John Ashbery is a celebrated and challenging poet.
Herbert Paul Grice is a celebrated and challenging cricketer.
John Ashbery is, besides, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised verse to brilliant and baffling heights.
Herbert Paul Grice is an enigmatic genius of the Demijohns, a cricket club he founded while at St. John's. ("College," Nancy Mitford, echoing the non-U, woud add -- Mitford says that adding 'college' to "St. John's" ("It surely ain't a church!") is the mark of the ignoramus).
Herbert Paul Grice is a celebrated and challenging cricketer.
John Ashbery is, besides, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised verse to brilliant and baffling heights.
Herbert Paul Grice is an enigmatic genius of the Demijohns, a cricket club he founded while at St. John's. ("College," Nancy Mitford, echoing the non-U, woud add -- Mitford says that adding 'college' to "St. John's" ("It surely ain't a church!") is the mark of the ignoramus).
Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, has his home in Hudson, New York.
Herbert Paul Grice has his home in Halborne, an affluent suburb of Staffordshire, or Warwickshire. ("When I was born, it was part of Warwickshire, but when my FATHER was born -- he was also christened "Herbert" -- it was part of Staffordshire -- so, as the Americans say, go figure!")
Ashbery's death was from natural causes.
Grice's death was from non-natural causes, alas.
(Popperians might discuss the above).
Herbert Paul Grice has his home in Halborne, an affluent suburb of Staffordshire, or Warwickshire. ("When I was born, it was part of Warwickshire, but when my FATHER was born -- he was also christened "Herbert" -- it was part of Staffordshire -- so, as the Americans say, go figure!")
Ashbery's death was from natural causes.
Grice's death was from non-natural causes, alas.
(Popperians might discuss the above).
Few poets are so exalted in their lifetimes as Ashbery is.
Ashbery is the first poet alive (when he was alive) to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work.
Ashbery's collection, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," is the rare winner of the book world's unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize.
Ashbery was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing "how we read poetry."
Ashbery is the first poet alive (when he was alive) to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work.
Ashbery's collection, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," is the rare winner of the book world's unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize.
Ashbery was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing "how we read poetry."
Among a generation that included Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stands out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humour and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions (or implicatures) and (Fregeian) sense impressions.
"No figure looms so large in poetry as John Ashbery," Langdon Hammer notes.
Hammer goes on:
"Ashbery's phrases always feel newly minted."
"His poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. "
"In this regard, he is like Grice, only different." And implicating, "And as opposed to Popper?"
Hammer goes on:
"Ashbery's phrases always feel newly minted."
"His poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. "
"In this regard, he is like Grice, only different." And implicating, "And as opposed to Popper?"
But to love Ashbery, it helps to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as
"You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork" not to worry about their meaning.
Writing for Slate, Meghan O'Rourke advises Ashbery's "Griceian" addressees "not to try to UNDERSTAND the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music."
O'Rourke is obviously referring to P. F. Strawson, the Oxonian philosopher, of St. John's (sometimes) who inverted Grice's definition of "to mean" to provide one (suggested by Grice in "Meaning," 1948, that Anne Strawson typed) for "to understand".
Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was poetising about.
"And I don't think I found out!," she recollects, echoing Grice!
("Meanings are not found.")
"You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork" not to worry about their meaning.
Writing for Slate, Meghan O'Rourke advises Ashbery's "Griceian" addressees "not to try to UNDERSTAND the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music."
O'Rourke is obviously referring to P. F. Strawson, the Oxonian philosopher, of St. John's (sometimes) who inverted Grice's definition of "to mean" to provide one (suggested by Grice in "Meaning," 1948, that Anne Strawson typed) for "to understand".
Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was poetising about.
"And I don't think I found out!," she recollects, echoing Grice!
("Meanings are not found.")
"I don't find any direct statements in life," Ashbery explains to the Times in London.
"My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection."
This is an obvious reference to Grice on implicature as understatement (or innuendo).
The locus classicus is Searle (a student of Strawson at Oxford) and his account of 'indirect' (vide "indirection") speech acts as implicature. Cfr. Holdcroft on implicature in his "Indirect forms of communication" in The Journal of Rhetoric.
Ashbery goes on:
"I do not think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation."
He adds: "Do you?"
Ashbery's implicature is that THE TIMES's journalists usually care a hoot about the subjects they are interviewing ("It's all about the money!")
