Do you think the ONE person in ten could quote a poem Ashberry wrote? I think that ONE person in ten would probably just say, "Oh, John Ashberry. He was a poet." Ask him to say something else about the guy, and what would you get? "I think he was married to Sylvia Plath. Maybe I'm wrong."
Quite wrong. Ashberry was gay (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Something IS wrong with nobody really knowing or caring that a "world famous poet" died. There was a time when this mattered. It was big news when Carl Sandburg died. And Robert Frost. Then again, they actually wrote poems, not crossword puzzles. Anybody with some intelligence could enjoy their poetry.
Poetry has degenerated into word games. Archaic, pseudo-intellectual, "try and figure this out" word games. Have you read any of Ashberry's works? No, you probably haven't. Now you can be enlightened. Here are three examples. Let's see how much you enjoy them or even understand them.............
Entertained? Enlightened? Do you now have a better understanding of the human condition?
I realize that this may seem like bad Shakespeare ("I come to bury him, not to praise him") but I think Johnny's obit would've been more wider read and LONGER if he wasn't so obscure. Here's the entire AP obit:
Very nice. He won the book world's "unofficial triple crown." Does that mean that you wouldn't have a long, long day if you knocked on doors and asked "Anybody got a copy of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror?"
Can anyone name a living poet? No, no, my Hallmark card-loving friend, Maya Angelou died in 2014.
A Pulitzer Prize recently went to Bob Dylan, much to the chagrin of obscure poets who've written obscure books that got praise in obscure review columns.
We could consider Bob Dylan a living poet. Some of his stuff is a bit obscure now and then, but at least you can get SOMETHING out of it. Even if it's an uneasy chuckle: "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken!"
Look, if you couldn't figure out every line of Bob's lyrics at least you could enjoy the music. You could say the same thing of Keith Reid's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" or Bernie Taupin's "Take Me to the Pilot." I interviewed Billy Joel once, and he pointedly said, "I won't call myself a poet." Maybe he didn't want to be associated with a profession in disgrace, one rotting in the dusty embrace of professors who have atrophied a lot worse than J. Alfred Prufrock.
The sad thing about modern poetry is that it's more Jackson Pollock than Dali or Picasso. With Dali or Picasso, you may not fully understand what it all means, but it gives you a gut feeling. You have an emotional reaction. If you don't walk away with a profound interpretation of every symbol, the excuse is "well, it's expressionism. It's surreal. It's dada." It's SOMETHING.
Jackson Pollock spilled paint. That's all he did. Too often, all modern poets do is spill words. THEY may pretend they didn't do it at random, but they sure as hell did it in some state of altered consciousness, and without taking drugs as an excuse. It's just pretentious pseudo-intellectual riddling.
You probably haven't heard of Spike Hawkins. He was a contemporary of Anselm Hollo and Pete Brown (yes, the poet Pete Brown IS the same guy who wrote lyrics for Cream and for Jack Bruce). His stuff didn't exactly make sense, but at least it was short. It also gave you some kind of reaction:
LIGHTS SEEN
the rainbow hid in the car
until the car stopped
and the man got out and threw
away his entire family
And you know something's happening, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
OK, I prefer Spike Milligan, but I could enjoy a little of Spike Hawkins once in a while. It's easier to take an oddball poem by Hawkins because nobody gave him a Pulitzer Prize or praised his word games as the pinnacle of modern poetic achievement.
Ashberry was lucky. He may be the last poet (not lyricist) to be acclaimed in his lifetime for his obscure work that nobody could understand. It's not likely to happen for the creatures whose poetry appears in The New Yorker.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Bob Dylan has been an icon for over 40 years. People have published books with nothing but photos of the man. Posters of Bob Dylan are on many a wall. Sometimes he's been called "Jokerman," but that's cool. Ashberry? Call him "The Riddler," because he looks like one.
Maybe, like royalties, the literary world simply has to understand that SOME things aren't going to be part of our world any longer.
This includes poets who can reach the average person the way Poe, Dickinson, Whitman, Kipling, Service, Sandburg, Ginsberg and Frost did. Yes, I'm giving you a good cross-section there. There's art even in something that rhymes, and his romantic, like "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes, and you can enjoy it as well as you can enjoy e.e. cummings.
Poetry has descended into drivel (the kind of things you hear when a "poet" is asked to recite at a Presidential inaugural) and into stuff that only appeals to a small circle of condescending prigs.
Guys like Ashberry are neither sentimental nor pornographic nor emotional. They are cold, which is not a trait one associates with a poet.
Poetry is no longer what it used to be: poetic.
No comments:
Post a Comment