two of the poems I read just now were poems that had taken part of their procedure or idea from a television show, which is something that I could never imagine a modernist poet—well, there wasn’t television then, but, that embrace of popular culture in an unselfconscious way as poetic material… that certainly seems to me something that the poets of my generation are engaging with and interested in. And not just as the kind of name-dropping and name-branding of different devices or technologies or celebrities, but also that.
I can’t imagine those poems being allowed to be even heard without someone like John, whether he loves that or not. I feel like John is so responsible for oxygenating a very staid way of looking at ambitious and difficult poetry, [which lasted] for so long, and his work has always been filled with so many crossings, and improbable ones. A poem of his I can’t get over is called “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.” It begins, “Something strange is creeping over me.” The idea that someone would write a three-and-a-half-page poem inspired by a Chuck Avery cartoon that references obscure French drama, watersports, and is the most Miltonic sounding poem in the English language that I know of outside of Milton, that astonishes me. And I think it speaks so well to our moment, because we are so inundated with different types of culture, and this idea that we should be hierarchically stacking them or appropriately engaging with them at certain moments or not—I think that’s over, that’s passé, and John’s work is much more fluid, and then you realize all the experimental and progressive work in poetry is that way, too.
POLITO
Do you feel part of that generation?
TIMOTHY DONNELLEY
A TV generation?
POLITO
A TV generation or a poetry generation, I was thinking more of.
DONNELLEY
Everything Adam’s saying I to some extent I identify with or I completely understand what you’re saying. Simultaneously, within my own development as a writer, as a person, I’ve often felt and still do feel that the compulsion to be new—I don’t have… I think I have that to some extent, but I also feel a little bit suspicious of it. Everyone knows the mandate, “Make it new.”
POLITO
It’s already in quotation marks.
DONNELLEY
Yeah, yeah. And to me, on some level, I don’t not see that that is also kind of part of our culture—our society needs always to replace the material goods that we have with the newer version of it. To some degree, I find novelty or making something new, displacing the old, is not something I don’t have a somewhat critical or anxious relationship to. I love Tennyson, I love Keats, and I feel I want to be in their company as much as the company of the—for history to look at me that way, but I feel when I write, the occasion is as much a part of the distant past as it is in this moment and this gentleman and whatnot. I found myself, at times, writing new poems, post my second book, feeling like, “I don’t know if it’s fresh enough,” and then I ask myself that question and I’m suspicious of myself for having asked it. Like, why not just go ahead and see what comes? So my relationship to the idea of being of the future or of this moment necessarily with all of its trappings and its buzzwords and its footnotes, yes and no: yes, I do feel that that’s the case, but I also hope that there’s some other layers there as well…
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POLITO
[to Ashbery] Do you feel it was totally different for you as a poet, when you were coming up, when you were a young poet, than it is now? Than it was for Tim, or Adam, or my generation?
JOHN ASHBERY
Well, when I first became interested in poetry, it was still the poetry of the late thirties and early forties, which was actually a very exciting period in American poetry that’s been kind of neglected—people like Delmore Schwartz, Jane Garrigue, and a wonderful poet who’s completely forgotten today named Ruth Hershberger. These people appeared in the annual Oscar Williams anthologies and the annual New Directions anthologies, which I had access to in a public library near where I lived. And then, after the war, it seemed to me that suddenly poetry regressed and became more academic, possibly as a result of the war itself. Robert Lowell, for instance, seemed like a move backward in time. Maybe people just had had enough of the war and couldn’t stand this experimental shit. In England, for instance, the same thing happened. There were the wonderful English poet[s] of the thirties, with the unfortunately named movement the New Apocalypse—just what we all need, a new apocalypse—[who] were replaced after the war, just as English art of the thirties became gloom and seriousness and Henry Moore. Where was I going?
POLITO
I was just asking about what it felt like to be part of a generation and was it different for you coming up than it was for them.
ASHBERY
I eventually felt I saw sort of backward by pursuing this kind of experimentation, and of course, popular culture fascinated me—Daffy Duck, for instance, I actually don’t think I ever saw him on the screen until I was living in Paris and went to an intellectual animated cartoon evening, where they had French intellectual discussions afterward. But I happened to be carrying Paradise Lost when I went to a festival of animated cartoons at a museum on Columbus Circle—whatever it’s now called, the Huntington Hartford Museum—and somehow these two things kind of melded together. The plot of Paradise Lost is somewhat similar to the plot of Daffy Duck in Hollywood, I won’t burden you with the… and I actually quote two or three lines of Paradise Lost in the poem, because why not?
POLITO
When you did that, were you conscious of that being a very radical action? Like, very radical at a time when there was a real distinction between high culture and what was called low culture, which, as Adam was pointing out, just seems to have totally disappeared for us?
