John Ashbery (1927–2017)

John Ashbery, from “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” in Houseboat Days (New York: Viking, 1977).

The poet John Ashbery has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary. I chose the lines above for several reasons: the Wallace Stevens-like meditative voice, the intimations of mortality, the genial resolve to move along, like, say, Adam and Eve or Lycidas (“to be ambling on’s / The tradition”), the comic diction (“Therefore bivouac we,” “the big, / Vaguer stuff”). All in a poem that’s inspired by one Merrie Melodies cartoon (Duck Amuck) and shares a title with another.

And I chose these lines because “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” has special importance for me. The poem (available here) begins with a catalogue of items from the dowdy world that includes “the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile / Escritoire.” Who? A once-popular writer whose name I know only because of this poem. Years ago, I noticed one of Miller’s books at a library book-sale and sent it to John Ashbery in care of his agent. (Why not?) A year later, I received a letter of thanks, which I found in my mailbox right before walking into the poetry class in which I’d just taught an Ashbery poem.

In 2002, I visited New York City’s Museum of American Folk Art to see a Henry Darger exhibit and attend a reading by Ashbery, whose Girls on the Run (1999) was inspired by Darger’s work. (I was writing something about Ashbery and Darger.) I was second in line for the reading and sat in the front row (after vacillating). And who came in and sat down next to me? Yes, John Ashbery. I said hello (why not?) and he nodded back. “John,” I said, “you don’t know me, but I sent you a book several years ago by Helen Topping Miller.” “I still have that book,” he said. I said that I was glad. A little more conversation followed, before and after the reading. John Ashbery was not only one of the great poets of our time: he was a sweet, kind, generous man.

Related reading
All OCA John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)