[Guest Author Note: Scholar and poet Andrew McCarron
has kindly shared with us this transcript of a delightful Q&A
session between the late great John Ashbery [pictured left] and Andrew's
high school students at Trinity School in Manhattan. It blows my mind
to think of John walking into one's high school… Special
thanks to the Flow Chart Foundation for providing the tape and
permission to share this with you. Here's to chap-stick! -- Justin
Jamail]
Despite the difficulty of his work, I have consistently taught the
poetry of John Ashbery in my English classes at Trinity School on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan. My students have ranged from fourteen to eighteen, and pretty much without exception, the students have loved the challenge. Ashbery’s
playfulness, his roving sense of wonder, and the childlike way his
poems try making sense of an incomprehensible universe of surprise,
contradiction, and changeability, captivate their imaginations. Whereas I started out teaching his short poems (e.g., Some Trees, The History of My Life, and This Room), I’ve since moved on to teaching longer works like Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, A Wave, and the book-length Girls on the Run. Many
years ago, on May 8, 2003, I invited my old Bard College professor,
John Ashbery, to a ninth grade English class I was teaching during my
first year at Trinity. John had come from the dentist’s office where he’d been given a shot of Novocain. He was dressed in a white blazer and a blue tie for the occasion and was bemused by the interest of the teenagers.
Here’s a partial transcript of the Q&A, recorded by my colleague and friend Bill Zavatsky, who was also present:
Student: How do you get inspired?
Ashbery: I used to wait around for inspiration when I was your ages, but realized I wouldn’t get very much written if I had to wait. So, as the years have gone by, I’ve trained myself to get along without inspiration and it seems to work just as well.
Student: Did you enjoy an active imagination as a child?
Ashbery: Yes, I used to invent cities and people as imaginary citizens. I would do this on the beach where I grew up, on Lake Ontario, where I’d build sandcastles or houses. I used to make large maps on big sheets of cardboard and put on all the names of the cities and towns. I remember one country where the capital city was Murielsville because of a little girl I had a crush on in grade school. The population was something like 8,957,000. She had the most population of any of the cities.
Student: When did you realize you wanted to pursue the life of a poet?
Ashbery: Well, I still don’t want to pursue the life of a poet. I started writing poetry when I was in high school actually. It happened when I first discovered modern poetry in an anthology of Louis Untermeyer. Up until then I thought I wanted to be a painter. I became gradually more interested in poetry and it was easier to do than paint. I didn’t have much talent then, surely, as a poet, but I ended up not having any talent as a painter, I think. ... [mehr] https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2018/10/john-ashberys-visit-with-high-school-students-by-andrew-mccarron.html
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen