Note to users: The various sections of this website present large amounts of information about John Ashbery, his work, and his world. However, each section has its own individual format, one that seems most intuitive and best suited to its own objectives, and (at this time) multiple sections cannot be searched simultaneously. This tutorial demonstrates how information from different sections of the site can be integrated in productive and unexpected ways. By thus expanding the context in which Ashbery’s work is experienced and studied through the discovery of seemingly incongruous but indeed related materials documented here, interesting patterns and relationships as well as new avenues of inquiry may be suggested.
The following text was presented by Micaela Morrissette, the former Managing Director of the ARC and a Trustee of The Flow Chart Foundation, as part of the panel on "New Resources in Ashbery Studies" at the New School's Ashbery Festival, April 6-8, 2006. Ms. Morrissette's presentation was followed by an introduction to the ARC's "Created Spaces" project by David Kermani, President of the Flow Chart Foundation.
During her presentation, Ms. Morrissette performed sample searches of the ARC's annotated catalogue and browsed relevant pages in other sections of the website to illustrate for the audience the possibilities offered by the website resources. Images of these pages are provided in the text below. In some cases, the information on these pages has been edited to emphasize relevant material; therefore, the webpage images may not always match the exact results you would obtain if you were to perform these searches yourself. These static reproductions of pages from the ARC website do not include the interactive functionality of the pages they represent; please visit the other areas of this website to perform your own searches of the catalogue or to investigate the index of Ashbery's stated influences and interests and the Ashberiana index.
A version of the text below is to be published in the New School's journal LIT as part of a special issue documenting the Ashbery Festival.
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Introduction
The Ashbery Resource Center (ARC) is a research facility in Hudson, NY, where large portions of John Ashbery's archive, including bibliographic materials, are housed and investigated. The Flow Chart Foundation maintains the ARC's daily operation on behalf of Bard College. Flow Chart is a non-profit supporting organization that assists its supported organizations, including Bard, with projects that investigate interconnections between various art forms and other academic or scientific disciplines, and that emphasize historical, social, cultural and aesthetic contexts in understanding any given work. The ARC is an apt project for Flow Chart because of the way in which Ashbery's career can be understood as a nexus or meeting point for a wide range of art forms, a statement which should become clearer when we concentrate in a moment on the question of influence on and of Ashbery's work.
In addition to these theoretical preoccupations, however, the ARC organizes the archive, adds new materials to it, and documents those materials in an extensively annotated, searchable online catalogue open to the public at www.flowchartfoundation.org/arc. This catalogue, which updates the information available in David Kermani's 1976 bibliography of Ashbery's work, and which adapts the organizational system of that bibliography, is a continuous work-in-progress. While there are many citations to add and much room to expand present citations, the catalogue currently documents over 2600 works by and about Ashbery and is even now at a stage where it can be of use to researchers.
The catalogue is one of several tools the ARC has developed in order to enable scholars and enthusiasts not only to take stock of the research materials available to them at the archive, but also to make sense of those materials in a multitude of different ways: to apply various filters and to approach the information in a variety of contexts. Two other tools the ARC has created to this end are the hyperlinked index of Ashbery's influences and interests in various media, as cited by him in interviews and miscellaneous published remarks, and the browsable Ashberiana index of works in various media that draw on Ashbery's poetry to achieve their own creative aims. As Ashbery wrote in "The New Spirit," in Three Poems: "I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way." The ARC is attempting to put it all down, in order to allow Ashbery scholars to do the crucial work of leaving out. The inclusiveness of this information means that, despite the ARC's own interest in interconnections and context, the archive and the catalogue that documents it can support a variety of theses on Ashbery's work and even on related topics to which Ashbery is not necessarily central – the New York School, the reciprocal influences of American and European artists of the 1950s, the anthology as cultural roadmap, translation theory, and so on. But this presentation will focus on a pattern closer to home – the question of chains and patterns of influence, leading to and from Ashbery's work, as well as, in a sense, sideways.
Seven types of influence
1) Ashbery's direct sources of influence
Ashbery's direct sources comprise the first of these chains of influence. Ashbery's own revelations about his influences or works or artists of interest to him are documented in the index of influences and interests.