ASHBERY
I felt very, you know, suspect until I met Frank O’Hara, with his “Lana Turner Has Collapsed” poems and others of that ilk. He gave me really the courage to explore this path which interested me, and to not worry so much about what everybody else thought I should do. He studied music at Harvard and composed some music (which is unfortunately lost), but he was passionate about Schoenberg, whom nobody liked at Harvard, although it’s now said that serial music had taken over the music departments at great universities. That hadn’t happened at Harvard, at least when we were there. He was actually ridiculed by people in the music department for attending a premiere of a work by Schoenberg that took place while we were both there, his string trio, one of his most forbidding works, actually.
POLITO
That’s almost the opposite along the high/low continuum. He was going to the most avant-garde work possible. I remember a statement that the film critic Jim Hoberman once made about Manny Farber, that “he played both ends against the middlebrow.” The idea was that he liked high culture and liked pop culture but kind of nothing in the middle.
Do you think that the poets of the so-called New York School were united primarily by the kind of aesthetic concerns that you were just talking about or by friendships? Because it seems to me that one way of talking about poetry over the last forty or fifty years is that it was quite possible for you and Frank and Jimmy Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, whose poems could never be mistaken one for the other, to be very, very close friends, even though you wrote differently. For a long time, poets could only be friends with people who wrote exactly like them, and then it seems to be now we’ve moved back into something more like what was characteristic of you and your friends, in which people are friends first and admire their work but feel no obligation to operate out of the same aesthetics. Does that make any sense to you?
ASHBERY
Well, we never considered ourselves a school of any kind, because nobody knew anything about us [laughter] and it stayed that way for a long time. In the middle of this period of being ignored, I went to France on a Fulbright and stayed there for ten years, and was sort of completely out of touch with what was happening in New York. Nobody ever wrote me and told me.
POLITO
That’s not true.
ASHBERY
If only we had e-mail then. What was the question?
laugher]
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FITZGERALD
Part of what’s happening on this stage here is that Tim and John represent for me as a poet very important aesthetic configurations of what it means to be a poet today in different ways.
POLITO
Could you talk a little bit about that?
FITZGERALD
Oh, oh God. Well, I mean, part of what’s so sublime about John’s work is that you can read it and feel permission that you can write anything almost. Not that that means it’s going to be good or interesting, but you don’t have to have a sense that prior approval, it’s what you make with the materials, and those materials can come from anything that experience or thought kind of sits upon. And I don’t want to say something that would seem crude, quick, or get me in trouble, but I think in some ways—in some ways, that openness that John has inspired does of course, you know, let’s face it, either extreme is bad for any art. And I think sometimes—
POLITO
What are the two extremes?
FITZGERALD
I think maybe in John’s generation, coming up at Harvard in the forties and fifties, there was this academic staidness where we should all be writing these kind of Horatian, dry poems about the meaning of culture and the legacy of European civilization and decay, kind of Eliot 101. That’s suffocating, and no one needs more of that. You know, Bernadette Mayer, who is someone who’s read John and been influenced by him—but she was more of your contemporary—when I was interviewing her once, she said, ‘I always thought the idea of trying to write a perfect poem was stupid.’ But yet, that said, if one extreme is a kind of tight-ass formalism, I think another extreme is a kind of anything goes hippy-dippy, you’re stuck in a shower with low water pressure, and I feel like part of what… I don’t know why we went there but we did.
POLITO
I see an anthology with that title.
FITZGERALD
I feel like part of what Tim is able to embody and articulate in our time is not a return to that, but to a real serious, ambitious, unapologetically Major-with-a-capital-M stab at writing a poem. He read his poem tonight, “Traveler,” and I know, that is a poem that my mind, when it hears it out loud, resists wanting to be able to follow. I say, “How can someone be able to write that? How could someone be able to read that out loud?” It is so intense and sublime and yet like Schoenberg or John’s poems, like “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” it is a work that conditions you to surrender to a new state of being and I can’t help but feeling that there’s so much courage in that.
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POLITO
When I was in Chicago a couple of weekends ago they were filming is it Transformer, is that the series now?
FITZGERALD
Sure, I’m not actually—
POLITO
Tranströmer?
ASHBERY
Tranströmer?
POLITO
They were filming that on the roof of my building, so there were helicopters sweeping around the building while I was there, I think it was number four or five.
ASHBERY
I don’t know what that is, “Transformers.”
POLITO
I think it’s a kind of science fiction.
FITZGERALD
You don’t know what Transformers are?
ASHBERY
Not the movie.
FITZGERALD
No, but you know, you know the cartoons, the—now I don’t know what they are—
DONNELLEY
Robot turns into a car—
FITZGERALD
Robot cars!
DONNELLEY
Robot turns into a plane…
ASHBERY
A Transformer is a robot car?
FITZGERALD
Yeah, it’s a robot car.
POLITO
For some reason it involved helicopters spiraling around a beehive in front of Grant Park…
ASHBERY
I thought it was something that kept the lights burning in your house.
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For video and audio of the entire conversation, visit LIVE from the NYPL’s webpage.