Interviewed by The Associated Press, Ashbery jokes that if he could turn his name into a verb, "to Ashbery," it would mean "to confuse the hell out of people."
D. C. Dennett, formerly of All Souls, and a tutee of Grice, did coin "to grice" to mean, "to fill with details". Kemmerling coined an antonym, "to disgrice" -- which for Kemmerling is merely to 'strawsonise'.
Ashbery should have noted that if 'ashbery' is going to be used as a verb (cfr. Humpty Dumpty on verbs) it does not need to be capitalised.
"My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection."
This is an obvious reference to Grice on implicature as understatement (or innuendo).
The locus classicus is Searle (a student of Strawson at Oxford) and his account of 'indirect' (vide "indirection") speech acts as implicature. Cfr. Holdcroft on implicature in his "Indirect forms of communication" in The Journal of Rhetoric.
Ashbery goes on:
"I do not think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation."
He adds: "Do you?"
Ashbery's implicature is that THE TIMES's journalists usually care a hoot about the subjects they are interviewing ("It's all about the money!")
Interviewed by The Associated Press, Ashbery jokes that if he could turn his name into a verb, "to Ashbery," it would mean "to confuse the hell out of people."
D. C. Dennett, formerly of All Souls, and a tutee of Grice, did coin "to grice" to mean, "to fill with details". Kemmerling coined an antonym, "to disgrice" -- which for Kemmerling is merely to 'strawsonise'.
Ashbery should have noted that if 'ashbery' is going to be used as a verb (cfr. Humpty Dumpty on verbs) it does not need to be capitalised.
Ashbery also is a highly regarded translator and critic -- not necessarily in that order, Popper would add.
("How do we varify 'high regard"?)
Ashbery was the art critic for The New York Herald-Tribune in Europe, New York magazine and Newsweek and the poetry critic for Partisan Review.
By 'art critic,' we mean (alla Grice) that he criticised art (vide Urmson on "Appraisals").
Ashbery translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and numerous other French writers.
"I did it because I know French."
This poses a problem for Popper. "What does it mean to _know_ French?" "If we go by Gettier's 'conceptual analysis'," that Popper despised, "we would say that Ashbery believes that he knows French, and that Ashbery knows French and that it is true that Ashbery knows French. I hope you'll agree with me that that Oxonian analytical approach is hardly better than my own dialytical one."
Grice commented that "a French poem" can mean different things. A poem by Rimbaud translated by Ashbery "can still be considered, via implicature, to be _in French_." "Or not," he adds, to aggrave Sir Peter Strawson.
Ashbery, but not Grice, was a teacher for many years, including at Brooklyn College, Harvard and Bard.
Nancy Mitford would agree that dropping "college" from "Brooklyn college" quite does NOT do -- "Since Brooklyn is so _big_!".
Grice taught at Harvard if delivering the William James lectures on conversational implicature (One of his exames, "Every nice girl loves a sailor") can be deemed 'taught'.
Starting at boarding school, when a classmate submitted his work (without his knowledge) to Poetry magazine, Ashbery enjoyed a long and productive career, so fully accumulating words in his mind that he once told the AP that he rarely revised a poem once he wrote it down.
By 'rarely' Ashbery EXPLICATES that he sometimes did.
Oddly, when Grice wrote (hand-wrote) "Meaning" he hardly thought about publishing ("unless you count delivering the thing to the Oxford Philosophical Socieety a sort of 'publishing' alla Witters and St. Augustine.")
Strawson was aggravated and had his wife type the thing. Then, Strawson submitted the thing to The Philosophical Review and signed, "H. P. Grice, St. John's". The thing was accepted (+> for publication). Then Strawson approached Grice:
Strawson: You thing, "Meaning," got accepted for publication in "The Philosophical Review.
Grice: But I never submitted it.
Strawson disimplicated all for Grice, and Grice, reluctanctly agreed to have the thing published -- it gave him nightmares after that. Especially when Max Black started to criticise it.
B. J. Harrison, too. And he joked about it: "Grice's analysis of meaning comes second in the philosophical tradition to act-utilitarianism as being victim of counter-examples."
This gave Wilson the idea to entitle his essay for "Nous": "Grice on meaning: the ultimate counterxample" -- where he quotes from Grice. When Wilson showed Grice the alleged counterexample in an APA conference -- that Grice confuses between perlocution and illocution -- Grice smugly replied,
"I MIGHT be mistaken -- but surely I'm never CONFUSED." The implicature being, "except when I drink." The implicature being "alcoholic beverages."
