A Process Note
The Ashbery erasure poems are the result of a long, sustained act of reading Ashbery over the course of many years, and the recognition that the alterity represented in that work could serve as a kind of outer shell, a new context, for my new work, a kind of rebirth. After all, after Abrupt Rural came out in 2004, I’d been trying to bury what I’d been doing up to that point—my rural, nature loving and slightly self-destructive persona in the early books, along with the austerity of the deep image lyric style that had evolved with it. It was so absorbing (and instructive) burrowing into Ashbery’s voluminous work, like entering a language goldmine, carving phrases and words from those cave walls. Mr. Ashbery became almost a higher power, the “field” of his work something I could depend on, the endlessness of it all vast enough to allow me to reinvent my own poetry, poems that weren’t MINE, obviously, but still echoing qualities one might identify in my earlier work (as to voice, subject matter, references to nature, etc.). The work in this issue of Tupelo Quarterly will appear in a third collection of Ashbery erasures, a volume entitled Unlikely Animals (which will also contain dictionary sonnets and collages). All of this said, I am so grateful to John Ashbery for the harbor of his words, and not a day has gone by since his passing in which I do not feel the ache of his absence. My work with John’s poetry was also a springboard into what constitutes my new work in collage, which actually began after I composed the erasures in Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere. I’ve had three one-person exhibitions of the collages (with a fourth coming) since 2014. I owe John Ashbery so much—example, and mentor . . .
Just Someone To Say Hi To
What about
parachutes
in the sky?
I think about
dreams
How I
behave
in them
How
I’m like
a birthday
present
Parachutes
I look out
to the
end of
thinking
Her extraordinary plan of action
I thanked and tiptoed
out of her
Yet I could not
proceed
to my ideas
I almost reached
the gigantic. decaying
architect
No one liked him
The long, alienating corridors
the sun
sliced through were a
present sent by death while you
waited
for her touch
There was not
any breath
in that
plucked sunflower
David Dodd Lee is the author of ten books of poems and the forthcoming novel, Flood. He is a visual artist and his work has been shown in three one person exhibitions since 2014. His newest book is And Others, Vaguer Presences: A Book of Ashbery Erasure Poems (2016, BlazeVox). A new book, Unlikely Animals, including Ashbery erasures, dictionary sonnets, and collages, will apppear from Wolfson Press is 2018.