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The cinema list documents various actors, films, radio shows, filmmakers, and characters that he has identified as influential or of interest to him. Those that he has specifically linked to particular of his works are marked with an asterisk – for instance, the film Lawrence of Arabia.
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By clicking on the link to the film, we learn that Ashbery cited that movie as an influence on his poem "At North Farm." Several links to off-site resources are provided to enable researchers to find out more about Lawrence of Arabia in order to draw their own conclusions about the relevance of it to Ashbery's work. An on-site link is also provided; this leads to the literature section of the index of influences, where other influences Ashbery has cited for "At North Farm" are documents, including the Finnish epic the Kalevala, the Welsh epic the Mabinogion, and the American writer John O'Hara. Which brings us to a second chain of influence-relationships:
2) Works or artists linked through shared residence in Ashbery's work
These influence-relationships are between those works or artists which, like O'Hara and the Kalevala, seem to have no connection to each other but which are linked by having residence in the shared space of a single Ashbery work. Sometimes their coexistence there can illuminate an unsuspected affiliation or common quality.
3 & 4) Aligned aesthetics: direct and indirect connections
Two additional types of influences are those cases of artists or works that are so closely aligned with Ashbery's own preoccupations or methodology that descriptions and analyses of either could be applied to one or the other without disconnect.
In the first of these types no direct connection is alleged between Ashbery and the other artist, but their creative processes or
products are so strikingly similar that they seem to have been separated at birth.
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An example of this is Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, which Ashbery describes in a 1985 Newsweek review: "He had transformed the house's solemn Teutonic interior into a mad, dreamlike environment that he termed Merzbau. For Schwitters, this constantly evolving project was to be the summit of his life's work; tragically, the house was destroyed during an Allied air raid in 1943. Yet it is perhaps fitting that his art survives as fragments – collages, junk assemblages, garbled poetic texts. Merzbau was a sort of Tower of Babel, meant never to be completed, and fragments were what it was all about." The significance of fragments to Ashbery's own work will come up again twice below; first momentarily in a discussion of his relationship to the composer Schreker and again shortly thereafter in a discussion of the relationship between Ashbery's work and that of the comic strip artist Seth. The discussion of the artist's home as a work of art equal to and allied with the conventionally understood body of work is the subject of Mr. Kermani's Created Spaces discussion.
In the second case of aligned aesthetics, there is also a direct relationship between Ashbery's work and the analogous work. In the music list of the index of influences and interests is a pop-up with information on the composer Franz Schreker.
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A link leads to the dmoz database, where we find an excellent essay on Schreker's work at the American Symphony Orchestra website. There we read this analysis of the composer's methodology: "Schreker's instrumentation refracts thematic ideas through the prism of his orchestra. Lines intertwine, motives move imperceptibly from one instrument to another, transforming a trumpet into a clarinet, wedding the harmonium with a bassoon. And just as thematic ideas give up something of their material autonomy to become immaterial color, formal articulation is blurred through Schreker's love of mercurial shifts of mood, tempo, and rhythm." This would suffice as a particularly gorgeous description of Ashbery's work, especially the trumpet transforming into a clarinet as the personal pronouns you or we so infamously transform into he or she in Ashbery's poems. Additionally, several critical voices (Ashbery's among them) have pointed out the pertinence of music to his poetry: an abstract summoning of emotion and mood by means of an unparaphrasable, mysterious evocation. That essay includes another point that speaks to Mr. Kermani's interest in common bonds between Ashbery's physical and linguistic worlds: Schreker's unfinished opera of 1915, Die tönenden Spharen. "That," we read, "significantly, is the story of a man who collects sounds." The essay goes on to describe Schreker's own reputation as a collector of sounds. And Ashbery too is an inveterate collector: of physical objects of every ilk, of sounds or words, and of words as physical objects. An acknowledged but not fully explored facet of his creative process, as briefly touched on above, are his "fragments," piles of irregular and torn papers, scribbled with phrases or single words, that accumulate on surfaces in his space, and from which he chooses at random (or not at random) when writing.
