John Ashbery: "Forties Flick" (Contemporary Poetry Series)

In a past “One Poet’s Notes” article, “Rating Great Poets and Considering Contemporary Concerns,” explaining my views on that remarkable generation of poets born between the end of World War I and the end of World War II that may be credited with redirecting the course of poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, I listed 50 individuals of some significance and influence who contributed to the collective effect that group has had on American literature. In my article, I suggested: “Just as the modernists transformed poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, those poets born predominantly between the world wars shaped a transition toward today’s postmodern situation. Indeed, as individual volumes such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Stevens’s Harmonium impacted poetic direction in the country following the time of their publication, so too did particular collections by John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, James Wright, and others.” At the time, I wrote:

I find an amazing array of figures on the roster of poets, including the following born between 1923 and 1943: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, John Balaban, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Luicille Clifton, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Richard Hugo, Donald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, William Matthews, Walt McDonald, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Dave Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, Lucien Stryk, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and James Wright. Additional significant poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry Levis, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur, among others—appear just outside the selected dates.

Consequently, I have decided to present a regular series on “One Poet’s Notes” exemplifying poetry by the 50 individuals mentioned above. Over the course of time I intend to display a sample piece from each author as an introduction and an invitation for readers to seek further works by the poet featured. For lack of a better title, the series simply will be known as the Contemporary Poetry Series. The poems I will choose may not represent the most famous or most highly regarded pieces by every one of these poets, because many of those might already be well-known poems to readers or too long for adequate presentation in this space; however, I hope the selections will offer a feel for one style of writing or concentration on subject matter readers might find characteristic in each poet’s collected work.

Since the article that began my compilation was initiated somewhat by a discussion about John Ashbery, I will begin with him and his poem, “Forties Flick,” the first sample work proposed for consideration in the “One Poet’s Notes” Contemporary Poetry Series:

FORTIES FLICK

The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall,
Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,
Focus on the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.
‘In bra and panties she sidles to the window:
Zip! Up with the blind. A fragile street scene offers itself,
With wafer-thin pedestrians who know where they are going.
The blind comes down slowly, the slats are slowly titled up.

Why must it always end this way?
A dais with woman reading, with the ruckus of her hair
And all that is unsaid about her pulling us back to her, with her
Into the silence that night alone can’t explain.
Silence of the library, of the telephone with its pad,
But we didn’t have to reinvent these either:
They had gone away into the plot of a story,
The “art” part—knowing what important details to leave out
And the way character is developed. Things too real
To be of much concern, hence artificial, yet now all over the page,
The indoors with the outside becoming part of you
As you find you had never left off laughing at death,
The background, dark vine at the edge of the porch.

—John Ashbery

Readers are urged to listen to John Ashbery reading “Forties Flick.”

John Ashbery is the author of nearly two-dozen books of poetry, the latest release being the Library of America publication, John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987 (2008). Other recent volumes by Ashbery include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), A Worldly Country (2007); Where Shall I Wander (2005); Chinese Whispers (2002); Your Name Here (2000); Girls on the Run: A Poem (1999); Wakefulness (1998); Can You Hear, Bird (1995); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); Hotel Lautrémont (1992); Flow Chart (1991); and April Galleons (1987).

Over the years John Ashbery has won almost all the major American awards offered for poetry. A Wave (1984) was honored with the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Some Trees (1956) was selected as a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He also has been awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets; the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from Poetry, the Modern Poetry Association, and the American Council for the Arts; the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale University Library; the Harvard Arts Medal from Harvard University; and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Among a number of awards offered by other countries, such as France and Belgium, last year John Ashbery was the International Prize winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada.

Additional articles concerning John Ashbery on “One Poet’s Notes” may be found at the following: “John Ashbery, Pierre Martory, and Jackson Pollock,” “John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter,” “John Ashbery: 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,'” “Poet of the Year: John Ashbery,” “John Ashbery: 'My Philosophy of Life,'” and “Poetry, Painting, and Economy: Rothko, Warhol, and Ashbery.”