OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS General Editors PAULINA KEWES LAURA MARCUS PETER MCCULLOUGH HEATHER O’ DONOGHUE SEAMUS PERRY LLOYD PRATT FIONA STAFFORD John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange The Minor Eras OLI HAZZARD 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oli Hazzard 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. 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Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. In memory of John Ashbery and Lee Harwood Acknowledgements I’d like to express my deep gratitude to the following people, each of whom contributed generously to the making of this book: Ron Bush, Mark Ford, David Kermani, Patrick Hayes, David Herd, Brian Glavey, Hermione Lee, Lloyd Pratt, Peter Riley, Laura Marcus, Sam Riviere, Sarah Howe, Hugh Foley, Stephen Cheeke, Stephen Ross, David Spittle, Steph Burt, Steve Clark, Anthony Howell, Michael Schmidt, Robert Sheppard, Rosanna Salbashian, Rosa Campbell, Chris and Jean Porter, Robin Hazzard, Maria Hazzard. I’d like to thank the staff at the following institutions for allowing me access to their collections: the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Hartley Library, University of Southampton; the British Library; the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. I’m grateful to Wolfson College, and the Oxford Centre for Life- Writing, for providing funding for the duration of my D.Phil and for a travel grant in 2012; the English faculty at the University of Oxford for the award of a Maxwell and Meyerstein Grant; and the Arts and Human- ities Research Council for a Studentship, and for a Research Training Support Grant in 2014. Thanks also to Chris Gair of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American for Literary Relations publishing an early version of Chapter 3, and to Will May, editor of Reading F. T. Prince, for publishing an extract from Chapter 2. Finally, to Lucy, Ned, and Frank Hazzard: this book could not have been written without your support and love. Thank you. Excerpts from John Ashbery’s work are copyright © by John Ashbery [1945–2017]. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. and Carcanet Press for the author. Excerpts from SELECTED ESSAYS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS are copy- right ©1954 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpts from Paterson are copyright ©1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958 by William Carlos Williams. Cover copyright © 1992 by Pat Power and B.K. Epler. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Contents Epigraph xi Introduction 1 1. ‘the barbarous wastes’: Ashbery and W. H. Auden 33 2. ‘all things as they might be’: Ashbery and F. T. Prince 62 3. ‘trying to have it both ways’: Ashbery and Lee Harwood 100 4. ‘we are where we exchanged / positions’: Ashbery and Mark Ford 148 Works Cited 197 Index 205 Alice’s looking glass is reached by Emily’s riddle. —John Ashbery Introduction This is an account of John Ashbery’s career in which, as he puts it in ‘Grand Galop’, the ‘minor eras / Take on an importance all out of proportion to the story’.¹ The ‘minority’ of any part of any story is, of course, a relational status always open to dispute, but in the available narratives of Ashbery’s life and work his personal and textual engagements with contemporaneous English poets have, up to this point, occupied a certifiably marginal position. This is unsurprising. When compared with the most ambitious, compelling narratives of Ashbery’splacewithin literary history—portraying him as a late Romantic, a Francophile avant- gardist, or a coterie poet of the New York School, among many other possible identities—concentrating on his English connections might seem a limited perspective from which to view his work. Yet because the idea of ‘minority’ was a central preoccupation for Ashbery throughout his career, it is apt to discover that many of the important, enduring points of interest which occupied his poetry and poetics—the relation of the margin to the centre, the ways in which art represents the historical moment of its composition, the processes by which canons are formed, the methods through which aesthetic ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ are determined, the connection between national identities and traditions and individual poetic expression—are foregrounded and illuminated when raised within such a ‘minor’ context. The limitation of scope in this study—which attends to Ashbery’s relationships with W. H. Auden, F. T. Prince, Lee Harwood and Mark Ford—allows for a localized, concentrated sample of his writing to be attended to, and obliquely to substantiate or complicate our understanding of more general themes or practices in his oeuvre. Ashbery’s body of work is broad and varied enough to justify its frag- mentation into specific sub-categories, which in combination will allow for a larger, more comprehensive and more complex picture of this inex- haustible poet to be presented. This book hopes to make three central contributions to that broader picture: to demonstrate the significance of Anglo-American contexts to Ashbery’s work, to illustrate his importance ¹ John Ashbery, Collected Poems: 1957–1987 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), 438. 2 John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange in understanding the work of four English poets, and to examine how these contexts inflect his key concept of ‘other traditions’. The Anglo-American backdrop in which his engagements with these poets take place is particularly apposite for a study attentive to the shifting valence of ‘minority’ as an aesthetic category. The dramatically changing nature of Anglo-American relations during the long historical moment of Ashbery’s career—characterized, in many accounts, by the post-war ascen- sion of the United States to a position of cultural, economic, and military centrality, with the concomitant decline of Britain in those sectors—has provided an ideal set of circumstances for the articulation of a version of literary history, which has attended as much to the recently diminished and occluded as to the newly powerful and visible.² Ashbery’s is a critical project—or, perhaps more accurately, a series of discrete but linked critical phases—in which aesthetic values are posited as changing, historical phenomena, destined to be abandoned or superseded; and this interest in impermanence and contingency reflects acutely the period of its expres- sion, when the location of the most innovative practices in Anglophone poetry crossed the Atlantic, postmodernism as a theoretical approach and aesthetic became culturally central, and poststructuralism entered and altered literary-critical discourse.³ His playful interventions in the histories of English and American poetries can be viewed as correctives informed by broader historical, philosophical, and literary transitions, but also as self- reflexive, intended to mediate how his own poetic career is read. While often described as a distinctly ‘American’ writer, Ashbery was careful to identify himself multiply and inconsistently with different poetic tradi- tions and national contexts.⁴ The concepts and practices which circulate in ² For a comprehensive overview of how political and economic changes in the Anglo- American relationship have been registered (or pointedly omitted from consideration) by a number of poets, see Something We Have That They Don’t: British and American Poetic Relations Since 1925, Steve Clark and Mark Ford, eds (University of Iowa Press, 2004), 1–29. ³ Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s long poem based on the art of Henry Darger, features a relevant dialogue between three of its characters on the subject of changes in taste over much wider historical periods: ‘But you know, our fashions are in fashion / only briefly, then they go out / and stay that way for a long time. Then they come back in / for a while. Then, in maybe a million years, they go out of fashion and stay there. / Laure and Tidbit agreed, with the proviso that everyone would become fashion / again for a few hours.’ John Ashbery, Girls on the Run (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), 3. ⁴ As Ben Hickman demonstrates abundantly, critics as diverse in motivation and practice as Harold Bloom, Marjorie Perloff, Helen Vendler, and Susan Schultz have characterized Ashbery as a poet whose American-ness runs from the ‘irrepressible’ to the ‘obvious and inescapable’. See Ben Hickman, John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 2–3; Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 130; Susan Schultz, The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 1; Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 225.