John Ashbery and Marcel Proust

Here are some comments Ashbery made about Proust in a1983 Paris Review interview with Peter Stitt:

“Sometimes I would do a Proustian excursion, looking at buildings he or his characters had lived in. Like his childhood home in the Boulevard Malesherbes or Odette’s house in the rue La Pérouse.”
“I read Proust for a course with Harry Levin, and that was a major shock.”
“I started reading it when I was twenty (before I took Levin’s course) and it took me almost a year. I read very slowly anyway, but particularly in the case of a writer whom I wanted to read every word of. It’s just that I think one ends up feeling sadder and wiser in equal proportions when one is finished reading him—I can no longer look at the world in quite the same way.”
“Yes [I was attracted by the intimate, meditative voice of his work], and the way somehow everything could be included in this vast, open form that he created for himself—particularly certain almost surreal passages. There’s one part where a philologist or specialist on place names goes on at great length concerning places names in Normandy. I don’t know why it is so gripping, but it seizes the way life sometimes seems to have of droning on in a sort of dreamlike space. I also identified with, on account of the girl in my art class[1], with the narrator, who had a totally impractical passion which somehow both enveloped the beloved cocoon and didn’t have much to do with her.”

  Here is Ashbery’s poem “Proust’s Questionnaire” from 1981′s A Wave:

I am beginning to wonder
Whether this alternative to
Sitting back and doing something quiet
Is the clever initiative it seemed. It’s
Also relaxation and sunlight branching into
Passionate melancholy, jealousy of something unknown;
And our minds, parked in the sky over New York,
Are nonetheless responsible. Nights
When the paper comes
And you walk around the block
Wrenching yourself from the lover every five minutes
And it hurts, yet nothing is ever really clean
Or two-faced. You are losing your grip
And there are still flowers and compliments in the air:
“How did you like the last one?”
“Was I good?” “I think it stinks.”
It’s a question of questions, first:
The nuts-and-bolts kind you know you can answer
And the impersonal ones you answer almost without meaning to:
“My greatest regret.” “What keeps the world from falling down.”
And then the results are brilliant:
Someone is summoned to a name, and soon
A roomful of people becomes dense and contoured
And words come out of the wall
To batter the rhythm of generation following on generation.
And I see once more how everything
Must be up to me: here a calamity to be smoothed away
Like ringlets, there the luck of uncoding
This singular cipher of primary
And secondary colors, and the animals
With us in the ark, happy to be there as it settles
Into an always more violent sea.