John Ashbery by Joey Pollari
Illustration by Sam Russell Walker
Musician, actor, director, producer, multi-instrumentalist Joey Pollari is releasing his new album “I’ll Be Romance” on April 5th. “I’ll Be Romance” chronicles the death of Joey’s father and the bloom of falling in love and a new relationship from the vantage point of your early 20s, playing on sonic density and cathedral emptiness, transience and hyper-presence, vocal androgyny and self-as-Other. Pollari has shot all the beautifully cinematic music videos for the project, citing references such as Derek Jarman, Joanna Hogg, Alain Renais, Tsai Ming-liang and Kelly Reichardt. He also stars in the new TV series “Sugar” which also launches on April 5th.
John Ashbery - My Name Is Yours
Before and after I began reading John Ashbery, two lovers have had his same birthday, and the turn of each year since has started by reading his name. This isn’t devotion. That’s what it plays at. Every December, I come to buy another collection of his because I’m home in Minnesota for Christmas and the local book-store has ceremoniously presented another new collection that I haven’t read, and then I, being instinctively moved toward small ceremonies, buy it and start it January one. (I stop to search “John Ashbery Minnesota” to see if he ever traveled there. In 1988, a poem of his was placed on the beams of the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge connecting to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. I’m moved; I didn’t know this before now. This calls me up. (See how this works? It’s not devotion.) I view some snippets of the poem-on-the-beams in photos on the Internet: “And now / I cannot remember” and then, later, “It is fair to be crossing, / To have crossed,” The last line is “And then it got very cool.” The poem is titled “Where You Stand.” I think of where I stand, but I’m sitting. I remember an Ashbery title is a lot like a bridge; it faces you while it faces in. Its time is omnidirectional. I say instead, “Where you stand.” Who is you? It’s hard to say. We cross and “have crossed.” See how this works?)
Over the years the difference has blurred between crossed and crossing, Ashbery standing and me standing, even you and me. You can’t write without being read by you first. You speak to a “you” that’s also you. This is an extended point of Ashbery’s interest. (See a late-career collection title: “Your Name Here.”) This makes a sincere effort upon me. John Ashbery writes me as I thought myself. But he has also called my life his.
It was in the summer of 2019 that I first read John Ashbery by ordering “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to a house at the top of Laurel Canyon (my lover’s canyon) and I spent the next morning trying to get in. I say “get in” because language is a box we enter. Under Ashbery, countless boxes. This is well evidenced by his numerous progressions and digressions under the banner of French symbolist poetry (a word is a box), his interest in collage (images are enmeshed in other images), and his belonging to the New York School (a mutual interest in boxes; the box is surreal, the box is enmeshed with other boxes, there is no box). With such edged and myriad interests, “difficulty” is the common checked-box of Ashbery’s poetry, alongside “indirectness” and “funny” and “fresh,” and so it generally happens that reading “Self-Portrait” at the start of a formative relationship in your early 20’s will soon happily skip you forward to realize your formative relationship billows under the same descriptors. I was young and in love, and at the same time, I was reading Ashbery. This wasn’t devotion. It was ceremony.
On a dirt-spackled green-shaded porch, I sat to pour myself into “Self-Portrait.” I face-planted. Refused. It batted me off. (This is a career-spanning Ashberian feature that haunts us still; we’re deflected from gaining meaning even while plenty seems to be there, and so we resign to war for it. Of course the war is only won by resigning: to pliability, adaptation. Then we worry: maybe there’s too much meaning?) I wielded a pen against it. On the collection’s starting poem, “As One Put Drunk Into The Packet Boat,” I scribed an arrow to the first stanzas and wrote: “in the name/make of waiting.” (My lover is right across from me. We’ll be broken up in four months. A lesson in not reading well enough.) By the time I got halfway through the collection, I’d halfway learned about the pleasures of his misdirection. You think a poem belongs to you, and then it refuses. That’s how we come to belong to it. That’s Ashbery’s secret.
And that was also mine. At the start of any relationship, our romantic loving is allusions. We haven’t yet watched the oak tree grow. Our allusions point to a higher pantheon, to an arc of meaning, to a sun-cloak party of boozy welcome. But constellations of youthful love care nothing of devotion, they care about ceremony. Their parties open and then shut at whim. They don’t know ceremony must be chosen. They only know about convex mirrors. In Ashbery’s hands, allusions and ceremonies coalesce in a language of raucous playfulness. There’s the higher pantheon there in the distance of the poem, and there’s also too much party to see it. His gayness is central and made of asides both idle and sniping or headlong in love. His gayness is in the indirectness that outlier sexuality comes to be initially understood by. It’s made of his voice or a voice he’s heard and we’re confused by the sudden turn; we don’t know who’s speaking. “Who’s there?” is the opening dialogue of Hamlet, and Ashbery makes this question his own, multiplying it to include a what (“What’s there?”), and making it include you and anything in sight or ear-shot. Reading “Self-Portrait,” a suspicion came that these poetic attentions of who-and-what-is-there were the stakes of my romantic endeavor. When two other lovers happened to have Ashbery’s birthday, I started to feel more acutely the suspicion was right.
In the midst of reading Ashbery that first time, I was writing songs for my sophomoric record, “I’ll Be Romance.” The album is swallowed in the light of his influence, and so very little of it reflects him. Instead, the album is where the ceremony began, for since that initial reading, I’ve read ten other collections of Ashbery’s, and learned better how to read him. (Or so I think — last year, in Provincetown, I struggled through “Commotion of the Birds.” I barely made out. Ceremony is a ritual, not love-dependent.) Still, the sundry readings possible of his writing are also what profess his sincerity. He sniffs out metaphysics alongside mechanisms of a pergola or musicians performing Faust, and then he speaks so directly gentle that I’ve wept. It’s that he often speaks to his lover David Kermani with the word “you” and then shifts that “you” around so you suddenly refract after you’ve already identified with the pronoun; you come to cohabitate in a constancy of mingling. When the he’s and she’s soon include you too, it’s a ceremony of language. Ashbery tells us the unions happen in our minds.
This is what has most influenced my day-to-day thinking in a way only poetry can. A recorded pop song, my most frequent medium, can reach similar influence, but it teaches me other lessons. Where pop music generally pleasures us (say, with its consistency and availability), Ashbery guns for more outside pleasures (say, a greater propensity for jumps and intangibility being pleasurable.) It’s in this way that romance reflects poetry, not a pop song. But it’s because of Ashbery that every time I go to write a song, I think of outside and in. What unions can be made by indirectness. By jumps.
In a poem and in life and in romance, there the words are: there are the events of life or loving or words banded, there to read in a dominant mode, awaiting another lens, awaiting your aside, awaiting the chance to slip away from meaning’s easeful transience. You know it’s all important and suspect so much of it isn’t, that maybe some bigger aspected understanding is soon to be beamed. This is what Ashbery teaches you — a melancholic ecstasy of recognition that depends on you and chance and time. It was in that early encounter with love and with Ashbery that the fresh indirection contained in relationships was fanned out for me to see. You read him like you are, and like he is, too. That’s what I read in my lover on the porch. My life was contacting his words as much as he was contacting me. This was a ceremony. This is what makes Ashbery’s “you” both you and me. This is what makes his “you” Ashbery reading his own writing, speaking back to himself. The jumps are startling, but the union began. That’s why, in the summer of 2019, reading John Ashbery on my lover’s porch, your name may not have been my lover’s, but my name was yours.
Sam Russell Walker is an illustrator based in Glasgow. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2015 and his work is inspired by film, pop culture, the human form, plants and fashion. His process is also heavily influenced by the act of mark making and creating textures through this process.
