ASHBERY
It’s four a.m. on Labor Day 2017, and I am surprised to hear as I lie in bed listening to BBC radio, that John Ashbery died yesterday in Hudson, NY. Ninety a month ago, John’s career has been long and exemplary. But the dreaded moment has come. We’ll be pondering his works and admiring his diction for years. As the darkness fades, I get dressed, make a cup of tea, feed the cats, and decide to drive over to Hudson to leave a scarlet dahlia on his front porch, along with a note for his mate, David Kermani.
No one is on the road. A few golfers in South Egremont are just teeing up. Bad news dominates the radio. Flooding in Houston, sabre-rattling in North Korea, the Sox losing to the Yankees.
When I get to the house, there is a lone blue car parked in front. I walk up on the front porch of the large stone house, and find a place to the right of the front door for the old milk bottle filled with water and the one dahlia, and for the envelope with a note to David. For some reason, I take a photograph of it. Tiny, sitting there on the portal step, near the brown of the strong old doors, the flower is alone. Perhaps David is, as well, asleep upstairs?
John, the times I was in his company, was always friendly. Sometimes it was after one of his readings, other times it was at a gallery or restaurant with friends. He liked to throw back the first martini in two sips, or one, then smile a funny smile. Asked once where his poetry came from, he answered, “Well, it’s just like television, there’s always something on.” In 1987, invited to select the best poems found in magazines that year, John picked one of mine. It was even in prose. Another time, at Bard College, I asked him what percentage of the time he starts a poem with a dream fragment, and he got nervous, didn’t answer, and said something to put me off the trail.
Decades ago, in Berkeley, John had agreed to do an afternoon reading at the studio of Helene Aylon. Prior to the reading there were drinks, and John’s glass I noticed was straight Scotch. When Robert Duncan, Michael Palmer, Jack Shoemaker and other poets came into the space in the middle of the afternoon, a half-drunk Ashbery, greeting Duncan, tried to put his tongue in Robert’s ear! Eventually, we all got seated on rugs on the floor, and John read a poem or two, slurring badly. A woman he knew was sitting next to him, and after those first few poems he handed the woman his book, and asked her to read the poems, then he lay his head down on the woman’s lap. As she struggled to read, smiling some and stumbling some, John reached up and felt for a nipple!
A “New York School” occasion, I wrote to Bill Berkson in Bolinas the next day. Bill had been in the audience that Berkeley afternoon, had witnessed the nuttiness.
Bad boy John liked to debauch from time to time, usually when David Kermani was out of town for a few days. John would invite a friend to join him in Hudson for an extended drinking session. Michael Gizzi, an hour away in Lenox, Mass, might get a call from John at any hour, asking if he’d be so kind as to buy some booze for the revelers, and to bring it over to Hudson. Already drunk, Ashbery couldn’t risk going out shopping, or driving. And Michael, no doubt fresh that very evening from an AA meeting, would say yes, though I’m sure he felt the twisted pang of the enabler. When Michael got there with the scotch and vodka and gin, John and his friend would still be in their pajamas, but very happy to see Michael.
At a luncheon in Boston once, John told the story of the time David had a psychotic breakdown in the Hudson house, and that John had had to call a hospital to have someone come solve the problem. Two big guys arrived from a hospital, suppressed David, got him into a straight-jacket, and were about to haul him away, when John, struck by the good looks of one of the men--a handsome black man about thirty--started flirting with the man. Suddenly, John didn’t want them to take David away!
The best reading I ever heard John give was after the publication of Planisphere in 2006. Held at St Marks Church on the Bouwerie, in the sanctuary, the room was filled with fans and friends and ex-students and peers, and John, more animated than normal, read poems from the new book. As the warm applause died down at the end, I turned to Eileen Myles, seated next to me, and said, “He’s still bonkers!” And Eileen said, “No kidding!”
But the best thing I ever heard John say, was the opening sentence of his introduction at the Dia Center for the Arts in Soho, the night he introduced James Schuyler. Much anticipated (because Jimmy was known not to read), the event took place on a dark, cold winter night. Despite the chill, there was a long line of folks, a line that went around the block, waiting to get in.
Darragh Park and Jimmy arrived by cab and were ushered in. Eventually we all trickled in, and found seats. I sat with Ron Silliman, who just happened to be in town that night. And John’s opening line, as he introduced the evening’s poet, was “I can’t remember a time that Jimmy Schuyler wasn’t my friend.”
ELIZABETH MURRAY
Visits to Elizabeth did not take place after shooting hoop with Mel Bochner, Bob Holman, and John Gillen in the late 80s, on a cement court in Tribeca, back around the time that that neighborhood got its name. I wasn’t ready.
