"Got any more of these cross-literary sparks, or is there another Stafford zinger that cracks you up?"

Grok asked me after I was asking it about the poem "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" by John Ashbery, specifically my favorite line, "Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched/Her long thigh."

The poem had just come up in a crossword puzzle: 20 Across: "Cartoon character featured in the John Ashbery poem 'Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.'" There are a lot of cartoon characters in that poem, but the answer is POPEYE. 

I'd said to Grok: "That description of Olive Oyl and the poem title — 'Farm Implements' — made me think of this quote David Sedaris found in the biography of Jean Stafford: 'She was sharp-tongued and once described a fellow writer as 'looking as if she were pregnant with farm machinery.'"

That's in DS's new book (commission earned).

Well, I didn't have any more cross-literary sparks or Stafford zingers, so I said "No. Do you?"

And Grok was all "Yes — plenty." Etc.

"[A] large portion of new poetry titles during [the book review editor's] tenure could be (and often were) tossed into a pile labeled 'Ashbery impersonations.'"

"And Mr. Ashbery remains far and away the most imitated American poet. That widespread imitation has served mostly to underscore the distinctive qualities of the original — and those qualities are singular indeed. An Ashbery poem cycles through changes in diction, register and tone with bewildering yet expertly managed speed, happily mixing references and obscuring antecedents in the service of capturing what Mr. Ashbery called 'the experience of experience.' The effect can be puzzling, entrancing or, more frequently, a combination of the two — as if one were simultaneously being addressed by an oracle, a PTA newsletter and a restless sleep talker."

From the NYT obituary for John Ashbery, who has died at the age of 90. Extracts of his poetry at the link, if you need to apply those abstractions to something concrete. And more poetry at this link (also the NYT). The first example:

“The Chateau Hardware” (1970)

It was always November there. The farms
Were a kind of precinct; a certain control
Had been exercised. The little birds
Used to collect along the fence.
It was the great “as though,” the how the day went,
The excursions of the police
As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

Please explain.

Those "Germanic compounds."

John Updike has a nice, long review of Jed Perl's "New Art City."

The thesis of the book, to be blunt about it, is that art in Manhattan passed in midcentury and beyond from the nighttime creations of existential, heroic, romantic, art-history-minded revolutionaries hardened in the 30's to the daytime works of empirical, eclectic, unheroic, relatively theory-free individualists who had ripened in the shadow of the action-painting giants.

I want to break out a criticism of Perl's writing:

In his commendable desire to stretch the language of visual perception and philosophical understanding, Perl coins compound adjectives as if hyphens were snowing upon his word processor. We have: "the individual's at-an-angle relationship with society," "go-with-the-flow neighbors," "an increasingly knit-together, everything-is-one-thing, homogenous character," "knock-you-in-your-teeth actualities," "the wacky-bleak fascination of a play by Samuel Beckett," "this everything-becoming-something-else moment," "more-than-material yet grounded in the materials of art," "the whatever-happens-happens nihilism," "Ashbery's go-with-what-amuses-you attitude," and "the stark, nobody-knows-you-when-you're-down-and-out decrepitude." Some of these Germanic compounds, like "at-an-angle" and "go-with-the-flow," are handy enough to be used more than once, but they are, along with stretch adverbs like "amazingly," "infinitely" and "immensely," and such tenuous concepts as "everydayness," "brownishness" and an "ordinariness" that "melts into the silveriness of the images," symptomatic of the stresses placed on the vocabulary of those who would write about art.

I must say I love "Germanic compounds" -- when they are properly expressive. I see Updike uses them himself -- e.g., "art-history-minded" -- and doesn't seem all that critical of Perl for writing like that. It gives me the feeling of someone talking excitedly about specific ideas that have just formed in his head -- when it's done well.