More than 30 Ashbery volumes have now been published, including poetry, essays, translations and a novel, "A Nest of Ninnies," co-written with poet James Schuyler.
"The implicature being is that it takes two to discourse about ninnies."
Ashbery's masterpiece was likely the title poem of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by a 16th century Italian painting of the same name.
"Only in Italian," Ashbery explicates to the ignoramus!
In 400-plus lines, Ashbery shifted from a critique of Parmigianino's painting to a meditation on the besieged 20th century mind.
"I thought the implicature was clever."
And it was!
("How do we varify 'high regard"?)
Ashbery was the art critic for The New York Herald-Tribune in Europe, New York magazine and Newsweek and the poetry critic for Partisan Review.
By 'art critic,' we mean (alla Grice) that he criticised art (vide Urmson on "Appraisals").
Ashbery translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and numerous other French writers.
"I did it because I know French."
This poses a problem for Popper. "What does it mean to _know_ French?" "If we go by Gettier's 'conceptual analysis'," that Popper despised, "we would say that Ashbery believes that he knows French, and that Ashbery knows French and that it is true that Ashbery knows French. I hope you'll agree with me that that Oxonian analytical approach is hardly better than my own dialytical one."
Grice commented that "a French poem" can mean different things. A poem by Rimbaud translated by Ashbery "can still be considered, via implicature, to be _in French_." "Or not," he adds, to aggrave Sir Peter Strawson.
Ashbery, but not Grice, was a teacher for many years, including at Brooklyn College, Harvard and Bard.
Nancy Mitford would agree that dropping "college" from "Brooklyn college" quite does NOT do -- "Since Brooklyn is so _big_!".
Grice taught at Harvard if delivering the William James lectures on conversational implicature (One of his exames, "Every nice girl loves a sailor") can be deemed 'taught'.
Starting at boarding school, when a classmate submitted his work (without his knowledge) to Poetry magazine, Ashbery enjoyed a long and productive career, so fully accumulating words in his mind that he once told the AP that he rarely revised a poem once he wrote it down.
By 'rarely' Ashbery EXPLICATES that he sometimes did.
Oddly, when Grice wrote (hand-wrote) "Meaning" he hardly thought about publishing ("unless you count delivering the thing to the Oxford Philosophical Socieety a sort of 'publishing' alla Witters and St. Augustine.")
Strawson was aggravated and had his wife type the thing. Then, Strawson submitted the thing to The Philosophical Review and signed, "H. P. Grice, St. John's". The thing was accepted (+> for publication). Then Strawson approached Grice:
Strawson: You thing, "Meaning," got accepted for publication in "The Philosophical Review.
Grice: But I never submitted it.
Strawson disimplicated all for Grice, and Grice, reluctanctly agreed to have the thing published -- it gave him nightmares after that. Especially when Max Black started to criticise it.
B. J. Harrison, too. And he joked about it: "Grice's analysis of meaning comes second in the philosophical tradition to act-utilitarianism as being victim of counter-examples."
This gave Wilson the idea to entitle his essay for "Nous": "Grice on meaning: the ultimate counterxample" -- where he quotes from Grice. When Wilson showed Grice the alleged counterexample in an APA conference -- that Grice confuses between perlocution and illocution -- Grice smugly replied,
"I MIGHT be mistaken -- but surely I'm never CONFUSED." The implicature being, "except when I drink." The implicature being "alcoholic beverages."
More than 30 Ashbery volumes have now been published, including poetry, essays, translations and a novel, "A Nest of Ninnies," co-written with poet James Schuyler.
"The implicature being is that it takes two to discourse about ninnies."
Ashbery's masterpiece was likely the title poem of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by a 16th century Italian painting of the same name.
"Only in Italian," Ashbery explicates to the ignoramus!
In 400-plus lines, Ashbery shifted from a critique of Parmigianino's painting to a meditation on the besieged 20th century mind.
"I thought the implicature was clever."
And it was!
____
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging on all sides, everywhere I look
Merging on all sides, everywhere I look
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.
----
----
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, while Grice was born in Harborne.
"If I had been born in Rochester," Grice once said, "I possibly have liked Dickens, but I don't."
Grice is punning on Rochester (New World) and Rochester (Old World).
Ashbery remembered himself -- "as Grice would put it in "Personal Identity" -- as a lonely child, haunted by the early death of his younger brother, Richard.
