A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982

Thinking You Know

Constructing a rich interpretive framework for John Ashbery’s “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” art historian Reva Wolf questions how decisive such contexts can be for reading the poem. Specifically, she wants to know whether it was possible for Ashbery to have seen a certain painting by Andy Warhol (Popeye, 1962) that depicts the hero of his poem and also contains the phrase “farm implements” (in a fragment of a crossword puzzle). Should that evidence as historical determine our reading of the poem? Ashbery himself denied knowing the painting, crediting the phrase to his writing for ArtNews on a Dutch landscape painting, Farm Implement and Vegetables in a Landscape. What would constitute reliable knowledge of the sources and contexts of the poem? Wolf’s account engages several kinds of knowledge: first, the everyday knowledge of experience that presents us with what she terms “unexceptional yet utterly strange epistemological dilemmas”; second, knowledge of the sources from which an artist or writer draws his or her materials, and why they enter the work; and finally, knowledge of what a work is about, its meaning. In Wolf’s critical detective story, Ashbery’s social life, art writing, and knowledge of painting all provide evidence, even while “in the end, the discovery must remain unsure.”

Is it possible to know something and then again to not really know it? A great deal of the knowledge we possess contains this sort of uncertainty. Think of the way we “know” circumstances when we take a position on a political issue. Or of the way we “know” friends and acquaintances when we assess their motives or the nature of their personal struggles. The kinds of understanding that we gain from such knowledge are important—they contribute to our behavior and attitudes toward the events and people of our lives.

The shaky status of this day-to-day knowledge is a recurrent topic in John Ashbery’s poetry. Clues, coded messages, and puzzles the reader cannot solve are in Ashbery’s writing especially effective metaphors for our altogether unexceptional yet utterly strange epistemological dilemmas. These metaphors are effective because they nudge the reader—often annoyingly—to experience something similar to the author’s own struggles with the limits and limitations of knowledge.1 But what happens when a reader thinks he or she has actually pieced together clues in an Ashbery poem and has found a meaningful reference? Does the purported discovery take away from the power of the poem? Or does it add to it? And what about the unsure status of the discovery? These are some of the questions I was led to raise after spending a long time thinking about Ashbery’s poem “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.”

“Farm Implements” was first published in Paris Review in 1967.2 Ashbery later included the poem in The Double Dream of Spring (1970), which has as one of its leitmotifs duplicity, as the word “double” in the title quietly intimates. The title poem is in itself a double: it is the title both of the poem and of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico (1915) in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, as Ashbery acknowledges in an author’s note.³ The title “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” too, has a double in the visual arts, as will soon become evident, although the source of this title is unacknowledged by the author, and is concealed.

The characters in this amusing poem are Popeye, Olive Oyl, their family, and their coterie of strange friends. On the surface, the only evident link between the landscape of the title and the comic-strip drama that unfolds in the poem is in the general theme of rural imagery—“it was cheaper in the country”; “it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.” (However, the narrative occurs not in the country but in Popeye’s urban dwelling, and this confusion of locations is consistent with the general theme of duplicity.)

The title seems more directly related to the poem if the whole is understood in relation to a painting of Popeye made by Andy Warhol in 1961 (fig. 1). In this hand-painted work, Warhol superimposed a representation of Popeye onto a depiction of another feature of the entertainment pages of the newspaper, a crossword puzzle. Only a fragment of this puzzle is visible, and only three clues (which themselves function as a Dada-like poem): “award,” “farm implements,” “distress.” The two words of the second clue, “farm implements,” are also the first two words of Ashbery’s poem. The combination in both the painting and the poem of Popeye and “farm implements” appears, then, to be a hidden link between the title of the poem and its ostensible subject.

Indeed, Ashbery has produced a kind of verbal translation of Warhol’s Popeye/crossword superimposition. As a parallel to the crossword in the painting, the narrative of the poem begins with a word puzzle: “The first of the undecoded messages read: ‘Popeye sits in thunder.’” And on the third line, a Chinese puzzle allows for an escape from a tenement apartment to a more expansive environment (of the mind?): “a tangram emerges: a country.”

