Perennial Voyager

John Ashbery at Home

by Nina Shengold, October 29, 2007

Attention, shoppers.” This may not be the opening gambit most readers expect from a poet who’s won every major award in the pantheon, but John Ashbery often defies expectations: These K-Mart tinged words launch his poem “Wolf Ridge.”

There are few laudatory adjectives that critics haven’t applied to Ashbery’s 26 books of poetry; “dazzling,” “sublime,” and the like become shopworn. His 1975 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won an unprecedented triple crown, garnering the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Prize, and the Pulitzer. This September, Bard College hosted a celebration honoring the poet’s 80th birthday, drawing such overflow crowds for three days of panel discussions and readings that practically every event was moved into a larger venue.
This month, Ecco will release Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, and the literary magazine Conjunctions will devote some 150 pages of its 49th issue to Ashbery and his work. “John has been a contributor and dear friend for almost as long as Conjunctions has been going,” says editor Bradford Morrow. “I’ll never forget the exceptionally moving first lines of the first poem he ever sent me for publication—‘To have been loved once by someone—surely / There is a permanent good in that.’ He’s a colleague at Bard and, to my mind, the most influential, important poet alive. His poetry investigates voice and what can be voiced in its every gesture. It soars, shimmers, and bristles with both street smarts and hieratic wisdom.”

Ashbery divides his time between a Manhattan apartment and a magisterial Victorian home in Columbia County. His partner of 37 years, David Kermani, a slight, dark-haired man with a seemingly permanent smile, opens the door to an alternate universe. He ushers his guests through the oak-paneled entryway, past a huge stained-glass window of striking amber and butterscotch hues, and into a formal dining room lined with deeply textured maroon wallpaper. Like the woodwork, beveled mirrors, and tile fireplaces, it’s original to the house. The careful arrangements of porcelain geishas, trompe l’oeil plates, Little Orphan Annie teacups, and the like are pure Ashbery.

The eclectic mix of architectural classicism and vintage curios mirrors the juxtapositions of high and low diction in Ashbery’s poems. The late Jim Ryan, curator of nearby Olana, once told Kermani, “Someday this house is going to be seen as a major work by John Ashbery.” Kermani ran with the concept, publishing an essay called “In Context: ‘Created Spaces’ as a New Resource in Ashbery Studies” in LIT magazine, in which he described these live-in collages as “a kind of physical poetry.”