John Ashbery and John Yau, Special Lecture 1988

John Ashbery and John Yau give a lecture at Skowhegan talking about their respective poetry practices. Ashbery and Yau explore how writing poetry operates as a spontaneous act: one can produce a beautiful and moving poem even when one is deliberately trying not to. For Ashbery and Yau, the deep emotion out of which poetry is supposed to spring very often doesn’t do the job that it is supposed to be doing. For them, words are physical things that are connected to the writer, and language is a system that one can use to point at entities beyond or outside of your reality. Ashbery and Yau believe that a poem is an organization of words that can be used to evoke or point at something that one can’t necessarily see or know in a real sense. For Ashbery and Yau, language is a tool that can devour itself in front of a person. Ultimately, they say, if artists can paint something they can’t see, they can also write something they can’t see. Ashbery and Yau then discuss art writing, saying that writing about art can help turn it around. They see this process as similar to going to the cinema, where one can see Western films or comedies or films beyond one’s comprehension, and not understand as a great pleasure.