Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Songs We Know Best
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: New Haven
STATE: CT
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://humanities.yale.edu/people/karin-roffman * https://us.macmillan.com/author/karinroffman/ * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/19/songs-we-know-best-john-ashbery-karin-roffman-review
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Yale University, lecturer. Worked previously as a teacher for Bard University and the United States Military Academy Preparatory School.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Karin Roffman is both an English lecturer and author. She is affiliated with such schools as Bard University and Yale University.
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life is a nonfiction work written by Roffman, and serves as an account of the life of John Ashbery, the renowned poet. As the title suggests, Roffman traces Ashbery’s youth, in turn tracking the forces that led him down the road of becoming the poet we know him as today. The book specifically tracks Ashbery’s background from the year 1927, when he was born, to the year 1955. This was when Ashbery had his first poetry collection published. Roffman gathers her research from various sources, including first hand conversations with Ashbery as well as examinations of photos and other documents pertaining to his life and family. Every aspect of Ashbery’s youth is displayed and discussed, including even some of his first pieces of writing. As Roffman reveals, Ashbery is a native of Rochester, a city in New York. However, despite his city birth, he spent much more time in the town of Sodus, where his family managed a farm. Ashbery’s dreams transcended beyond farm life, however. On his father’s side, he had a grandfather who worked in academia. Ashbery took after his grandfather through an avid interest in school and strong sense of intellect. Ashbery’s interests led him and his father to clash, as his father was far more interested in agriculture and living off the land. Despite early conflicts, Ashbery goes on to enroll in the exclusive Deerfield Academy, then Harvard University. It is there that Ashbery begins to come into his own. Roffman also goes into detail about how closely Ashbery’s poetry and personal life intertwine. This includes Ashbery’s identity as a gay man, which features heavily throughout his work.
Booklist contributor Diego Baez recommended The Songs We Know Best to “Ashbery’s fans and readers interested in a remarkable gay artist’s midcentury coming-of-age story.” In an issue of BookPage, Robert Weibezahl commented: “With its sharp, informed and unsentimental insight into both the man and his work, The Songs We Know Best is an invaluable biography of a masterful artist.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews remarked: “This incisive, groundbreaking portrait of the enigmatic and influential poet will be indispensable to all future biographical work.” A Publishers Weekly contributor said: “It is an educational, comforting, inspiring book that will satisfy Ashbery’s curious fans.” Guardian Online reviewer Mark Ford called The Songs We Know Best an “entertaining and brilliantly researched book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June, 2017, Diego Baez, review of The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, p. 42.
BookPage, June, 2017, Robert Weibezahl, “A poet’s roots,” review of The Songs We Know Best, p. 4.
Choice, December, 2010, R. Mulligan, review of From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries, p. 683.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of The Songs We Know Best.
Publishers Weekly, March 27, 2017, review of The Songs We Know Best, p. 91.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (July 19, 2017), Mark Ford, review of The Songs We Know Best.
Macmillan Website, https://us.macmillan.com/ (November 7, 2017), author profile.
Yale University Humanities Program, http://humanities.yale.edu/ (November 7, 2017), author profile.
Karin Roffman has taught literature at Yale, West Point, and Bard, and is the author of From the Modernist Annex. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Karin Roffman
Karin Roffman's picture
Lecturer in Humanities and in English and Associate Research Scientist in American Studies and English
Address:
53 Wall St, New Haven, CT 06511-8916
karin.roffman@yale.edu
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early
Life
Diego Baez
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life. By Karin Roffman. June 2017. 336p. Farrar, $30
(9780374293840). 811.
