Emily Skillings: My name is Emily Skillings, and this is PoetryNow. The sound of it had been kind of bouncing around and singing around in my head for a long time. It’s like, (SINGS) “I flutter in order / to enter / the phrase’s silver.” It was literally stuck in my head and it’s never happened to me before. So I was like, alright, this is getting annoying. So I had to stick it in a poem. (LAUGHS) Then it stopped. John Ashbery was not only my favorite poet, but he was one of my favorite people. John passed away September 3 of 2017. I wrote this poem about a month before he passed away. And then when I went back to reread it, I realized that this poem was, in so many ways, about me thinking about a world in which he wasn’t anymore.

(READS POEM)

No People in It
 
             for JA
 
I flutter in order
to enter
the phrase’s silver.
 
Jackdaws have launched nearby
this time, silk green and ripped,
the movement a kind of chafing thinking.
 
Oh he’s marking
terrain right there—
right there with his
 
unmade song. The shadow kids
whip fronds, froth air up
into heat, pure and simple
 
“violence of the eye.” Wild iris
ink, wet in the margin’s stage.
Well, hadn’t this testament begun
 
to carry its chime in stripes?
That’s when I knew he was going away
from me, towards the sound.
 
Like the ring on the table
it can’t be decentered.
Rim around the recent.
 
Ashes, ashes,
A bright tangled seeming.

* * *

(BELL RINGS)

My mentor during my last year of undergrad had previously been John Ashbery’s assistant, and she wrote to me and asked me if I would be interested in being John Ashbery’s assistant. And I wrote back immediately, and I said, “Yes! No question about it.” I showed up for the interview, which was conducted by his husband, David Kermani. And John was working on his translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in the next room. So I just heard the typewriter kind of clicking away. (LAUGHS) That was my first, I guess, meeting John. It was kind of a sonic experience, which makes sense.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Just being around John—it wasn’t exactly like a John Ashbery poem, but it had the same kind of associative way about it, where, he would be remembering a line from some French text, and the next second he would be asking me about some celebrity that he had heard about. So in the same way that in a John Ashbery poem, there’s all these multiple registers that are interacting, that’s the atmosphere of being around him, too. It was a kind of way of being that I found just as inspiring as his poetry.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

That’s when I knew he was going away / from me, towards the sound. // Like the ring on the table / it can’t be decentered. / Rim around the recent. // Ashes, ashes, / A bright tangled seeming.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Sarah Geis: That was Emily Skillings and her poem “No People in It.” I’m Sarah Geis and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.