The next day I had my first conference with Allen; we were supposed to go over some of my poems. I spent a long time in front of the mirror before going over to Allen's because I noticed that the better looking you were, the more Allen liked your poems. For example, there was a guy named Bobby Meyers. I thought his poems stunk. Allen raved about what a genius Bobby was. At parties, Allen would introduce him as the next Ezra Pound. It always burned me up. Bobby was cute, with a lot of dark, curly hair and a cherubic face. He looked like one of the Romantic poets, even if he couldn't write, but for Allen, that was enough. Allen put my work aside and took out Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery. He turned to a longish poem called "The Skaters.""Now tell me," Allen asked, almost pleading at his desk. "What does this mean? I can't understand it. I want to know what it means, what is happening in this poem. Why does he have to be so mysterious about everything? Is it too much Manhattan psychiatry?"
I dodged Allen's bullet. I said a lot of people keep asking what Ashbery's poems are about, and he probably wants to know the same thing. "I think it's about skating, about falling through the ice of our own conscious mind." I was getting good at appropriating little phrases I had picked up from my teachers' interest in Buddhism. It seemed like a salve that covered all sorts of ailments. I also think that it may have really been what the poem was about. I wasn't sure.
"I hate feeling stupid, I hate not getting the idea," Allen said. Anne later said she thought Allen really wanted to be the smartest man in America. I asked her about Allen's poem "Ego Confession." She said that they were sitting next to each other somewhere in San Francisco when Allen started to write it, but that he was embarrassed or for some reason didn't want her to see him writing his poem, so he cupped his hand around the piece of paper like a schoolboy guarding answers on a test.
I returned to Ashbery's poem. "'The apothecary biscuits dwindled.' I like lines like that," I told Allen. "I can't even explain why. It's just pleasing to the ear."
"But shouldn't it be about something?" Allen asked, really upset that he couldn't get a handle on Ashbery's poem, which was like a greased pole he kept trying to climb, only to come sliding back down again. I wondered what was wrong with not knowing something. I was certainly getting used to it here.
― alimosina, Sunday, 17 July 2016 21:55 (seven years ago) link