5) Unacknowledged, speculative, unconfirmed sources for Ashbery's work
In addition to these acknowledged influences documented in the index of influences and interests, a fifth type of influence involves unacknowledged, speculative, unconfirmed sources for Ashbery's work. These are documented, by no means exhaustively or authoritatively, in the catalogue, where the ARC also provides links to off-site resources so that users can immediately gauge the validity of the connection or the applicability of it to their research.
Sometimes these links are straightforward: for the poems "Wild Boys of the Road" and "Le mensonge de Nina Petrovna," the ARC supplies links to reviews of the two films from which those poems take their titles.
For the poem "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland," you can follow a link to the Amusement Park History website to learn a brief history of the song of that title written for the opening day of Dreamland Park, and to see sheet music.
On the other hand, sometimes the links to off-site information about potential sources for Ashbery's poems are immediately suggestive. For the poem "Drame Bourgeois," for example, users can follow a Wikipedia link to discover that this theatrical genre, "bourgeois tragedy," originated by Diderot, depicts as tragic heroes commoners whose intentions are focused on their private lives. That suggests to some extent that at least in this title Ashbery may refer to his own well-known appreciation for common or colloquial language or themes and his interest in the universality of the private life. On quite the opposite tack, users who follow a link for the poem "Musica Reservata" to the FluteInfo website,will learn that this phrase refers to chromatic compositions written for the educated and elite, and not intended for pleasure, and might be reminded of the "difficulty" and "resistance to the reader" for which Ashbery's work is perhaps unjustly notorious.
And sometimes the links to information on possible sources are at odds with each other: For "Sleepers Awake,"users can follow links to learn about both Kenneth Patchen's book and Bach's hymn of that title, either of which are equally likely to be or not to be relevant sources for Ashbery's poem. Or,for the poem "Trefoil," the ARC provides links to information about the solitaire card game, the architectural design, the weaving pattern, and the mathematically fascinating knot that all share that name.
6) Artists and works influenced by Ashbery
The sixth pattern of influence involves artists and works influenced by Ashbery in the fields of film, fiction or poetry, music, theater, or visual art. Their name is Legion, but those who make the influence explicit are welcome in the archive. Many such works are dedicated to Ashbery, prefaced with epigraphs from Ashbery's work, or are portraits of Ashbery; others play with the Ashberian persona in a more complicated way: for instance, David Hirson's play Wrong Mountain, which involves an offstage but very present character "John Ashbery," whom one of the leads claims as a close personal friend. Another example is Annette Hayn's poem "Unlikely Marriage," in which "Emily Dickinson" and "Ashbery" live as doll-sized man and wife.
All these works influenced by Ashbery are documented in the online catalogue. Additionally, however, those that engage with a specific work by Ashbery are collected in browsable form in the Ashberiana index of the Special Features section of the ARC's website. The Ashberiana index is organized in terms of the collections by Ashbery in which each influential poem was published; this organization makes apparent to certain trends. For example, some collections gave rise to several musical interpretations: poems in The Tennis Court Oath spawned compositions by Ned Rorem, Paul Reif, Roger Reynolds, and Eric Salzman. A Wave had the same effect– Reynolds and Rorem reappear, and Lee Hyla, Richard Wilson, and Lilia Rodionova also surface.
Why do these two collections, apparently so different from each other, appeal above many others to composers? And do the compositions that arose from the works therein meaningfully reflect, when compared with each other, the aesthetic that seems to govern each of Ashbery's collections as a whole? Is an explanation to be found simply in the fact that those collections happen to contain frequently anthologized works that are therefore more accessible to composers looking for a text to set? (Though the question of which poems are most anthologized in what decades and why is also an interesting question that can be investigated by searching the catalogue for Ashbery's poems in anthologies – Section M of the archive.) Or, could the seeming anti-musicality of The Tennis Court Oath or the lyricism of A Wave have to some degree engendered these small explosions of musical responses?
Interesting generational chains of influence are also apparent: We learned at the index of influences and interests that "At North Farm" draws from the film Lawrence of Arabia, from the epic poems the Kalevala and the Mabinogion, and from the work of John O'Hara. To what extent do the seeds of those originating works flower in Roger Reynolds', Lee Hyla's and Ned Rorem's settings of "At North Farm"? Assuming the composers are not aware of Ashbery's sources, is it possible to argue productively that the aesthetic, mood, theme or tropes present in the originals persist to some degree in the grandchild works?
