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On November 8, 2003, Professor Dara Wier and her MFA Form & Theory Seminar from the Juniper Initiative of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst visited the Ashbery Resource Center (ARC) and toured John Ashbery's home in Hudson, NY. Their visit was part of a semester-long investigation into the concept of the poet's persona, particularly as that is defined by a poet's first book. Among other poets' works, the seminar examined Ashbery's first major poetry collection, Some Trees (Yale U.P., 1956). They also read Other Traditions (Harvard U.P., 2000), a collection of essays based on the Norton Lectures that Ashbery delivered at Harvard University, in which he spoke about six "minor" poets who have special significance for him and his work. In addition to the importance of these texts to understanding Ashbery's work and persona, the Flow Chart Foundation (FCF) suggested to the students that they also consider the physical environment of Ashbery's home, a space he has chosen, populated, and arranged, a space that both shapes and mirrors the poems written within it. The restoration and furnishing of the late-nineteenth-century house has been a twenty-five-year process during which Ashbery has been intimately involved with every detail of the interior design, choosing the rugs and wallpaper that permanently frame the space, and amassing and periodically rotating collections of paintings, statuary and memorabilia including toys and games, kitsch, and objects from or reminiscent of Ashbery's childhood. FCF President David Kermani conducted a tour of this living museum, pointing out the frequency with which Ashbery has identified his poems' Cage-ian susceptibility to the events (sights, sounds, tastes) that occur while the poems are in the process of emerging. Kermani and the Juniper students were able to identify objects in the home that corresponded to references in Ashbery's poems; as well as arrangements of objects reminiscent of linguistic arrangements in the work. The parallel between the poetic and domestic environments was particularly striking in the juxtaposition of fine artworks with the artifacts of popular culture. The same relationship was evidenced in the juxtaposition of personal memorabilia, objects of private memory, with mass-produced objects, artifacts of the universal. The students and ARC/FCF representatives found a medley of values -- personal/biographical, fine/aesthetic, kitsch/camp – simultaneously present in both the domestic and the poetic spaces engineered by Ashbery. (For an elaboration of this relationship between Ashbery's domestic and poetic spaces, please visit the ARC's online exhibition, Created Spaces.) Following the tour of Ashbery's home, Professor Wier and her students visited the ARC archive. There, they examined original archival materials and discussed their pertinence to the concept of poetic persona. Particular attention was paid to Some Trees and Other Traditions. The group discussed the irony of the austerity of the Yale University Press edition of Some Trees, and the mainstreaming effect that the character of that publishing house and the weight of the W.H. Auden introduction (however reluctantly written) had on these poems, despite the fact that the work had issued directly from a hothouse, avant-garde arts environment. This irony has continued throughout Ashbery's career, as his relentlessly experimental work has regularly been published by such generally traditional houses as Wesleyan University Press, Dutton, Viking, Knopf, Penguin, and so on. ARC Managing Director Micaela Morrissette suggested that the reputations of these houses and the glossy editions that they issue might affect readers' understandings of the work, lessen the shock of its experimentalism, and render the Ashberian persona more user-friendly or commercial. The students were also asked to consider whether Ashbery might have deliberately worked against that in Other Traditions, by selecting obscure writers and critiquing their work in a markedly unacademic and personal tone. Could Other Traditions, despite its publisher, have represented Ashbery's attempt to reclaim a renegade persona from the academic mainstream by identifying himself with writers on the very outskirts of the canon? The opposite possibility was also considered: that by adopting the role of critic and judge and by articulating his connection to the past, Ashbery could be settling into a conservative persona. To facilitate discussion of these and related ideas, the ARC provided the seminar with materials including a log of revisions made over the years to the poems in Some Trees, as well as the editorial correspondence that shaped the evolution of Other Traditions. Additionally, the ARC made available a number of archival items from other categories of interest not related directly to these two works, which could contribute to the students' discussion of persona in new or unexpected ways. Below is an inventory of the items examined by the Form & Theory students. You may click on each item to read a brief summary of the discussion that centered around it. The ARC's intention in providing these summaries of discussion is not to support any given interpretation of the materials. Rather, we want to illustrate the multiplicity of diverse theses to which a single text or object can pertain. In particular, we wish to document the ways in which the items were applied to one specific pedagogical context, the Juniper seminar's visit to the archive. We hope that educators and students will use these preliminary notes in their own classrooms for their own purposes. In keeping with the tone of our discussion – which was informal, ranged widely from topic to topic, and concentrated on raising questions rather than providing answers – these notes are rough sketches of what were frequently unfinished arguments, avenues of inquiry not (yet) fully explored. – Overview and discussion summaries by Micaela Morrissette, Managing Director, Ashbery Resource Center
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