The structure of the poem, a sestina, itself resembles a puzzle. In a sestina, the last word of each of the six lines in the first stanza are repeated in the remaining stanzas in a regulated shifting order (in Ashbery’s poem, the six endwords are: thunder, apartment, country, pleasant, scratched, spinach). There is a final stanza of three lines, in which three of the endwords fall at the end of the line, and three in the middle. The endwords, then, are filled in, somewhat like the answers to clues in a crossword puzzle. In “Farm Implements,” as in the crossword puzzle, these answers do not seem to add up to anything more than a bit of pleasure, a distraction, as the ribald final stanza of Ashbery’s poem implies (see fig. 4).

Just as Warhol uses preexisting imagery, so Ashbery uses preexisting poetic formats, but also preexisting arrangements of words. A conspicuous example is found in the ironic “For this is my country” of the second stanza. Also plundered, as Ashbery himself has pointed out, is a comic strip of Popeye published in the New York Spanish-language newspaper El diario (fig. 2): “‘How pleasant / To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye.’”⁴ It is interesting that these two appropriated passages are set apart from the rest of the text through being italicized; the reference to citizenship in the United States together with the Spanish words bring to mind the situation of immigrants in New York, who often must live in small apartments such as the one in which Popeye resides. Popeye himself is an uprooted figure (“‘Popeye, forced as you / know to flee the country / One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate / father’”). In one sense, Ashbery’s poem is about how various cultures intersect, appropriate, and/or parallel one another.

A parallel between Ashbery’s poetic language and the peculiarities of Popeye’s English has been explained by Ashbery in an interview: “Popeye’s malapropisms … might be another reason why I find him interesting, since I tend to dislocate language myself.”⁵ The comparison of comic strip language to poetry had been in Ashbery’s mind for many years, and is found in a poem from his first book, Some Trees (1956):

The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong,
Still, as the loveliest feelings

Must soon find words, and these, yes,
Displace them, so I am not wrong
In calling this comic version of myself
The true one.⁶

The title of this poem, “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” which is based on the title of a poem by Andrew Marvell,⁷ in all likelihood doubles as an allusion to Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family, thereby producing another equation of poetry with comics.

In “The Picture of Little J. A.,” Ashbery’s comic self, like Popeye, transforms ordinary language. This comic self is perhaps Dick Tracy, as a character named “Dick” in the poem suggests. Dick Tracy—along with Popeye and other figures of popular culture—also appears, in the guise of a statue, in a collaborative poem by Ashbery and Kenneth Koch entitled “Death Paints a Picture,” published in 1958.⁸ Dick Tracy can be understood as one of Ashbery’s many poetic alter egos. When Andy Warhol made a “screen test,” or film portrait, of Ashbery around 1965–66 (fig. 3), either Warhol or Ashbery, according to a later report, had described Ashbery “as kind of having a Dick Tracy profile—he has a kind of square face and nose.”⁹

Figure 2. El diario, Sunday supplement to La prensa, 16 April 1967. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Ashbery Papers, AM 6. Reproduced by permission.

The detective is an apposite identity for a poet whose writing is cluttered with clues, hidden meanings, and puzzle pieces. Inquisitive readers are prompted to attempt to make sense of this kind of imagery, an activity that casts them, too, in the role of detective—and the search for knowledge becomes detective work. In an intriguing essay, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” Carlo Ginzburg observes that three figures—Sherlock Holmes, the art historian Giovanni Morelli, and Sigmund Freud—each used, at the same moment in history, a method of piecing together minute and hidden clues to intuitively determine, respectively, who the criminal is, whether a painting is authentic, and why psychological trauma occurs.10 The clues in “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” are precisely what lead readers to find “evidence”—meaning, really—not only within the poem itself, but also outside it, such as in the connection with Warhol’s Popeye.

