The Pleasures of John Ashbery’s “Difficult” Poetry / Nathan Goldman. In: Lit Hub Daily September 4, 2018

When I learned that John Ashbery had died, I was on my way, with my then-fiancée (now-wife), to a coffee shop to write. But when we got our drinks and settled at our table, instead of writing I opened Twitter and scrolled, watching the news begin to spread. I realized that there was someone I should tell. Before opening my draft to get to work, I emailed a former teacher with whom I’d recently been in touch. His latest email to me, which described his summer reading, ended with a note that, “for [my] pleasure,” he’d attached a PDF with the title poems from Ashbery’s two most recent collections, Breezeway and Commotion of the Birds. I’m prone to over-long emails, but that day, I was brief. “Thanks for this note and for the poems,” I wrote. “I’ll respond more fully soon, but I wanted to share, in case you had not heard, that John Ashbery has passed away.” I added a link. Ten minutes later, my teacher wrote back. He hadn’t heard until I wrote him.
There was a sad symmetry in my telling my teacher that Ashbery had died, because he’s the one who’d told me that Ashbery existed. In the summer before my senior year of college, on his recommendation, I’d purchased the first volume of the Library of America edition of Ashbery’s collected poems. I found them challenging. The language called attention to itself. The connections from one line to the next were obscure, the overall meaning elusive. But something in the strangeness of the language, in the subtle shape detectable in that seeming senselessness, held me.
I kept reading. With my teacher as an advisor, I wrote a senior thesis in which I tried to find a way of reading Ashbery’s long, chimerical, uncontainable poem “The Skaters.” I came to believe that entering Ashbery’s often incomprehensible work requires us to set the goal of comprehension to the side and to linger patiently in the poems’ pleasures. In these, I think we can find a way into something warm—something vital—pulsing beneath the mysterious verse, a force that Ashbery hints at in “Soonest Mended”:

…We are all talkers
It is true, but underneath the talk lies
The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose
Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-pleasures-of-john-ashberys-difficult-poetry/