MTV’s Poet Laureate

mtvU may have an irritating acronym and a dubious business plan, but at least it showed some imagination in selecting John Ashbery as its first poet laureate. mtvU will broadcast snippets of his poems  to 750 colleges across the US as part of an effort to expose students to poetry and provide some cultural cover for Viacom's expansion plans in the 18-24 demographic.

Ashbery has taken a what-the-hell approach to the project. He doesn't get paid, but one or two students somewhere may be paying enough attention to read some more poetry. For the students who already read poetry--and there are more than one would expect--the project will be yet another well-meaning but somewhat puzzling publicity campaign, much like the 1990's vogue for poems in subways.

The mtvU presentations are slick and minimalist, and, I suppose, it's beside the point to object that they're not accurate representations of the experience of reading a full Ashbery poem. The short mtvU films lend the poems a formal closure the full poems lack. For instance, "Soonest Mended" becomes aphoristic, and Ashbery is anything but an aphoristic writer. On the other hand, Ashbery's aesthetic has been likened to music, or, perhaps more accurately given the current context, a music video: scraps of discourse and images float by, each arresting in its own way but not adding up to anything coherently meaningful. It's also worth noting that Ashbery is the only major literary figure associated with the Abstract Impressionist movement in the 1950's. Ashbery is too reserved and cerebral to be a prosody version of Willem de Kooning, but Ashbery did pick up on the Abstract Expressionists' explorations of form and emotion--at the same time early rockers were forging the same connections. Maybe someday soon mtvU will designate Barnett Newman as its first court artist.