Tag: John Ashbery

Luminous with Manifold Illusion: Rereading as Postmortem or Death of the Poet

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Georgia Rose Phillips “I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 28.   The day I heard a line from Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” when walking up Semaphore beach (“The seasons are no longer what they once were”), something equally as intriguing started to transpire. Ashbery’s line prompted me to think of the final two lines of TS Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”. This oft-quoted work ends on the troubling but oracular note, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”. As…

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Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost: Rereading as a Haunting–Phantom Texts, Hauntology and Spectral Readers

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Georgia Rose Phillips For a long time, I have been rereading John Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” in the way I occasionally reread certain poems—feeling as if the lines I have committed to memory have become the echo of my own emotion. When I experience grief, I often hear the line from Joy Harjo’s poem, “Desire”, “Say the stars have never learned / to say goodbye” (99). I see a muted twinkle against a stretch of navy and feel the pang of the star’s condition of being permanently suspended outside the redemptive thralls of language. When I first learnt how to create…

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In Praise of Rereading: Iterative Inhabitations and Sheltering the Paradise of Words

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Georgia Rose Phillips Sometimes, the line of a poem leaps out unexpectedly from the well of my consciousness when I encounter something close to what it resembles in the real world. On an unseasonably cold November day in Semaphore, South Australia late last year, I heard a line from Ashbery’s “Syringa” as I walked up the beach. I had been pressing through the afternoon’s sharp sandy gusts and feeling the overhang of winter in the cold sting of the breeze. As I moved towards the grey surface of water, dotted with white foamy caps, I had been starting to doubt…

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Poets in Cars, An Interview with Nicholas Powell

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by Luke Beesley …turn on that dishwasher John Ashbery, ‘Wooden Buildings’ My old mate, poet Nick Powell, visited Melbourne last week with his family – it was his first trip back to Australia in 4 years. Nick’s partner, Laura, is Finnish and he has lived in Helsinki (with short stays in Australia) since 2008. We both spent a large part of our childhoods in Beaudesert, a country town south-west of Brisbane but we first met in Toowong (hilly and green inner-west Brisbane) about 15 years ago – Nick moved into the same apartment building, which became the headquarters of Men’s…

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Ardent Dentists and Artists’ Cupboards: Raymond Roussel and Gerald Murnane in Days of Heaven

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by Luke Beesley John Ashbery apparently went into a bookshop in Paris in the late 1950s and said something along the lines of what’s the craziest French writing around, and the shopkeeper had no hesitation in handing him a book by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). Ashbery brought Roussel’s writing back to New York and showed his friends and not only did they sit wide-mouthed as they imagined the temerity in Roussel’s commitment to a beautifully strange literature, they named their new poetry journal after one of his novels – Locus Solus. Ashbery and Schuyler later went and wrote a collaborative novel,…

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The Painterly Eye

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by Nicolette Stasko It would be an understatement to say that almost every poet has written about art. I could use this entire post to list only the Australians. In his preface to Writers on Artists, Daniel Halpern comments, ‘many important writers have spent a significant part of their non-writing time thinking about painting and sculpture’[1]. The American poet, John Ashbery, also an art critic and friend of artists, immediately comes to mind along with his brilliant long poem, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, ‘As Parmigianino did it, the right hand/Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer. … The…

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Homage and influence, naked and otherwise

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Jill Jones I was looking over some notes the day I wrote this post (Wednesday). They were towards a piece I had begun some time ago, not completed, about the Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. As well as reminding me about life’s unfinished projects, it got me thinking about homage, paying respects. I have a wonderful book by John Ashbery, Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University Press). In the introduction, Ashbery says he did not want to explain his poetry and chose to speak about poets “who have probably influenced me”. The word “probably” seems to be a…

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