The ability to use these various tools – the Ashberiana index, the index of influences, and the catalogue – in conjunction with each other to trace patterns is particularly exciting. A similar search across these resources can be performed with regard to Ashbery's poem "The Thief of Poetry." The index of influences documents Ashbery's identification of William Carlos Williams as an influence on that poem.
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Both the catalogue and the Ashberiana index document James Dashow's setting of the poem in his composition "A Way of Staying." What remains of Williams' influence in Ashbery's poem? How does Dashow integrate Ashbery's text in his music? How do the Williamsesque qualities in Ashbery's poem turn out in Dashow's rendition?
7) Those who share Ashbery's influences
Finally, a seventh type of influence concerns those who are influenced by the same things – people, works, an aesthetic, a sense of nostalgia – as Ashbery. The catalogue includes information about the cartoonist Seth,
who is not known to be influenced not by Ashbery, and by whom Ashbery is not influenced. Rather, both Ashbery and Seth draw on a similar aesthetic and stock of materials. Both drew on the comic strip Joe Palooka: Ashbery for his poem "From Palookaville," and Seth for his comic book series Palookaville. The ARC provides a few off-site links to information about this artist so that users can evaluate the similarities and differences in the ways Seth and Ashbery respond to and reshape the same body of original material. One such link leads to an article at the Exclaim! website that quotes Seth talking about his comics: "Almost 90 percent were culled from old sources, old magazines, books, girlie magazines, comic books. My house and studio are built with just paper ephemera. There’s always stuff coming and going. Whatever would be at the top of the pile of interest — I would pull out an old newspaper and just be doodling from the photographs. Generally when I’m drawing, I’m looking for a certain level of spontaneity." This is very similar to the way Ashbery has described his own writing process – as Seth "pulls papers from a pile," Ashbery has said he thinks of the process of composing his poems as letting a bucket down into a flowing stream and pulling up whatever happens to be floating by. And Seth's comment "My house and studio are built with paper ephemera" is quite interesting in terms of the ARC's Created Spaces concept, which investigates Ashbery's Hudson home as a three- or four-dimensional poem.
Other patterns
This discussion of patterns of influence has been intended to illuminate the scope of the information available in the archive and hence in the catalogue, index of influences, and Ashberiana index, as well as to suggest the means by which these tools can uncover other patterns besides that of influence. As the most exhaustive and most searchable of the tools, the catalogue allows users to discover patterns that emerge out of the repetition even of a single word. A basic search for the right search term can on occasion turn up almost the entire range of materials needed to support a critical exploration of a theme. For instance, enter "weather" and find these poem titles: "Crazy Weather," "Winter Weather Advisory," "Weather and Turtles," "The Weather, for Example," and "The Revised Weather Report." Additionally, because most citations for interviews provide subject terms for the topics Ashbery discusses therein, we also find an interview in which Ashbery comments on the presence of weather in his poetry, and an interview in which he discusses the poem "Crazy Weather." Because many citations for poetry and fiction based on or influenced by Ashbery's work quote relevant sections, we find a discussion of Ashbery's remarks on "Crazy Weather" in David Lehman's poem "February 23." From a poetic response by Randall Mann to Ashbery's poem "Errors," we learn that weather makes an appearance in "Errors" as well. We discover that the composers Richard Wilson and Scott Wheeler both drew on Ashbery's "Crazy Weather" for their works "Poor Warren" and "Wakefield Double" (the ARC hopes in the future to be able to provide links in the citations to brief audio samples of works like these so researchers can quickly judge whether it might be interesting to pursue these kinds of artistic interpretations in the same way they might take account of previous critical analyses; in the meantime, a CD recording of Wilson's work is available at the Hudson archive, and a link is provided in the citation for Wheeler's work to give a fuller idea of the connection between Ashbery's original poem and Wheeler's composition). Finally, because citations for critical discussions of Ashbery's work usually provide either thesis statements or representative excerpts from the essays in question, we find that Richard Francis has already to some extent addressed this phenomenon of weather in Ashbery's work in his essay "Weather and Turtles in John Ashbery's Recent Poetry" in P.N. Review. Francis' essay turns out to apply "Weather and Turtles" and other poems to ideas of time. In the same issue, an essay by Justin Quinn on nature and environment in Ashbery's work turns out to involve weather as a critical term in the understanding of Ashbery as a nature poet. In eight keystrokes, then, it was possible to assemble primary poetic materials, the author's comments on the topic at hand, artists' responses in poetry and music to one of the critical works under discussion, and essays on related ideas.
