“75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. 

John Ashbery at 92Y in 1970 – Frank O’Hara Tribute reading (photo by Jack Prelutsky)

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.

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Still from trailer for Casablanca, 1942. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature. The book is full of holes. Shameless in repeating the same adjective from one line to the next, incontinent in the accumulation of these same adjectives, capable of opening a sententious digression without managing to close it because the syntax cannot hold up, and panting along in this way for twenty lines, it is mechanical and clumsy in its portrayal of feelings: the characters either quiver, or turn pale, or they wipe away large drops of sweat that run down their brow, they gabble with a voice that no longer has anything human about it, they rise convulsively from a chair and fall back into it, while the author always takes care, obsessively, to repeat that the chair onto which they collapsed again was the same one on which they were sitting a second before.

We are well aware why Dumas did this. Not because he could not write. The Three Musketeers is slimmer, faster paced, perhaps to the detriment of psychological development, but rattles along wonderfully. Dumas wrote that way for financial reasons; he was paid a certain amount per line and had to spin things out. Not to mention the need—common to all serialized novels, to help inattentive readers catch up on the previous episode—to obsessively repeat things that were already known, so a character may recount an event on page 100, but on page 105 he meets another character and tells him exactly the same story—and in the first three chapters you should see how often Edmond Dantès tells everyone who will listen that he means to marry and that he is happy: fourteen years in the Château d’If are still not enough for a sniveling wimp like him. Read More

Charles M. Schulz. Photo: Roger Higgins for the New York World-Telegram and Sun. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Charles Schulz exposed me as a fraud. Nearly two decades ago, upon hearing of Mr. Schulz’s impending retirement, I drew a clumsy comic strip tribute to Peanuts, fancying myself a halfway-decent mimic. I attempted to copy the strong, fluid lines of his mid-’50s work, which I long admired (idolized), but I quickly realized that I was going to fall far short. I could only scratch the surface of his inimitable drawings—as natural as handwriting, but even harder to forge—much less the emotional content he could pack into every molecule of ink. And anyway, the veneer is never the thing itself. You know how sometimes you might hear what sounds like a simple melodic line in, say, Mozart, and then you see the actual sheet music, which reveals an unfathomably complex, rich structure, an eternity condensed into tiny, elusive black marks flowing through, over, under, and beyond the staves, swimming like furtive cells viewed under a microscope, seemingly unfixed and unfathomable yet cohering into a unified and inextricable whole, all of this therefore outing you as an arrogant, deluded, oblivious fool? That was me.

While I hadn’t been drawing comics for very long at that point, I should have known better. A teacher in high school once explained that drawing was simply observation; thirty-five years later, that still seems like a pretty thorough definition. For starters, I wasn’t observing keenly or deeply enough. Even though in my pastiche/homage I was “drawing a drawing,” I hadn’t fully understood what I was looking at, because cartooning exists in a kind of liminal space somewhere between writing and drawing. Sure, one could imitate the telltale twirl of a brush winding its way through a stroke, or calculate the pressure applied to a nib traveling along a particular vector, but there was also something ineffable about comics, something more than the sum of its parts. Read More

Astonishing but true: in the fall of 2016, the United States was struck by an outbreak of clown sightings. The first sighting was reported in Wisconsin that August, and over the following months sightings were reported in every state in the nation, along with D.C. and Puerto Rico. Some of the clowns were engaged in seemingly innocuous behavior—walking around, or waving—while others stared creepily at passersby. Some attempted to lure passersby into nearby woods or unmarked vans. Others roamed around neighborhoods banging on windows and knocking on doors. Schools went on lockdown as clowns threatened to kidnap students and commit mass shootings. In a suburb of Los Angeles, a clown armed with a knife approached a man on a porch before being frightened off by a gunshot. In Florida, a pair of clowns with an axe and a bat chased after pedestrians. In New Jersey, a child was chased down an alley by a clown with a sword. On a trail in Colorado, a clown hit a man over the head with a bottle of whiskey. At the time, I was living in a city in Michigan. I was very much keeping informed about the situation. Hiking to the library once a week with a backpack full of books, I would occasionally glance behind me, keeping a lookout for people in whiteface and red wigs. In Michigan alone, a clown had terrorized a group of schoolchildren at a bus stop, a clown had been seen stalking a college campus, a clown had been seen lurking behind an ice cream shop, a clown had been seen lurking in an empty car wash, a clown had been spotted hiding behind a tree, a clown had been spotted walking alone at night down a rural highway, clowns had been spotted prowling near a supermarket with a hammer, a clown with a knife had attacked a child in a yard before disappearing, and clowns had chased a pair of teenagers down a street late at night in a flat-out sprint.

That November the United States held a presidential election. And abruptly, that November, the clown sightings ended. As if the clowns had only ever come for a single purpose: to herald the rise of a clown president.

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Novelist Lucy Ellmann’s perennial and revolutionary subtext is that women should enjoy pleasure.

Lucy Ellmann’s great theme is the grim impossibility of proportion: emotional, moral, cosmic. Her 1998 novel Man or Mango? begins with a disbelieving lament that the world kept turning after the Holocaust, instead of spinning faster to “fling us from the trees … hurl us into outer space.” And yet, who among us is capable of measuring personal preoccupations against the barometer of grand-scale tragedy? Ellmann’s latest novel, the Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport, is a sublime literary enactment of how guilt, grief, rage, regret, compassion, and every other emotion swirls and ebbs in unbalanced defiance of rational logic. Remembering a beloved parent’s drawn-out death clenches the heart of the unnamed narrator, but so does the plight of a two-year-old rhino rescued from the El Niño monsoons: “she must have been so frightened, poor little rhino, first the floods and then being manhandled.”

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The thing about being a woman is you always have to pretend to be interested in characters in books and movies to whom you don’t quite relate. I don’t relate 100 percent to men in suits, or men with guns, or men pining after women, or anguished male artists in paint-splattered pants, or men sailing ships, or men making money. I relate, at best, 74 percent to these men. And then I do the work, make the mental leap, bring myself the extra 26 percent so I can really enter the story.

What I can potentially relate to 100 percent is women. Women in flowing bow ties, women cleaning floors, women chopping wood, women knitting, women leading countries, women wrestling wild animals, women raising kids, women making eyes at men, women making eyes at women, women doing nothing at all. Some of the books and movies I come across are about women, but not enough. It’s fun to read books about people who are different from you, but not if your own story is so excluded that you feel erased.

The women in Ogden Whitney’s comics live to find love. If they are distinguished, or distinguishable from one another, it is only in order to offer a different spin on the tried and true form of the romance story. They are vivid characters, but their vividness exists solely to attract the attention of men. Although there are plenty of talented and interesting women in the pages of Whitney’s Return to Romance, clichés still abound: if they know how to cook, that’s good. If they don’t know how to dress, that’s bad. The edgy beatnik character in “Beat Romance” turns out not to be a beatnik after all: she’s a polite, healthy coed, top of her college class—not a threat to the status quo, and therefore deserving of romance. Read More