Later, it was by chance that one day on Crosby St I saw a small ground-floor gallery space lined with Elizabeth Murray drawings. Think they were all in ballpoint, but don’t quote me. It was not until early in the twenty-first century that I’d drop into Elizabeth’s studio of an afternoon to pick up a selection of her drawings to include in group shows.
For some reason, until that Crosby St show, I hadn’t known of her drawings. Seems as if they were not works she put a big value on? But I loved them. They held my attention, and then some. So I got in touch with her.
Later, when the money came in from selling hers, I called to tell her. She asked if it would be possible to be paid in cash.
“Of course.”
So we agreed upon a plan. I would drive to Saratoga Springs, not far from her summer place, and we would meet for lunch in a bar on the main drag. At some point, just sitting there talking, with nothing particular in mind, like small time Mafiosi, I would hand her an envelope. With a conspiratorial smile on her face she would bury the envelope in her purse without so much as pawing thru the loot.
Twice I showed groups of her drawings, and twice we met for lunch. But then dealers began to get interested, realizing the colored pencil works were not only terrific, but sellable. So these bar-room lunches ended.
Elizabeth knew more about the sustained attention and graphic risk that serious new work demanded than anyone, including all those famous guys in her generation. Her subjects may have been domestic but her treatment synthesized abstract and figurative elements in challenging ways. There was heft and clout and constructive smarts in each one.
Never flighty, she’d work for months on her big, complex, shaped painted works in low-relief. Once complete, though, she was only too happy for her dealer Paula Cooper to have them. “They take up a lot of space,” Elizabeth said. “And once finished, I don’t really have any further use for them.”
PAUL AUSTER
A.
Watching the Knicks battle the 76ers, I think of Paul who I’m sure is watching, since the last time we talked it was about the Knicks, and especially their leftie superstar, Jalen Brunson. The Knicks are up seven points at the half when I switch to Netflix to watch the last three episodes of RIPLEY. Pietro Ravini, the police inspector in that remake, is always a step or two late in trying to untangle Tom Ripley’s guises. Inspector Ravini looks a lot like Paul. Big eyes, lean features, hair combed back, middle age. And every time the inspector sits down, no matter which room or chair, he lights a cig. Has a habit of blowing smoke out his nostrils, which Paul never does. Naturally inquisitive, and naturally suspicious, this inspector is routinely frustrated by Highsmith’s brilliant sociopath.
A few months earlier, on the phone, Paul says that the past six months have been physically horrible and mentally rough. He has lung cancer. Hospitalized recently, once for two weeks. Says that twice he was revived after being declared dead. Back at home now, though, he is talkative, engaged, informed, and absolutely himself as we discuss his recent novel BAUMGARTNER. Paul is especially thankful to have Siri by his side. Now that he is back from the hospital, he is hoping she will have the time to return to the novel she is writing.
That night the Knicks end up losing a brutally close game. And the police inspector never catches up with Ripley and his murderous machinations. As it turns out, I learn a day later, Paul dies that night, on April 30th.
News of his death returns me to the night we met in Paris, at the apartment of Lauren Sedofsky. Lauren was one of the Fulbright scholars that fall of 1972 in Paris. We met her at a reception on La Place de La Concorde, in the tall-ceilinged US Embassy. Somehow she knew Paul in New York, well enough, as it turned out, to host a party for him as he turned twenty-six, early February, 1973.
Laura and I were among the guests that night, where we met poets Claude Royet-Journoud, and Joseph Gugliemi, among others. Then not much later, Jacques Dupin, whom Paul had been translating. I remember Dupin’s arrival. As he entered the room, wearing a grey sport coat, Lauren said, with a sweep of her hand, as if welcoming royalty, “Jacques Dupin.” At the time Dupin was forty-six years old.
When we were introduced to Paul he was sitting on the floor near a hassock, talking to the poets.
Now it is late December, 1973, in Paris, and Laura, newly pregnant, and I, in a booth by the door, are eating a dessert of profiterolles at La Closerie des Lilas. A white-haired man sitting at a table with friends in the room next to ours, has to be, if I am not mistaken, Samuel Beckett.
Twenty minutes later, as he is leaving, walking right past us, I stand up and extend my hand. I say, “Call that going,” as we shake. He looks at me quizzically, thinking I’ve said “How’s it going?”
The next day I call Paul and say, “Guess what?” Naturally, he has been wanting to meet Beckett, but hasn’t had the chance. But within a month, Paul manages to meet his idol. He calls me with great excitement that day, and tells me where and when and how it happened. This was just a few short years after 1969, the year that Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
B. PRESSURE-PACKED PLEASURE
The Mets, overwhelmed by a young right-handed pitcher for the Braves, are down 3-0 in the 7th. Whoever wins this game advances to the post-season, everything riding on the outcome. Having thrown 91 pitches, the Braves ace gives up a double and they take him out.