When doing searches like these, the ARC generally recommends doing an any-phrase basic search. For example, an exact-phrase search for the exact word "dream" will return 100 results, including Ashbery's poems "'They Dream Only of America,'" "The Double Dream of Spring," "A Waltz Dream," "A Waking Dream," "Probably Based on a Dream," "Dream Sequence (Untitled)," "Life Is a Dream," and "Dream Overture"; as well as Ted Berrigan's recounting of a dream he had about Ashbery, Ashbery's pieces of writing about art "Space and Dream" and "An Artist's Daring Dream House," several interviews in which Ashbery discusses The Double Dream of Spring and '''They Dream Only of America,''' Jim Brodey's poem "Dream," which is based on or influenced by Ashbery's work, Marie Chaix's photocollage based on Ashbery's "Life Is a Dream," numerous critical essays on "'They Dream Only of America,'" "The Double Dream of Spring," and on dream logic, dream structure, and dream narrative in Ashbery's work – and so on. However , an any-phrase search for any word including the string of letters "d-r-e-a-m" will return 139 results, including everything already discovered in the exact-phrase search as well as "Dreams of Adulthood," "Of Dreams and Dreaming," "Last Night I Dreamed I Was in Bucharest," "Our Leader is Dreaming," "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland," and "Winter Daydreams," Ashbery's pieces of writing about art "Tanguy: The Geometer of Dreams" and "Delirious Dreams Under Glass," as well as several interviews in which Ashbery discusses dreams as a source or model for his poetry.
Sometimes this can be overwhelming. Whereas a basic search looks for the search word or phrase among all the authors, titles, languages, notes, and so on, in every citation in the catalogue, an advanced search looks for search terms only in the areas specified by a user. Someone interested in finding work that has never been published can do an advanced search by format for unpublished materials,
This will return citations including Ashbery's B.A. thesis on W.H. Auden, his M.A. thesis on Henry Green, the collaborative filmscript for a "hippie epic," his acceptance speech for the National Book Award, and so on.
Someone interested in discovering poems that were published in periodicals but that never appeared in any of Ashbery's collections might do an advanced search of the format field for "periodical" and an exact-phrase search of the notes field for the phrase "never appeared,"
which is the terminology the ARC consistently uses when denoting these items. This search will yield 61 results, from 1956 – Ashbery's little-known play "The Coconut Milk" in the periodical Semi-Colon– to Ashbery's poem "Battleship Gray" in Bard College's student-run literary journal in 2004.
Someone writing on Ashbery's haibun and haiku poems who is looking for more about Ashbery's general knowledge of the Japanese arts might do an advanced search of the type field for "writing about art" and of the notes field for "Japan" (making sure to do an any-phrase search in order to discover "Japanese" as well). That researcher will discover articles Ashbery has published about Japanese folk traditions, tea ceremonies, erotic prints, nineteenth-century photographs, kites, and so on.
Conclusion
The aim of this presentation has been to clarify the nature of the various electronic resources available at the ARC's website as well as the range of physical materials available at the Ashbery archive, where it may be possible for scholars to arrange to visit. The ARC is a relatively young organization that has only recently begun to come into its own: the resources it currently offers are limited in number and are continuous works in progress, rather than authoritative texts. Its goal is to make available new means of accessing and understanding a wide range of materials, including rarities. The ARC hopes that the information it provides and the shifting contexts in which it presents that information will both facilitate current projects in the field of Ashbery Studies and suggest new angles of approach to Ashbery's career.