As a character, the detective may likewise be duplicitous, and is often required to hide his or her identity in order to obtain clues. In “Farm Implements” the poet plays out this role by producing several types of doubles, including a sexual duplicity. The El diario comic strip quoted in “Farm Implements” shows the Sea Hag wearing a tie and Popeye in a dress and bonnet, disguised as Swee’ Pea’s grandmother. Popeye, moreover, is a sailor; the sailor is often an object of homosexual desire (as in, to cite one in a large number of examples, Kenneth Anger’s 1947 film Fireworks).11

Warhol’s depiction of Popeye is a double, too, along with the one appearing in the first frame of the El diario comic strip—both of these having been derived from an earlier “original,” namely, the first frame of the strip as it appeared in a newspaper in English. This doubling up of references creates ambiguities concerning the origins of the poet’s words—the point being that their origins are only knowable to an (unmeasurable) extent.

The preceding analysis is based on the assumption that the words “Farm Implements” of Ashbery’s title were copied from Warhol’s painting. Yet Ashbery has claimed that his poem has no connection whatsoever to the Warhol painting, and that he saw the painting for the first time at the “Andy Warhol: A Retrospective” exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989.¹² According to Ashbery, the title of his poem was taken, rather, from a Dutch old master painting; he came upon this title while, as executive editor of ARTnews, he was routinely looking through auction catalogues for works to list in the magazine’s monthly column on the highlights of upcoming auctions. The title appealed to him, and eventually he used it in his poem.¹³

Indeed, among the titles included in the column on upcoming auctions in the March 1966 issue of ARTnews is Farm Implements and Vegetables in a Landscape, a painting by the seventeenth-century artist Salomon van Ruysdael.¹⁴ This is the title that appears on the manuscript of Ashbery’s poem (fig. 4); at some point he decided to change “Vegetables” to the more quirky “Rutabagas.” But the title of the Ruysdael painting is a double of sorts, too.

Going back one step further, to Ashbery’s initial discovery of this title in a Christie’s auction catalogue, reveals that he invented the title published in ARTnews. The Christie’s catalogue lists this work as A Wheelbarrow, Baskets of Vegetables, and Implements in a Landscape,¹⁵ a longer title than the one appearing in ARTnews and in the poem. The editing of the title may well have been a result of having to make it fit into the rather short ARTnews column, a practical function of Ashbery’s job. Still, this job became, finally, part of his poetry writing process, however mundane such an operation may appear to be (and perhaps this operation is similar to the imaginative distractions that make life at the office bearable in an earlier poem, “Instruction Manual”).¹⁶

Figure 4. John Ashbery, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” typescript and autograph revisions, 1967. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Ashbery Papers AM 6. Reproduced by permission.

Figure 5. Ugo Mulas, Thanksgiving dinner at Robert Rauschenberg’s loft, mid-1960s (detail). From New York: The New Art Scene (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967), 28. Reproduced by permission.

In any case, what stands out is that the words “Farm Implements” were not part of the painting’s title as Ashbery first encountered it. He wrote them into the title. The title thus was made to have a double reference—to the painting by Ruysdael, and to the one by Warhol.

Ashbery’s statement that he never saw the painting by Warhol can be questioned in other ways as well. He would have had the opportunity to see this painting both at first hand and in reproduction. Warhol had given Popeye to the artist Robert Rauschenberg in 1962 (perhaps because the collagelike layout, and the combination of comic strip imagery and a loose paint handling, were indebted to Rauschenberg’s own work).17 Rauschenberg hung Popeye in his studio, as can be seen in a photograph of the mid 1960s showing a Thanksgiving gathering there (fig. 5). Ashbery may have seen this photograph, and he may well have seen the painting on a visit to Rauschenberg’s studio. He had been an early supporter of Rauschenberg’s work, and knew him personally.¹⁸

Throughout the later 1950s and 1960s Ashbery was a prolific art critic—writing for such venues as Art International, ARTnews, and the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune—and, as is well known, the art he reviewed often found a place in his poetry.19 For instance, “The Double Dream of Spring,” as previously noted, takes its title from a painting by de Chirico, whose work Ashbery reviewed favorably.²⁰ His pillagings of visual art are never descriptions of the painting or sculpture in question. Instead, they are woven into the themes of the poems in complex, associative ways. At times this complexity involves a concealment of the visual source, as with “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.”