Then the Mets score six miraculous runs to go up 6-3. I am not quite gloating, but I feel confident that this one is in the bag.
Then the Braves come up and get four runs to go up 7-6. Misery. And I can see the same misery in the faces of the players on the bench.
But of course the Mets come up in the top of the ninth. The first batter gets hit by a pitch and trots to first. Then Francisco Lindor, the Mets shortstop and best player, hits a low fastball over the centerfield fence for the most important home-run of his career, to go up 8-7. Do these things happen? How is relief spelled?
Will the Braves find a way to get a run in the bottom of the 9th and send the game into extra innings?
It is right then that I feel a huge desire to call Paul Auster and discuss the pressure, the excitement, the madness of heroism and fate. Feeling the gravity of every pitch, the Mets somehow get the three outs and win. And Paul--Mets fan and student of the game--would have been even more thrilled than I with the outcome. What I would pay to hear him heave a happy sigh! If he were still here.
THANKING WAYNE SHORTER
Rattner’s was the name of the record store in San Diego on the corner of 7th and Broadway.
In 1961, music was routinely piped out onto the street. As you walked by, you walked through it. I was seventeen years old, on my way downtown. Passing Rattner’s that day I was struck by the pulse of the music in the air. With no idea who the band was, I stopped to listen.
Then I went into the store and asked. Leaning against the back wall was the cover for the LP, MOSAIC, by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Ah ha. Two things got me. The unified surge of the rhythm section and the sound of a tenor sax. I bought the record, my first ever jazz LP. I took this Blue Note disk home and played it constantly. Soon Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard and Cedar Walton became household names, not to mention Art.
“If you had to choose one album to take to the proverbial desert island,” Pop would ask, we would all answer, “Mosaic.”
The ground had been laid though, earlier. In those days Pop subscribed to the Evergreen Review. In each issue of the mag, jazz critic Martin Williams wrote a column featuring a different jazz artist. No doubt that’s why Pop would arrive home with “Round Midnight” by Miles Davis,
“Thelonious Alone in San Francisco” by Monk, or several Horace Silvers. Nor did it take long for Brubeck’s “Brandenburg Gate” to become a household favorite.
We’d already taken in priceless chunks of the American songbook by listening to Ella & Louis on their various records, as well as Sinatra and June Christy. I can still remember sitting in an orange naugahyde chair, on a weekend night, alone, listening to Paul Desmond’s alto.
But now it’s the mid-70s, and I’m in NYC. The Village Voice says that the Roy Haynes Quartet, with Wayne Shorter, is playing at the Five Spot. It isn’t the first Five Spot, I am told, where Eric Dolphy & Booker Little recorded their important work, but the second location, near Cooper Union.
So I’m sitting at the bar nursing a beer when Wayne walks in, two minutes before the music is to begin. He lowers his instrument on the floor between us and orders a shot of whisky and a beer. When our eyes meet, he says, “Gasoline,” with a smile. He tosses back the shot, then walks to the bandstand, situates his beer near the bass drum, takes horn out of case, and prepares to play with a few warm up glissandos. This is well before Steely Dan hired him to solo on “Aja.” Or Joni Mitchell worked with Wayne in LA.
But jump ahead now to the late 80s, Clark Coolidge and I are at the Iron Horse in Northampton. At one point, before Wayne goes on, he’s standing by the side of the stage and I approach him. I thank him for the music, and particularly “Children of the Night,” one of his originals on the “Mosaic” record. He nods graciously. Then I’m back in my seat as the music begins.
A few years later, on “High Life,” Wayne’s new record, he revisits his earlier recorded songs. He adds instruments and textures and a Brazilian feeling. We hear his work anew. And the first song on the record, to my surprise and delight, is “Children of the Night.” Cause and effect may be the bane of western thinking, but I wonder, like any fan, if my mentioning that song in Northampton had any bearing on his choosing to open his new record with it? Not that it matters, in any real sense, but once again, I thanked Wayne.
Born in Los Angeles in 1944, Geoffrey Young has lived in Great Barrington, MA, for the last 45 years. Recent books of poetry include, Ceanothus (2026), Recent Questions (2025), and Look Who’s Talking (2024). After twenty-seven years, he closed his contemporary art gallery in 2018. Before moving to Great Barrington in 1982, Young lived for two years in Paris (a Fulbright year followed by a six-month stint working for La Galerie Sonnabend). From 1975-1982 he lived in Berkeley with Laura Chester (two sons born). His small press, The Figures (1975-2005), founded in Berkeley, published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction. Young has written catalog essays for a dozen artists or more.
photo of Geoffrey Young in front of a wave by Robert Longo, taken by Sue Muskat at a gallery in New York
