Some terrific inside baseball in The Man Who Read Everything!

John Ashbery writes to Bloom about his book, The Tennis Court Oath: “I was deeply dissatisfied not with the poems in Some Trees but the ones I wrote afterward which were imitative of them…. Whatever can be said against those poems, and it is probably everything, they at least had the advantage for me of not being what I had written before. In order to find out what I wanted to write I first had to write a lot of things I didn't want to write.”

Inspiring that the great Ashbery’s process involved writing “a lot of things I didn't want to write.” (At least it’s inspiring to me. I’ve lately said “No” a number of new poems.)

Beyond that, it was kind of shocking to hear the rushed circumstances surrounding the publication of The Tennis Court Oath. “[W]hat happened was that John Hollander wrote to me in Paris asking me to submit a manuscript to Wesleyan, and to do it fast before Richard Wilbur got back from a leave of absence,” writes Ashbery. “I felt this was probably my only chance to get another book.”

I suppose it shouldn’t be strange to see Asbhery acting in ordinary, human ways, but somehow it is.

Back to the correspondence!