This rigorously intimate look at poet John Ashbery's young life follows him from his birth in upstate New York in 1927
to his debut collection, Some Trees (1955), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the coveted Yale Younger Poets
Prize. With unparalleled access to family records and photo albums and interviews with boyhood friends and the author
himself, Roffman deftly weaves together genealogy and an appreciation for the poet's art and turns an exacting lens on
even minor details, as in her explication of an eight-year-old Ashbery's letter home from sleepaway camp. Other
instances of the precocious poet's early years prove telling, such as when Ashbery, as a disconsolate kindergartener, first
articulates the unique medley of emotion and creative license that would later shape his work when he remarks, "I
regret the stairs." Roffman keeps a close eye on Ashbery into his teenage and early adult years, as his writing and
sexual identity evolve. This tender, youth-focused biography will be most enjoyed by Ashbery's fans and readers
interested in a remarkable gay artist's midcentury coming-of-age story. --Diego Baez
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Baez, Diego. "The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life." Booklist, June 2017, p. 42. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA498582651&it=r&asid=c25f05eecef4e657370d13a53c59c044.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498582651
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508712063596 2/6
A poet's roots
Robert Weibezahl
BookPage.
(June 2017): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
John Ashbery, who turns 90 in July, is one of America's most venerable, if challenging, poets. His work--which has
won nearly every major poetry honor, beginning with the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his first book, Some Trees--is at
once lyrical and disjunctive, as epigrammatic as it is puzzling. Karin Roffman opens a welcoming doorway into this
poet's life and work with her engaging, in-depth biography of Ashbery's early life, The Songs We Know Best (FSG,
$30, 336 pages, ISBN 9780374293840). A professor and literary critic, Roffman befriended Ashbery in 2005, and the
book is drawn from hours of conversation with the poet as well as the unprecedented access he granted her to personal
papers dating back to his childhood.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Songs We Know Best spans the first 28 years of Ashbery's life, from his birth in 1927 until 1955, the year his first
book was accepted for publication and he left for France to begin a Fulbright. By concentrating on these early years,
Roffman has shaped her study around the youthful concerns and conflicts that formed the man and his poetry. Given
her direct relationship with her subject, she is able to provide a remarkable quantity of detail--not merely the external
facts, but also the internal thoughts and struggles of the artist as a young man.
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a fruit farm in nearby Sodus. His father was an inveterate
farmer, and Ashbery's paternal grandfather was a professor. Education and culture were valued by his grandfather
especially, and young John showed great intelligence and talent from the start--he appeared on the national radio show
"Quiz Kids" at age 14--and knew from an early age that he was meant for something more far-reaching than the family
business. Ashbery's relationship with his father was complicated, often contentious, although one gets the sense from
Roffman's telling that the father valued his son, even if he did not fully understand him. The tragic death from leukemia
of Ashbery's 9-year-old younger brother, Richard, whom their father favored, had a lasting effect on the family and the
future poet.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A key element Roffman explores throughout this coming-of-age narrative is Ashbery's growing awareness of his
homosexuality. As with many young gay people--most certainly in the mid-20th century--this sexual awakening was a
process that began with confusion touched by shame, but ultimately Ashbery embraced his identity and drew upon it
for his work. Roffman sensitively mines these themes in the poet's earliest writing, including previously unpublished
juvenilia. Ashbery's intellectual preoccupations, poetic sensibilities and romantic desires grew stronger at Deerfield
Academy (where he was a scholarship student) and then at Harvard, where he made such indelible friends as fellow
poet Frank O'Hara and Barbara Epstein, co-founder of The New York Review of Books. Roffman's lively portrait of
Ashbery's post-college bohemian years in New York City in the early 1950s captures the artistic energy and youthful
ambition of his impressive circle of friends and fellow artists.
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508712063596 3/6
Many poets draw on their personal experiences in their art, and Roffman convincingly shows that "even in his earliest
writing, Ashbery is drawn to specific moments when one's understanding transforms." With its sharp, informed and
unsentimental insight into both the man and his work, The Songs We Know Best is an invaluable biography of a
masterful artist.
BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Weibezahl, Robert. "A poet's roots." BookPage, June 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492899124&it=r&asid=ad4ab82e808ae665eb6a149cc16859ac.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492899124
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508712063596 4/6
Roffman, Karin: THE SONGS WE KNOW
BEST
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Roffman, Karin THE SONGS WE KNOW BEST Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 6, 13 ISBN:
978-0-374-29384-0
The first "comprehensive" biography of the American poet's early years.Roffman (Humanities/Yale Univ.; From the
Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries, 2010) met Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John
Ashbery (b. 1929) in 2005 at Bard College, and they immediately hit it off. The "vehemently private" poet provided her
with an early diary and handwritten and typed manuscripts of poetry, plays, and stories, as well as numerous
photographs (included here along with many poems). All of this material, writes Roffman, provides "astonishing record
of his earliest creative life." When the author asked if she could write a biography of these early years, he assumed she
"already was." Roffman delivers a revealing, unprecedented portrait of this artist up to the publication of Some Trees in
1956, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.H. Auden, narrowly beating out Ashbery's close friend
Frank O'Hara. Born in Rochester, New York, he spent time on the family's farm and in his beloved grandparents' home
overlooking Lake Ontario. His youth was "ordinary," and he loved to paint, write, and read. He wrote his first poem at
age 8 and read an article about surrealism and Dada in Life that "thrilled him." As early as kindergarten, Ashbery felt
attracted to boys but kept his feelings secret. In 1941, he appeared on the national Quiz Kids show in Chicago. After
attending Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, he went to Harvard. At the time, he said, "I suppose I'll come out of it
intact." Midway through his college career, Ashbery had ambitious plans to "rip modern poetry wide open!" At
Harvard, he met poets O'Hara and Kenneth Koch and immersed himself in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Marianne
Moore. Next came Columbia University and a new, lifelong friend in fellow gay poet/collaborator James Schuyler. This
incisive, groundbreaking portrait of the enigmatic and influential poet will be indispensable to all future biographical
work.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Roffman, Karin: THE SONGS WE KNOW BEST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA489268400&it=r&asid=44dea3df805b27fd68ede78e6d4d3e9a.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A489268400
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508712063596 5/6
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early
Life
Publishers Weekly.
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p91.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Songs We Know Best:
John Ashbery's Early Life
Karin Roffman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30
(336p) ISBN 978-0-374-29384-0
With immaculate detail and eloquence, Roffman (From the Modernist Annex) has written the first in-depth biography
of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Her narrative follows Ashbery, who was born in 1927, up to 1955, when
W.H. Auden awarded Ashbery's debut collection, Some Trees, the Yale Younger Poets prize. Roffman expertly analyzes
his poems, revealing the nuanced imprint of his personal life on his work. She explores Ashbery's friendships (with
painter Jane Freilicher and poets Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, among others), his influences (including W.H.
Auden and Marianne Moore), and his ventures into acting, prose writing, and painting. In addition to describing his
triumphs, she reveals the darker parts of Ashbery's life: the childhood death of his brother, the specter cast by his era's
homophobia, and his ongoing battle with depression. Roffman excels in her recreation of Ashbery's early years because
she does not waver from firsthand sources and never attempts to interpret his life or poetry through pure speculation.
Although at times this work is slow going and lacking in drama, it is an educational, comforting, inspiring book that
will satisfy Ashbery's curious fans. 82 b&w illus. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 91. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928171&it=r&asid=34f7821e00f62382559bea6ab7309397.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928171
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508712063596 6/6
Roffman, Karin. From the modernist annex:
American women writers in museums and
libraries
R. Mulligan
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
48.4 (Dec. 2010): p683.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
48-1930
PS151
2009-36280 CIP
Roffman, Karin. From the modernist annex: American women writers in museums and libraries. Alabama, 2010. 252p
bibl index afp ISBN 9780817316983, $44.50
Roffman (West Point) analyzes four US writers--Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, and Ruth Benedict--
devoting a chapter to each. Although these modernists never met, the author unites them through their associations with
American libraries and museums. In her introduction, Roffman presents a history of US cultural institutions and argues
that they systematized knowledge to shape public opinion. The chapter on Wharton closely examines The Age of
Innocence, particularly the scenes that occur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which Wharton's uncle had been
president. In the Larsen and Moore chapters, Roffman connects the authors' employment as New York librarians to
their writing. For Larsen, systems of knowledge were often systems of exclusion. For Moore, who was also an assistant
to Melville Dewey (the creator of the Dewey Decimal System), systemization of knowledge was both appealing and
restraining. Benedict is best known as a pioneering cultural anthropologist, and Roffman presents her poetry as
countering her scholarly career and its institutions. The details of this study are fascinating, but because the four authors
differ greatly, the thesis is expansive. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Graduates students, researchers.--R. Mulligan,
Christopher Newport University
Mulligan, R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mulligan, R. "Roffman, Karin. From the modernist annex: American women writers in museums and libraries."
