Poet as Art Critic, The

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2005 by Yau, John

The coordinates of this position might be ill defined, its fragility or strength unassessed, its motivations unconscious; still the position stands, and stands for and against.1-Yves-Alain Bois

THE PUBLICATION OF JOHN ASHBERY'S Selected Prose, edited by Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), offers us the opportunity to begin considering what he has, in his position as an art critic, stood for and against. And, once we do so, it may enable us to begin teasing out the relationship between his art criticism and his poetry, how they might have influenced each other. It also allows consideration of the position taken by Frank O'Hara (1926-66), Ashbery's contemporary and close friend, in his art writing. Ashbery and O'Hara are the only two poets of the original five poets associated with the New York School to have made a living from working in the art world. Both James Schuyler and Barbara Guest wrote reviews and essays, but neither of them ever supported themselves as art critics. The fifth poet, Kenneth Koch, taught at Columbia and was never an art critic.

Selected Prose brings together what the author calls "miscellaneous prose pieces written over the last half century." It augments Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 2957-2987, edited by David Bergman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), which includes over one hundred articles and reviews, most of which Ashbery wrote during the years he worked for ARTnews, Art in America, Newsweek, and New York. The sixty-nine pieces in Selected Prose include reviews of poetry and fiction; art criticism; essays on artists who wrote (and vice versa); five essays of varying length on Raymond Roussel (the most on one figure); prefaces and introductions to books; introductions to poetry readings; public lectures; reminiscences; essays on film, music, photography, and architecture; an obituary. They appeared in Poetry, Portfolio and ARTnews Annual, Book Week, New York Times Book Review, ARTnews, PN Review, Edge, Poetry Project Newsletter, and Modern Painters.

While Selected Prose and Reported Sightings add up to more seven hundred pages, the two books represent just a fraction of Ashbery's total activities as an art critic and literary essayist. Based on the six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard University in 1989-90, Other Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) is around one hundred and fifty pages long, and includes essays on John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert, writers who, at best, barely have a toe-hold in the canon. According to his bibliographer, David Kermani, Ashbery published over four hundred and fifty articles, reviews, and essays about art between 1957 and 1975. This does not include his contributions to art catalogues, book reviews and other kinds of writing and writing work he did during this period, his stints as the critic for New York (1978-80) and Newsweek (1980-85), or catalogue essays and introductions he has written since 1975. As Ashbery readily admits: "Some were written for money to help subsidize my poetry habit." But it is also true that many were written because he was commissioned to write about a subject he "was interested in." It should go without saying that this position is the one every art critic tries to occupy and maintain. Otherwise, writing becomes sheer drudgery.

O'Hara's criticism and related writing is collected in three books totaling around three hundred and seventy-five pages: Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), Standing Still & Walking in New York, edited by Donald Alien (Bolinas, CA: Gray Fox Press, 1975), and What's With Modern Art, with an afterword by Bill Berkson (Austin, TX: Skanky Possum Press, 1999). After graduating from Harvard, where he, Ashbery and Kenneth Koch met, and receiving an M.A. from the University of Michigan, O'Hara moved to New York and worked in the art world from 1952 to 1966. A charismatic figure, he soon became a highly visible, active force in the burgeoning art scene, a dervish toward which different groups, factions, and individuals gravitated. As Philip Guston said, after O'Hara died, "he was our Apollinaire."

Ashbery, who has stated that he "backed into a career as an art critic," began writing art reviews in 1957, though not on a regular basis. In 1960, while living in Paris, he became the art critic for the New York Herald Tribune (international edition) and continued in this position until 1965, when he returned to New York and became an executive editor at ARTnews, a position he held until 1972. In 1974, after being unemployed for more than a year, he began teaching creative writing at Brooklyn College (1974-1990). While teaching at Brooklyn College, he was the art critic for New York (1978-80) and Newsweek (1980-85), which means that after he received three major literary awardsNational Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Critics Circle Award-for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975), he still found it necessary to work at two full-time jobs.