John Ashbery

In sooth, I come here sadly, 

not trembling, not against my will, 
hoping you will set the record straight. 
You can, you know, in a minute 
if the wind is right and no felon intervenes. 

And we sit and you tell me how crazy I am. 
I shall petition the other board members 
but am afraid nothing will ever come right. 
It has been going on too long for this to happen, 
yet it was right to go, to go on as it did, 
even if there was a strangeness in the rightness 
that no one can see now. They see the night 
in its undress, plaits unplaited, brushed, 
the sound of the surf churning on distant rocks, 
can think only about how heavenly it would have been 
if it had all happened later of differently. 

Now, according to some sources, 
new golfing trends are a commodity, 
along with silence, and sweetness. 
Doucement, doucement . . . 

And when the sweetness is adjusted, 
why, we’ll know more than some do now. 
That is all I can offer you,  
my lost, my beloved one.

Joe Brainard

Little-Known Facts about People

          Did you know that Kenneth Koch's wife Janice used to be

an airplane pilot? Once she had to make an emergency landing

on a highway.

          When Kenward Elmslie was a kid he wanted to be a tap

dancer. Did you know that Kenward's grandfather was Joseph

Pulitzer?

         Kenward once told me that Jane Russell is a dyke.

         Andy Warhol wanted to be a tap dancer when he was a

kid too.

         D. D. Ryan wanted to be a ballerina.           

         Did you know that Pat Padgett was Ted Berrigan's girlfriend

for years before she married Ron?

         Ron Padgett and I were in the same 1st grade class together

in school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

         Ron's father, Wayne, was a notorious bootlegger in Tulsa

until Oklahoma went wet.

          A few years ago Ron's father got divorced and married a

beautiful Las Vegas showgirl younger than Ron's wife Pat.

          Did you know that Bill Berkson was once bat boy for the

Yankees?

          Ted Berrigan married his wife Sandy after having only

known her for five days.

          Did you know that the first poems John Ashbery ever had

published were published in Poetry magazine under the name of

Joel Symington?

          Did you know that Bill Berkson was on the "1oo Best

Dressed Men" list of 1967?

          Rudy Burckhardt once dated Miss Vermont of 1938.

          Donald Droll is in some way related to Daniel Boone.

          Frank O'Hara once told me that what he really wanted to

be was a concert pianist.

          Did you know that Harry Mathews started out to be a com-

poser? He studied at the Juilliard School of Music.

          Edwin Denby was born in China.

          Anne Waldman's father wrote a book called Rapid Reading 

Made Simple.

          Tom Veitch's father writes Christmas card verse.

           When I was a kid I wanted to be a fashion designer, a

minister, and an artist.

            Peter Schjeldahl's father is very famous in the plastic area.

He discovered the new lightweight plastic used in Bufferin bottles.

Soon he hopes to open a contraceptive factory in Red China.

           Did you know that Bill Berkson was once on I Remember

Mama?

           D. D. Ryan went to see The Boys in the Band with Jackie

Kennedy just a week before she married Onassis.

          John Ashbery was a quiz kid.

         Kenneth Koch once won the Glasscock Award.

         Did you know that Ron Padgett has blebs on his lung

which may explode at any moment? They have exploded twice

already.

         Tina Louise once sang "I'm in the Mood for Love" to Bill

Berkson over London broils at P. J. Clarke's.

         Did you know that Ted Berrigan did his thesis at Tulsa

University on George Bernard Shaw?

         Did you know that the Katz Tumor is named after Ada

Katz who discovered it?

         Edwin Denby once performed in Berlin's "Wintergarten"

billed as "Der Amerikanische Grotesktaenzer Dumby."

         Yvonne Burckhardt was the backstroke swimming cham-

pion of Connecticut for one week.

         When I lived in Boston I used to panhandle on the street

where all of the art galleries were, and I got my cigarette butts

from the urns in front of the Museum of Fine Arts.

         Did you know that Ted Berrigan's first book of poems, A 

Lily for My Love, was published by the Lenox Bar in Providence,

Rd. Island?

         Greta Garbo once called Bill Berkson her ice cream man.

         I once went to a "come as your favorite person" party as

Marilyn Monroe.

         Did you know that John Ashbery once worked in a cherry

canning factory?

 

Thomas Devaney

    Thomas Devaney and Bill Berkson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 2012.

  

Cold Fingers Light the Way

I read Bill’s essay on Ray, it was 100% Bill / 100% Ray.
Walked in the rain and got very soaked. 
              The old photocopy had surfaced from a personal slush pile 
in the dark lake of the TV room where I had been hiding. 
If anyone asked, I would have said I had been following the news. 
But it was more than that. I was consumed. I put my stamp on that. 

For much of Bill’s life he had been in the New York Correspondence School:
envelopes, photocopied GUM BALLS For Sale, and at least one secret love. 

I will incorporate the letters that seem appropriate in this letter which will be 
waiting for you when you return—

To the end he had a full head of white hair, stood 6’3” in his stocking feet.
And sharp words for Chelsea and all else that had gone “berserk.”

“Scratches show the surface as the surface,” more notes scribbled down. Elsewhere looking at the views as if I were seeing the feeling I longed to see and to feel.
A turn and a half-dozen more—Bill’s limpid prompt to his correspondent 
to find the courage to their own tenderness.

Envelope as a vehicle of its own. Another printed in Sharpie to WILIAM S. WILSON from RAY JOHNSON. Direct about their indirections and home.

The letters of each name, a plot as much as they are instruction for those who would bury the dead. Speaking in sweeping monologues to all of the living-room shades. King Lear of the Chesapeake, standing and gesturing in my mind, and signing-off in an email: “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats. If it be man’s work, I’ll do ’t.”