Ashbery had been following the career of Warhol for some years. He had become interested in the artist’s work when he first saw it at a spring 1963 exhibition of pop art at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, where he was then living. In a review of this show, he wrote that he was surprised to find that the work of some pop artists, which he had been attracted to in reproduction, seemed weak when viewed in person, while,

on the other hand, Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe repetitions, which I had not particularly noticed in reproduction, impressed me with their strength, their hardness and their absolute uncontrovertibility. Unlike Rosenquist’s and Wesselmann’s ambiguity, Warhol’s is unambiguous; his work makes a direct and unformulable point.²¹

Ashbery here envisioned a kindred spirit in what he saw as the paradoxes of Warhol’s work—the “unambiguous” ambiguity and the “direct and unformulable point.”²² Contained within these comments is the more general theme of the limits of knowledge.

A few months after the review of the Sonnabend exhibition was published, in September 1963, during a trip to New York, Ashbery met Warhol.²³ Upon returning to Paris, Ashbery wrote an essay about Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series (paintings of car crashes, electric chairs, race riots, and the like) for the catalogue of Warhol’s first one-person exhibition there. In this essay, he again expressed his fascination with how Warhol’s work reflected on the limits of knowledge, especially regarding the nature of newspaper reports and photographs. Ashbery himself had already appropriated and explored the media’s handling of the tragedies of contemporary life in his 1962 book The Tennis Court Oath (in such lines as “And all I can smell here is newsprint” and “to be dying, he gets them into magazines / and some of them mangy and rabid”).24 Discussing Warhol’s use of press photographs in the silkscreen paintings, Ashbery observed that

one cannot really say what is taking place in most of the photographs published by the press, above all when one views them like a rubbing on the surface of a kitchen table oilcloth (which is of course on par with our inability to discern the real nature of an event—what exactly happened—when we read a newspaper report). It is acknowledged that press photographs are imprecise and hardly flattering.²⁵

The inaccessibility of concrete knowledge is also expressed in a lengthy and rather bleak—even though parodic—poem, “The Skaters,”²⁶ composed around the time of the Paris exhibit of the “Death and Disaster” paintings, and first published in late 1964.²⁷ As with “Farm Implements,” it seems as though Warhol’s imagery is embedded, in a concealed form, in the poem. Warhol’s paintings Red Race Riot (1963, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Mustard Race Riot (1963, private collection), which were included in the “Death and Disaster” exhibit, and his use of repetition, are evoked by this passage of “The Skaters”:

and all the clumsy seductions and amateur paintings done,

Clamber to join in the awakening

To take a further role in my determination. These clown-shapes

Filling up the available space for miles, like acres of red and mustard pom-poms

Dusted with a pollen we call “an air of truth.” Massed mounds

Of Hades it is true. I propose a general housecleaning

Of these true and valueless shapes which pester us with their raisons d’être

Whom no one (that is their weakness) can ever get to like.²⁸

Though the tone here may be parodic, a feeling of agitation emerges in these (and many other) lines from “The Skaters.” If the “amateur paintings,” the red and mustard “clown-shapes,” and the “true and valueless shapes” bring to mind Warhol’s Red Race Riot and Mustard Race Riot, they do so in such a way as to imply an ambivalence about Warhol’s work, or at least toward what it might signify about our culture.

The lines preceding the above-quoted passage suggest other works by Warhol, the well-known Campbell’s Soup Can paintings:

But another, more urgent question imposes itself—that of poverty.

How to excuse it to oneself? The wetness and coldness? Dirt and grime?

Uncomfortable, unsuitable lodgings, with a depressing view?

The peeled geranium flowering in a rusted tomato can,

Framed in a sickly ray of sunlight, a tragic chromo? …

But to return to our tomato can—those spared by the goats

Can be made into a practical telephone, the two halves being connected by a length of wire.

You can talk to your friend in the next room, or around corners.

