Thursday, December 28, 2017

John Godfrey on arbitrariness and Ashbery


You know, when you use these arbitrary things it's amazing how what you come up with may have the consistency of something that doesn't have that much arbitrariness and that's what the beauty of the arbitrary was. John Ashbery was very effective 35 years ago in his use of the arbitrary. He could make something just come out of infinity into this place that seemed to have had some kind of finiteness about it, something concrete about it. He just pulled in this thing that didn't belong there and made it fit. I mean your mind would make it fit and it would bounce you into this place that just had nothing to do with our conventions of thinking, of logic.” 'An Interview with John Godfrey,' by Lisa Jarnot, Poetry Project Newsletter April/May 1997, #165, reprinted in What Is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from thePoetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009), ed, Anselm Berrigan, Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2017 , p. 99.

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