Oddly, Grice was haunted by his younger brother, Derek, but only because Derek played the cello "so bad I couldn't sleep when he rehearsed."
Ashbery grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, "The Battle," a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes.
"I won't tell you who wins," he says to the THE TIMES journalist. Implicating that THE TIMES journalists never understand!
Ashbery would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he did not write another until boarding school, the Deerfield, when his work was published in the school paper.
"I used to call it "Dearfield," for fun.
"It's amazing how praise can block a poet -- especially when coming from your grandfather!"
Grice disagreed: "I love praise, even faint!"
Grice is punning on the implicature of 'damn by faint praise," credited to a critic of Shakespeare.
"If I had been born in Rochester," Grice once said, "I possibly have liked Dickens, but I don't."
Grice is punning on Rochester (New World) and Rochester (Old World).
Ashbery remembered himself -- "as Grice would put it in "Personal Identity" -- as a lonely child, haunted by the early death of his younger brother, Richard.
Oddly, Grice was haunted by his younger brother, Derek, but only because Derek played the cello "so bad I couldn't sleep when he rehearsed."
Ashbery grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, "The Battle," a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes.
"I won't tell you who wins," he says to the THE TIMES journalist. Implicating that THE TIMES journalists never understand!
Ashbery would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he did not write another until boarding school, the Deerfield, when his work was published in the school paper.
"I used to call it "Dearfield," for fun.
"It's amazing how praise can block a poet -- especially when coming from your grandfather!"
Grice disagreed: "I love praise, even faint!"
Grice is punning on the implicature of 'damn by faint praise," credited to a critic of Shakespeare.
Meanwhile, Ashbery took painting lessons and found new meaning in Life, the magazine.
An article about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art -- "or MoMA if you must!" he explicates -- so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years.
"It was more interesting that the actual exhibit!"
At Harvard (where Grice lectured on implicature), Ashbery read W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore and met fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O'Hara and Robert Creeley.
"I hardly rowed."
O. T. O. H., Grice spent most of his time at Oxford -- as a _tuttee_ -- playing cricket!
Ashbery would be grouped with O'Hara and Koch as part of the avant-garde "New York Poets" movement, although Ashbery believed what they really had in common was living in New York.
"Which is ok as far as Venn goes."
Ashbery is referring to Grice's set-theoretical approach to the above implicature.
"The "New York poets" live in New York."
is, for Grice 'analytic' -- "and I would add 'a priori' if this were not redundant."
For Strawson it ain't, since Strawson fought with Grice over the conceptual analysis of the 'analytic a posteriori.'
Vide their joint "In defence of a dogma" -- that of analyticity, of course. Footnote to page 32.
An article about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art -- "or MoMA if you must!" he explicates -- so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years.
"It was more interesting that the actual exhibit!"
At Harvard (where Grice lectured on implicature), Ashbery read W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore and met fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O'Hara and Robert Creeley.
"I hardly rowed."
O. T. O. H., Grice spent most of his time at Oxford -- as a _tuttee_ -- playing cricket!
Ashbery would be grouped with O'Hara and Koch as part of the avant-garde "New York Poets" movement, although Ashbery believed what they really had in common was living in New York.
"Which is ok as far as Venn goes."
Ashbery is referring to Grice's set-theoretical approach to the above implicature.
"The "New York poets" live in New York."
is, for Grice 'analytic' -- "and I would add 'a priori' if this were not redundant."
For Strawson it ain't, since Strawson fought with Grice over the conceptual analysis of the 'analytic a posteriori.'
Vide their joint "In defence of a dogma" -- that of analyticity, of course. Footnote to page 32.
Ashbery's first volume, "Some Trees," was a relatively conventional collection, with a preface from Auden and the praise of O'Hara, who likened Ashbery to Wallace Stevens, and Grice.
"Ashbery manages to implicate, by 'some trees,' that he is not interested in ALL of them. But then who would?"
But later, Ashbery unleashed "The Tennis Court Oath," poems so abstract that critic John Simon accused him of crafting verse without "sensibility, sensuality or sentences."
Grice read the poems and inspired him to coin "quasi-sentence," to describe some of Ashbery's verses -- or "lines," as Grice preferred.
But then Grice had been educated at Clifton reading Virgil's Aeneid, where many 'lines' are quasi-sentences, too!
