Vincent Katz’s Poetry Selections: Default Mode by John Ashbery
Dia’s Readings in Contemporary Poetry series is curated by poet and author Vincent Katz. These readings emphasize the experimental aspects of contemporary poetic practice and foster exchange between diverse voices. Here, Katz selects a poem or text that was featured in a reading that particularly resonated with him.
John Ashbery
Originally recorded on March 11, 2011
Scroll to 0:55 to hear Ashbery read “Default Mode”
Born in Rochester, New York, in 1927, John Ashbery is known for his relentless experimentalism. He maintained the dreams of Modernism and Surrealism, while probing ever deeper into the surfaces of mundane American postwar language and experience. Part of the first generation of New York School poets, along with colleagues Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and others, Ashbery broke apart the tidy platitudes of the mainstream poetry of the 1950s and ’60s, opening up areas that have proved endlessly fruitful to later New York School poets, as well as the Language poets and many others. “Default Mode” is an example of a surprisingly direct poem in Ashbery’s oeuvre, its refrain “They were living in America . . . ” taking on cumulative power, occasionally with humor, often with chilling prescience.
DEFAULT MODE
They were living in America at another time.
They were living in America for the FBI.
They were living in America shit wins.
They were living in America on the border with Canada.
They were living in America further gone into teats.
They were living in America that was the only good one.
They were living in America that was the only good one.
They were living in America who answers the phone and.
They were living in America deliriously.
They were living in America sadly.
They were living in America fictitiously.
They were living in America wedged.
They were living in America Stella by Starlight.
They were living in America the mighty sun.
They were living in America pandemically.
They were living in America across from the Ritz hotel.
They were living in America getting their chops.
They were living in America only for just one summer.
They were living in America beside the lake.
They were living in America for the defeatist troops.
They were living in America for the pleasure of it all.
They were living in America as well as can be expected.
They were living in America as one grows passionately
out of a love affair they were living there every day.
Does this doughnut remind you of a life preserver?
They were living in America to remind you of me.
They were living in America and a storm blew up suddenly.
They were living in America extended terms of credit.
They were living in America but it’s all over.
They were living in America as tissue paper is to a comb.
They were living in America at fives and sixes.
They were living in America the same old same old.
“Default Mode” from John Ashbery’s Planisphere (New York: Ecco, 2009). © John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the Estate of John Ashbery.
Vincent Katz has lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan for much of his life, where he often writes poems on the streets and avenues. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (2020), Southness (2016), and Swimming Home (2015), as well as the translator of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004). He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (2002), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, Brooklyn Rail, and Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia Art Foundation, Katz edited the eponymous anthology with Dia in 2017.