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Dec. 2010, p. 683. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA249221852&it=r&asid=4cb4d61c02c850d2eda419d89680c275.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A249221852
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life by Karin Roffman – review
A brilliantly researched study explores the poet’s difficult relationship with his farmer father and his guilt-ridden need to conceal his sexuality
View more sharing options
Shares
85
Comments
11
Mark Ford
Wednesday 19 July 2017 09.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.29 EDT
The American poet John Ashbery, who turns 90 this month, is often figured as the epitome of cosmopolitan sophistication – as a refined but radical innovator whose open-ended lyrics and narrative-free long poems refract and dramatise the anxieties of postmodernity. Doyen of the avant garde Ashbery may have become, and yet, as Karin Roffman demonstrates in this illuminating account of his early life, the originality of his poetic idiom owes as much to his provincial rural upbringing, and to the compound of guilt and nostalgia that was its legacy, as it does to his embrace of the experimental in New York and Paris.
Ashbery’s parents, Chester and Helen, ran a fruit farm about a mile south of Lake Ontario, where winters are long and snowy. Chet, as his father was known, could be ill tempered. “He used to wallop me a great deal,” Ashbery recalled in an interview, “so I felt always as though I were living on the edge of a live volcano.” I’ve often wondered if the evasiveness of Ashbery’s poetry, its habit of tiptoeing or sliding around a crisis in states ranging from mild apprehension to ominous foreboding, reflects the simmering domestic tensions of these early years.
Young Ashbery escaped whenever he could to the reassuring home of his maternal grandparents, Henry and Addie Lawrence, who were more interested in artistic and intellectual matters. Indeed, since there was no kindergarten in Sodus, the small town nearest to the Ashbery homestead, he spent much of the first seven years of his life living in Rochester with Addie and Henry, who was a professor of physics at the university. It was there he developed a taste for reading, poring over The Child’s Book of Poetry in his grandparents’ well-stocked library, as well as Things to Make and Things to Do, a volume affectionately parodied in his first great long poem, “The Skaters”.
Alas, on his grandfather’s retirement in 1934, the Lawrences moved permanently to their lakeside cottage in Pultneyville, and Ashbery was returned to his father’s uncertain temper, which had been put under further strain by the onset of the Great Depression. Roffman eloquently sketches his isolated, restless days on the farm, his dislike of the chores that devolved to a farmer’s son (no budding Robert Frost he), and his sense of failing to measure up to his parents’ expectations. His younger brother Richard, born in 1931, fitted in better with what Chet and Helen had hoped for from a male offspring: “He was interested in sports and life on the farm,” Ashbery later commented of his younger sibling, who died aged 10 of leukaemia, “and would probably have been straight and married and had children, and not been the disappointment that I undoubtedly was to my parents”.
Ashbery in New York, 1954.
Ashbery in New York, 1954. Photograph: © 2017 John Ashbery. All Rights Reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author.
The wonderful late poem, “The History of My Life”, directly addresses his response to this loss: “Once upon a time there were two brothers. / Then there was only one: myself. / I grew up fast, before learning to drive, / even. There was I: a stinking adult.” It is perversely appropriate that he uses that favourite adjective of children, “stinking”, to describe the unacceptable aspects of his adulthood. Chet tellingly had framed and prominently displayed a picture of Richard in the act of throwing a football as a treasured image of his ideal son.
Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read more
Although Ashbery is the least confessional of poets, the upstate New York landscapes and lake vistas of his early years are often filtered into his poems in obliquely revealing ways. His longest poem, Flow Chart (1991), was begun in the wake of his mother’s death, and features numerous passages that evoke his life on the farm, or at his grandparents’ houses in Rochester and then Pultneyville (where Ashbery spent a series of idyllic summers), as well as elliptical characterisations of the tedium and excitements of childhood and adolescence. As Roffman demonstrates in close readings of poems such as the very early “Lost Cove”, Ashbery’s need to make his works present generic or “one-size-fits-all” transcriptions of experience, applicable to anyone, never wholly obscures their origins in the personal.
She also suggests that the cryptic aspects of his work can be related back to his dawning awareness of his homosexuality. From 1941 to 1945 he kept a series of diaries, which he strongly suspected were periodically read by his mother. Shortly before his 14th birthday, he and a male friend of the same age hugged and kissed and fondled each other, and he ejaculated for the first time. This event was commemorated in his journal with a fractured sequence of words that would not look out of place in his most disjunctive volume of poems, The Tennis Court Oath of 1962: “tulip garden / old dutch / home all our own until / recall once more / fashion in shows / dog cast in / days before …” This reads like an embryo version of a poem such as “Leaving the Atocha Station”, which, with its reference to “mouthing the root”, is in fact rather more explicit.
There was little chance of his mother decoding such a seemingly random set of phrases, although she may have wondered what her son was hiding. But when, in 1945, he inadvertently left an unsealed letter describing in bawdy detail his attraction to a classmate, one Phil Van Dusen, on his bedside table, whatever suspicions she had were confirmed. A hysterical outburst followed. Helen promised not to tell his father, but Roffman discovered in the course of her researches that she did so. Deeply dismayed, Chet sought counsel from a family friend, but never raised the subject with his aberrant but evidently gifted son – Ashbery was at Harvard by this stage.
The strange mixture of telling and not telling is fundamental to the hypnotic appeal of his poetry
The strange mixture of telling and not telling, of open secrets never explicitly mentioned, that is fundamental to the hypnotic, riddling appeal of Ashbery’s poetry, surely evolved out of his fraught and guilt-ridden need to conceal his sexuality from his parents, a need complicated by a counter-longing to disclose all.
At Harvard he met the poets Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, and was elected to the board of the Harvard Advocate, the art and literary magazine. He also composed some extraordinarily good poems, including “The Painter” and “Some Trees”, which – on the insistence of WH Auden, who kickstarted Ashbery’s publishing career by choosing him for the Yale Younger Poets award of 1956 – would become the title poem of his first volume. Both in Harvard and then in New York, where he lived from 1949 to 1955, Ashbery found himself in circles of brilliant, artistically inclined and often gay men and women, but seems never to have felt as exuberantly at home in these shifting coteries as the effervescent O’Hara. A portrait by Fairfield Porter of 1952 – one of the many superb illustrations included in this book – presents a slumped and melancholy figure. He fell in love often and deeply, but Roffman records more disappointments and frustrations than triumphs. Until, that is, the annus mirabilis of 1955.
That year he applied for a Fulbright scholarship to go to France, only to be rejected; and submitted his manuscript to Yale, whose first readers deemed it unworthy of Auden’s consideration. In early summer Ashbery departed on holiday to Mexico in low spirits, but on his return found a Fulbright scholar had withdrawn, making a place available for him; and that, through the good offices of poet Chester Kallman, Auden had not only read but chosen his manuscript (at that point simply called Poems) for the Yale Younger Poets prize. The last photo in this entertaining and brilliantly researched book shows a dapper young Ashbery in a smart overcoat on the streets of Montpellier. I think he is almost smiling.
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, price £23