An 80-Year-Old Poet for the MTV Generation

By MELENA RYZIK

MtvU, the subsidiary of MTV Networks that is broadcast only on college campuses, will announce today that it has selected its first poet laureate. No, he doesn’t rap. And it’s not Bob Dylan, or even Justin Timberlake.

It is John Ashbery, the prolific 80-year-old poet and frequent award winner known for his dense, postmodern style and playful language. One of the most celebrated living poets, Mr. Ashbery has won MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

Excerpts of his poems will appear in 18 short promotional spots — like commercials for verse — on the channel and its Web site (mtvu.com, which will also feature the full text of the poems). In another first, mtvU will help sponsor a poetry contest for college students. The winner, chosen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of the National Poetry Series.

“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU, which broadcasts at 750 campuses nationwide.

The idea of the laureate program was not to create more English majors, but simply to whet an appetite, said Mr. Friedman, a poetry aficionado since he majored in literature, philosophy and history at Wesleyan. Mr. Ashbery, he added, was the No. 1 choice to inaugurate the position. “He resonates with college students that we’ve talked with,” he said.

And Mr. Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, was immediately receptive. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry,” he said.

The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From “Retro” (2005): “It’s really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill/and you’ve gotten over someone/salty and mercurial, the only person you’ve ever loved.” From “Soonest Mended” (2000): “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued.”

The excerpts were chosen by David Kermani, Mr. Ashbery’s business manager, and two interns and an employee, all in their early 20s, in his office.

“We were just trying to pick lines that were catchy and sort of meaningful in some way, something that would appeal to what we thought younger people would be interested in,” Mr. Kermani said. These young people picked “things that had sort of raunchy references,” he added. “They thought it was sort of a hoot.”

Mr. Ashbery too was pleased by their choices, particularly because they reminded him of what was in his own canon. “I have a lot poems, so there are a lot of them that I don’t really think of very much,” he said. (Mr. Ashbery published “A Worldly Country: New Poems” in February, and an anthology, “Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems,” is due out in November.)

But will droves of young people respond?

“It’s our hope that we will interest college kids in poetry in a new way, make it hip for them,” said Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins that has published Mr. Ashbery’s work. But, Mr. Halpern admitted, “it’s very hard to tell what exactly is going to come of all this.”

Though his roots are in 1950s bohemia, Mr. Ashbery is perhaps not the most obvious choice for the iPod generation. He works on a typewriter and doesn’t listen to popular music, with the exception of a chance encounter with the Peaches & Herb song “Reunited” in a cab in the 1980s; it inspired his poem “The Songs We Know Best.” (“Just like a shadow in an empty room/Like a breeze that’s pointed from beyond the tomb/Just like a project of which no one tells-/Or didja really think that I was somebody else?”)

But Mr. Friedman is optimistic that verse will find its new audience, and mtvU plans to continue the program with other laureates after Mr. Ashbery’s one-year tenure is up.

“I don’t think there’s such a big leap from the artists we’re playing to the poetry that John is creating,” Mr. Friedman said. “Some of the music we play, Bright Eyes and the Decemberists, they’re phenomenal poets. I feel like there’s a connection there.”

Though he has not been offered the job, Mr. Ashbery has said that he wouldn’t necessarily be interested in being the United States poet laureate.

“There is a great deal of responsibility that comes with it,” he said. “You have to spend part of the time in Washington. It’s really a public post.”

But the mtvU gig — which is unpaid — came with few strings attached, and was not very demanding of his time, he said.

“I don’t have any specific duties,” he said. “They’re going to publicize my poetry and maybe people will get interested in it and other poets will benefit. That’s about as much work or responsibility as I would want.”

After a 50-year career and nearly as many published volumes, is Mr. Ashbery finally slacking off? He laughed. No, he said. “I’d rather keep the effort for writing poetry.”

Source: NYT