Incidentally Simon is punning on Austen when clashing 'sensibility' not with 'sense' but with 'sensUALITY'! Provocative!
Ashbery later told the AP that parts of the volume "were written in a period of almost desperation" and because he was living in France at the time, he had fallen "out of touch with my vernacular speech, which is really the kind of fountainhead of my poetry."
Grice disagrees: "I would believe Ashbery's explanation had I found ONE LINE in "The Tennis Court Oath" in French, but I didn't!"
Ashbery wrote a letter to Grice:
"Ashbery manages to implicate, by 'some trees,' that he is not interested in ALL of them. But then who would?"
But later, Ashbery unleashed "The Tennis Court Oath," poems so abstract that critic John Simon accused him of crafting verse without "sensibility, sensuality or sentences."
Grice read the poems and inspired him to coin "quasi-sentence," to describe some of Ashbery's verses -- or "lines," as Grice preferred.
But then Grice had been educated at Clifton reading Virgil's Aeneid, where many 'lines' are quasi-sentences, too!
Incidentally Simon is punning on Austen when clashing 'sensibility' not with 'sense' but with 'sensUALITY'! Provocative!
Ashbery later told the AP that parts of the volume "were written in a period of almost desperation" and because he was living in France at the time, he had fallen "out of touch with my vernacular speech, which is really the kind of fountainhead of my poetry."
Grice disagrees: "I would believe Ashbery's explanation had I found ONE LINE in "The Tennis Court Oath" in French, but I didn't!"
Ashbery wrote a letter to Grice:
"Dear Paul,
I actually went through a period after 'The Tennis Court Oath' wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it.
And then I must have said to myself, 'Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I'm not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.'
I hope this explains why I still used English when writing the poems you reviewed in France.
Love,
John."
I actually went through a period after 'The Tennis Court Oath' wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it.
And then I must have said to myself, 'Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I'm not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.'
I hope this explains why I still used English when writing the poems you reviewed in France.
Love,
John."
Ashbery's collection, "Rivers and Mountains," was a National Book Award finalist that helped restore his standing and "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" raised him to the pantheon.
Grice reviewed "Rivers and Mountains."
"It is a good example of 'implicature'. Strictly, when I suggested to Ashbery that he entitled the thing, "Mountains and Rivers," he disimplicated me for two weeks!"
Ashbery was given an honorary National Book Award for lifetime achievement and he declared he was "quite pleased" with his "status in the world of writers."
-- "Although he never knew what the implicatures of 'writer' were," Grice comments.
"A writer writes," Grice finds analytic. "But surely that cannot be Ashbery's implicature here!"
Grice reviewed "Rivers and Mountains."
"It is a good example of 'implicature'. Strictly, when I suggested to Ashbery that he entitled the thing, "Mountains and Rivers," he disimplicated me for two weeks!"
Ashbery was given an honorary National Book Award for lifetime achievement and he declared he was "quite pleased" with his "status in the world of writers."
-- "Although he never knew what the implicatures of 'writer' were," Grice comments.
"A writer writes," Grice finds analytic. "But surely that cannot be Ashbery's implicature here!"
Ashbery's style ranged from rhyming couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to President Warren Harding."
"Oddly, it was not difficult for me to find words that rhymed with the -ing of "Harding," even if Grice later criticised me for using too many 'feminine' rhymes -- whatever Grice meant by that!"
Ashbery became very sensitive to reputation.
"How to Continue" was an elegy, party turned tragic:
"a gale (that) came and said/it is time to take all of you away."
Grice never understood it!
"Oddly, it was not difficult for me to find words that rhymed with the -ing of "Harding," even if Grice later criticised me for using too many 'feminine' rhymes -- whatever Grice meant by that!"
Ashbery became very sensitive to reputation.
"How to Continue" was an elegy, party turned tragic:
"a gale (that) came and said/it is time to take all of you away."
Grice never understood it!
Reflecting on his work, Ashbery boasts about "strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion," but acknowledged that "I grew/To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew/Those few paces from the best."
In his poem "In a Wonderful Place," published in the collection "Planisphere," Ashbery offered a brief, bittersweet look back.
In his poem "In a Wonderful Place," published in the collection "Planisphere," Ashbery offered a brief, bittersweet look back.
____
I spent years exhausting my good works
on the public, all for seconds
Time to shut down colored alphabets
flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It
draws like a rout. Or a treat.
Cheers,
Speranza
Cheers,
Speranza
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