An American inventor made a fortune with just such a contraption.29

While the framed, rusted tomato can seems to allude to the Campbell’s Soup Can pictures, the “American Inventor” may well refer to Warhol.³⁰ And again, bleakness figures in the sociological diagnosis, although this time in the form of an unanswered question: “a tragic chromo?”³¹ Who can judge? On what kind of knowledge are such judgments based?

The passage about the tomato can is especially resonant in connection with the “Farm Implements” poem. It appears as part of a description of the apartment of a poverty-ridden individual. These “unsuitable lodgings” have a counterpart in Popeye’s “shoebox of an apartment.” In each instance, Ashbery has associated pop art with the poverty—both material and spiritual—of modern urban life. This association implies a judgment, but at the same time judgment is withheld. The value of things is known, and yet not knowable.

Another association found in “Farm Implements” as well as in “The Skaters” is between pop art and seventeenth-century Dutch painting. We have seen that the title “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” links up a Warhol painting with one by Ruysdael. Skaters are a common subject of Dutch painting. It is interesting that Hendrick Avercamp’s skaters are discussed by Roland Barthes in an essay appearing in the same issue of Art and Literature as the poem “The Skaters”³²—Ashbery was a co-editor of this journal. Interesting, too, is the fact that Barthes discusses these depictions of skaters as examples of how the lower classes were represented in the seventeenth century; these same social strata are evoked by the “unsuitable lodgings” with the framed tomato can in “The Skaters,” which contain, on the wall, a calendar of a Dutch girl.³³

The connections between pop art and Dutch art, then, is a repeated theme in Ashbery’s work. So, what to do with Ashbery’s claim that he never saw Warhol’s painting Popeye? One possibility is to turn to an explanation by Margaret Atwood of the poetry-writing process, in which Ashbery has acknowledged he finds personal meaning: “I believe most poets will go to any lengths to conceal their own reluctant scanty insight both from others and from themselves.”34 With Ashbery, this act of concealment, as it operates in his poetry, is his way of getting the reader to feel with him the uncertainties of his judgments about art, poetry, people, both on the personal level and epistemologically.

Uncertainty is one of the things that happens when a reader thinks he or she has actually pieced together a puzzle in an Ashbery poem. Regarding the question of whether the purported discovery—a source for the poem “Farm Implements” in Warhol’s painting of Popeye—takes away from or adds to the power of the writing, my answer is that it adds to it. It opens up one of the numerous, intersecting worlds of reference that Ashbery has drawn upon in his work. It gives us a sense of his working process. And all this, in turn, expands our sense of the poetry, allowing it to spill out into the world. However, in the end the discovery may remain unsure. This discovery is, nonetheless, a kind of knowledge, perhaps the most common kind.³⁵

NOTES

1 It has been claimed that these struggles make Ashbery’s work superior to poems by contemporaries that lack uncertainty and have a clear subject; see Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 84.

2 John Ashbery, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” Paris Review 11 (Summer–Fall 1967): 84–85.

3 John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring (1970; New York: Ecco Press, 1976), 95. Another double embedded in the title concerns the authorship of de Chirico’s painting, which de Chirico claimed was a forgery according to a 1946 account in Time; then, in 1949 he pronounced that it was painted by him, and that he had been misquoted by the Time reporter; see James Thrall Soby, Giorgio de Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art, n.d.), 106. A discussion of this story in connection to Ashbery’s work is found in Fred Moramarco, “John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara: The Painterly Poets,” Journal of Modern Literature 5 (September 1976): 457. On Ashbery’s attraction to de Chirico’s painting as a confrontation with epistemological questions, see W. S. Piero, “John Ashbery: The Romantic as Problem Solver,” American Poetry Review 1 (August–September 1973): 39; and on his use of titles of works of art as a way of posing questions about authenticity and imposture, see Lee Edelman, “The Pose of Imposture: Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’” Twentieth Century Literature 32 (Spring 1986): 95–97.

