“John Ashbery’s Reading Voice” by Marit MacArthur (poetry ’13)
An excerpt from an essay by Marit MacArthur (poetry ’13), published by The Paris Review.
John Ashbery’s Reading Voice
The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y has a seventy-year archive of recordings—it began hosting readings in 1939 and recording them in 1949—and it offers a unique opportunity to study poets’ voices and reading styles. Between 1952 and 2014, John Ashbery made seventeen appearances on the stage of the Poetry Center. He read with other poets—Barbara Guest, Mark Ford, Jack Gilbert, John Hollander, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. He read with painters—Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. And he joined in readings honoring other poets—tributes to Frank O’Hara (1970), Elizabeth Bishop (1979) and Marianne Moore (1987). Ashbery, who made regular Poetry Center appearances from the ages of twenty-four to eighty-seven, is on a short list of poets whose Y readings spanned so many decades (others include W. S. Merwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and Galway Kinnell).
As a scholar and poet who uses software to analyze performance style in poetry recordings, I was thrilled when Bernard Schwartz, the Poetry Center’s director, invited me to study the archive. The Ashbery readings seemed, to me, like a perfect corpus to begin with.
But even those who loved attending Ashbery’s poetry readings (I am one of them) might feel that he’s the last poet in the world whose performance style is worth studying. He typically read in a restrained, unassuming voice, and the unofficial consensus is that the performative energy of his poetry plays out not in the vocal delivery, but in the slippery syntax, the sly comedy of skewed idioms, the rich mixture of vocabularies and startling tropes, the momentum of swerving thought. His poems can elude the audience’s understanding in a live reading, and they elude many readers on the page as well.
[…continue reading at The Paris Review.]
