“Everything Has a Schedule”: John Ashbery’s Some Trees and the Notion of Career

Abstract

From start, Edward Brunner writes, the very existence of book had been problematic (76).W. H. Auden, editor of Yale Series of Younger Poets, had not declared a winner in 1954, which meant was under extra pressure to name one in 1955, when Ashbery and his friend Frank O'Hara entered their manuscripts in contest. Auden was disappointed by finalists, and wrote to Eugene Davidson at Yale University Press to say so: am very worried because, for second in succession, I do not find among mss. submitted to me one that I feel merits publication (qtd. in Bradley lxviii). Rather than refiise again to name a winner, which would result in bad press for prize, Auden asked Ashbery and O'Hara to resubmit their manuscripts directly to him through Chester Kallman, who was a mutual friend. After that, his choice came quickly: received manuscripts in little more than a week and made up his mind within days. The winner was Ashbery, salvaged slush pile to become in time one of best-known poets Yale series has ever published. That Auden had slighted judgment of in-house editors by choosing a manuscript they had weeded out did little to sweeten their reaction, which ranged, as George Bradley remarks, from confusion to outrage (Lxviii). One editor responded to Auden's choice with an angry memorandum that ended with a declaration of withdrawal all future involvement with series. Others were similarly unenthusiastic, and a couple of staff members refused their complimentary copies when [Some Trees] appeared following year (Bradley lxix). But perhaps most curious element in aftermath of Auden's choice was that Auden himself seemed to dissent it. He diagnoses Ashbery and Rimbaud with same problem in foreword to book: if danger for neo-classical poets is to neglect particulars of experience, the danger for a poet working with subjective life is reverse; that is, he is tempted to manufacture as if subjectively sacred were necessarily on all occasions odd (16). Reviewers took their cues Auden. 1 could make very little headway in understanding Mr. John Ashbery's Some 'rives, William Arrowsmith writes, and I take some comfort in I take to be Auden's similar difficulties in Introduction (294). Arrowsmith finds in volume only two or three poems in customary idiom of English poetic communication, and confesses to having idea most of time Mr. Ashbery is talking about. Similarly, Donald Hall quotes Au den's remark Ashbery's calculated oddities before rendering his negative judgment: writing a poem anything seems impossibly difficult (because of condition of world and word) poet may write only to give his verbs an airing. Ultimately result will be stale and repetitious (27). If early response to Ashbery portrays both poet and his first book as problematic, then it is this same sense of Ashbery's unconventional poetic that more sympathetic critics have seized upon in his defense. For critics such as Marjorie Perloff, Vernon Shetley, David Lehman, and David Herd, recovering Some Rees as promising first installment in career of one of America's most influential poets means turning die negative early assessment of book on its head. Having no idea what Mr. Ashbery is talking about signals in this context a daring opposition to an institutional literary culture that seemed to demand conformity on every front. This reading, in other words, leaves much of first impression elaborated by likes of Auden, Arrowsmith, and Hall intact, but ascribes value to idiosyncrasies of Ashbery's verse that had Formerly served as grounds for complaint. In this way, for Auden was a risky experimentation with subjective triode of Rimbaud figures in Lehman's account as admirable abandon of an outsider bent on revitalizing the American poetry of time, which had grown crusty with convention (5). …