4 See David K. Kermani, John Ashbery: A Comprehensive Bibliography, Including His Art Criticism, and with Selected Notes from Unpublished Materials, foreword by Ashbery (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), 85; quoted by Kermani from his unpublished interview with Ashbery, 2 June 1974, Oral History Collection, Columbia University. The page of El diario quoted by Ashbery has been reproduced by Helen Vendler, “Ashbery and Popeye,” in The Marks in the Fields: Essays on the Uses of Manuscripts, ed. Rodney G. Dennis with Elizabeth Falsey (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Library, 1992), 165.

5 Interview by Kermani, 2 June 1974 (as in note above), 86.

6 John Ashbery, Some Trees (1956; New York: Ecco Press, 1978), 29; originally published in Partisan Review 18 (July–August 1951): 420–21.

7 Ashbery, Some Trees, 27. On Ashbery’s adaption of this title from Marvell’s “The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers,” see Kermani, Ashbery, 72.

8 “Poets on Painting,” ARTnews 57 (September 1958): 24, 63.

9 Gerard Malanga, interview by the author, New York, 15 August 1989, tape recording.

10 In Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J. and A. C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125.

11 It would be simplistic to conclude, as one scholar recently did, that the use of comic strip figures such as Popeye on the part of pop artists served only to perpetuate stereotypes of male power; whether this occurs depends upon who is looking at the painting (or reading the poem). The argument that paintings such as Warhol’s Popeye and Dick Tracy (1960) served to reinforce the political status quo is found in Christin J. Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 96–98. Mamiya views Dick Tracy’s “firmly set jaw,” as it appears in Warhol’s painting, as a sign of “strength and moral fiber,” while, on the other hand, the art critic David Bourdon has understood this jaw as a type that “Warhol typically found so attractive in men,” in Warhol (New York: Abrams, 1989), 72. And in an alarmist study of 1954, Seduction of the Innocent, the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham warned that some comic strips were homoerotic; see William W. Savage, Jr., Comic Books and America, 1945–1954 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 97. For a recent assessment of the homosexual content of Popeye and Dick Tracy, see Michael Moon, “Screen Memories; or, Pop Comes from the Outside: Warhol and Queer Childhood,” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 78–100.

12 Telephone conversation with the author, 25 July 1989.

13 On Ashbery’s practice of using titles as springboards for poems, see Janet Bloom and Robert Losada, “Craft Interview with John Ashbery,” in The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from “The New York Quarterly,” ed. William Packard (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 111–12; and David Lehman, “The Shield of a Greeting: The Function of Irony in John Ashbery’s Poetry,” in Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, ed. Lehman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 111.

14 “Sales in London,” ARTnews 65 (March 1966): 28.

15 Catalogue of Pictures by Old Masters: The Properties of … (London: Christie, Manson, and Wood, Ltd., 1966), 17, no. 63 (auction of 4 March 1966).

16 Ashbery, “Instruction Manual,” Some Trees, 14–18.

17 Rauschenberg sold the painting in 1985; see Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 631. On the relationship between Warhol’s comic strip paintings of 1960–61 and Rauschenberg’s work, see Bradford R. Collins, “The Metaphysical Nosejob: The Remaking of Warhola, 1960–1968,” Arts 62 (February 1988): 48 and 54, n. 17.

18 Reviews by Ashbery of Rauschenberg’s work include: ARTnews 57 (March 1958): 40, 56–57; “Paris Notes,” Art International 7 (25 February 1963): 72–76; and New York Herald Tribune, Paris Edition, 26 July 1961, 4; 19 September 1962, 5; 13 February 1963, 5; and 23 June 1964, 5. Connections between Rauschenberg’s work and Ashbery’s poetry have been discussed in Moramarco, “Ashbery and O’Hara,” 455–56; Charles Altieri, “John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts,” Critical Inquiry 14 (Summer 1988): 820–25; and John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 55.

