What is Ashberyland?

[FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS] 

This site, for students enrolled in Mr. Janosco’s English courses at Darien High School, occasionally will serve as a repository for their thoughts on the “current American scene” and their readings of some celebrated works of contemporary American poetry.

Together, we hope that you, gentle Gen-Z soul, attender of Tip Top High School, USA, when reading these humble poetry articles, will land upon at least one poem that speaks to you in a powerful way, one that you will see as meaningful, that promises to stick with you beyond your small-group discussion, the end-of-class bell, your homework assignment.

Furthermore, it is our sincere hope that great contemporary American poetry might, in some small way, serve as a means for overcoming the regionalism that has given shape to the present contours of our United States of America.

So whether you reside in Darien, Connecticut, or Chanute, Kansas, or Fort Fairfield, Maine, or Garden City, Texas, or San Narcisco, California, there is, we believe, a fantastic poem somewhere out there — one that will allow you to connect to different types of students from around the country — and that poem has stopped, and it is waiting for you here, on this site.

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[FOR TEACHERS OF POETRY]

Though students typically feel otherwise, English teachers typically look forward to building a lesson upon a poem. And yet, many teachers also feel confined to the old standards—to the Frosts and the Dickinsons, to the Plaths and the Whitmans—blocked by curricular requirements or personal taste or general inertia. It’s much easier to extol the virtues of long departed saints, even when we know there are worthy verses being composed every day by vital living practitioners of the craft.

So if you, fellow English teacher, ever find yourself looking for new poems to put before your students — poems produced within the lifetimes of your students! — you might take an interest in the work of the students on this site, the poems that attracted their interest, and the results of a special semester-long student project.

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[FOR POETS]

Whether you are an MFA-wielding upstart or a much-decorated, anthologized institution, you may wonder if you have anything to gain from the thoughts and responses of high school students. Certainly as you are busy tranquilly recollecting your spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, you are not envisioning your reading audience as a group of slouching, texting, spaced-out Gen-Z bros in a classroom at 7:40am EST. And this is fine and this is good!

But perhaps a few of you will take the time to ponder what these young folks have to say about your work. While there is neither a Stephanie Burt nor a Marjorie Perloff in the bunch, these students bring an unexpected reservoir of meaningful experience to the enterprise of reading poetry. And though most of them need to make sizable adjustments and adaptations to the wordplay, self-reflexivity, dislocations, allusiveness, complexities, and experimentations that mark so much of contemporary poetry, they have nonetheless brought to the verses irresistible zest, youthful swagger, sugar-high immediacy, shocking insights, and, I promise you, every so often, actual standing ovations.

Few of these students will ever claim to love reading poetry. But all of them come away from the class with a favorite poem. I hope it’s one of yours.

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[JOHN ASHBERY, 1927 – 2017]

………………………… The surprises history has
For us are nothing compared to the shock we get
From each other, though time still wears
The colors of meanness and melancholy, and the general life
Is still many sizes too big, yet
Has style, woven of things that never happened
With those that did, so that a mood survives
Where life and death never could. Make it sweet again!

No, we are not aiming to make America “sweet again,” in the words of Mr. Ashbery. (The epigraph is from the beautifully titled “But What is the Reader to Make of This?“) But we acknowledge that “general life,” though not always a perfect fit, is sufficiently stylish and worthy of our contemplation. It’s a subject that, more than ever, we need to read and interpret. But before we do, we first need to find it.

Where to look? Each school year, our plan is to survey the land of contemporary American poetry, and we trace on our maps the various paths set forth by our nation’s current trailblazers. To be successful, we bring along well-calibrated instruments, and we always remember to read our findings creatively, suspending that eternal human quest for literalism in favor of abstraction, suggestion, ambiguity, and mystery. And with this as our project, it seems altogether fitting that we name the “land” we are exploring after Mr. Ashbery, the patron saint of anti-literal abstraction.

Won’t you join us? This land is your land, this land is our land.