19 See David Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 21; and David Bergman’s introduction to John Ashbery, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987 (New York: Knopf, 1989), xi–xii. The existing studies of the relationships between Ashbery’s poetry and work by his contemporaries in the visual arts tend to make general, conceptual comparisons, and to focus on either abstract expressionism or the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. See Moramarco, “Ashbery and O’Hara,” 448–62; Leslie Wolf, “The Brushstroke’s Integrity: The Poetry of John Ashbery and the Art of Painting,” in Beyond Amazement, 224–54; and Altieri, “Ashbery and Postmodernism,” 805–30.

20 See, for example, John Ashbery, “The Heritage of Dada and Surrealism,” New Republic, 1 June 1968; and “A De Chirico Retrospective,” Newsweek, 12 April 1982; both are reprinted in Reported Sightings, 5–8 and 401–4 respectively.

21 John Ashbery, “Paris Notes,” Art International 7 (25 June 1963), 76. Among the sources of Ashbery’s earlier familiarity with Warhol’s work through reproductions is the exhibition catalogue New Realists (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1962), to which Ashbery had contributed an essay.

22 The possibility that Ashbery’s art criticism is at least as much about his poetry as about the art being discussed is noted by Bergman, in Reported Sightings, xxii.

23 Ashbery met Warhol through the young poet Gerard Malanga, who at the time was Warhol’s silk-screening assistant; Ashbery, telephone conversation with the author, 25 July 1989.

24 John Ashbery, from “The New Realism” and “Europe,” The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 60 and 80 respectively. The similarity of pop paintings to the “tone” and the “look” of poems in The Tennis Court Oath was noted by Shapiro, Ashbery, 55.

25 Author’s translation; […] Warhol (Paris: Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, 1964), n.p. The essay is dated 16 November 1963. For a discussion of the exhibition and its reception, see Michel Bourel, “Andy Warhol à Paris dans les années 60,” Artstudio 8 (Spring 1988): 96–97.

26 The importance of parody in “The Skaters” is discussed by Shapiro, Ashbery, 93–95, 105, and 125.

27 Art and Literature 3 (Autumn–Winter 1964): 11–47; reprinted in Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), 34–63.

28 Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains, 49.

29 Ibid., 48–49.

30 The rusted tomato can is compared to pop imagery, and Ashbery to Warhol, as a “subtle critic of the commercial world” by Shapiro, Ashbery, 115.

31 Rivers and Mountains, 36. Connected to these allusions to Warhol is a passage occurring elsewhere in “The Skaters,” among a list of bad news—“The bundle of Gerard’s letters”—a reference to Warhol’s painting assistant. Ashbery has acknowledged that the Gerard mentioned here is Gerard Malanga; telephone conversation with the author, 25 July 1989.

32 Roland Barthes, “The World Become Thing,” Art and Literature 3 (Autumn–Winter 1964): 153–54. On the connection of the theme of skaters to music, see Kermani, Ashbery, 81, and Shoptaw, On the Outside, 92.

33 Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains, 48.

34 Margaret Atwood, quoted in Shapiro, Ashbery, 23. On Ashbery’s concealment of his most important influences as it relates to Harold Bloom’s theories about the “anxiety of influence,” see Ward, Statutes of Liberty, 120.

35 I want to thank Allen Grossman for having introduced me to Ashbery’s poem in his poetry class at Brandeis University in the mid 1970s.

PUBLICATION: Knowledge (1998), 10:165–78.

KEYWORDS: New York School; visual art; knowledge; readings.

LINKS: Bruce Campbell, “But What Is an Adequate Vice to Limit the Liquid of This Voice” (PJ 9); Lyn Hejinian, “La Faustienne” (PJ 10); Susan Howe, “My Emily Dickinson, part 1” (Guide; PJ 4); Bob Perelman, “Three Case Histories: Ross’s Failure of Modernism” (PJ 7); Herman Rapaport, “Poetic Rests: Ashbery, Coolidge, Scalapino” (PJ 10); Joan Retallack, “Blue Notes on the Know Ledge” (PJ 10); Andrew Ross, “The Death of Lady Day” (Guide; PJ 8); Barrett Watten, “The Literature of Surface” (PJ 7).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 1730 to 1850 (Boston: Godine, 1991); Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); introduction, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Da Capo, 2004).