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The Vermont Notebook is a book of poetry by John Ashbery with illustrations by Joe Brainard. It was published by Black Sparrow Press on March 26, 1975, shortly before the publication of Ashbery's award-winning poetry collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Background
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Ashbery and Brainard came to be associated with the New York School, a loose milieu of avant-garde poets and artists in and around New York City. According to Holland Cotter, this time was "the great New York moment of painter-poet convergence" marked by fruitful exchange between the visual arts and literature. The New York School scene, which poet Douglas Crase called "a vanguard of friends," included, among others, poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch, and artists Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Grace Hartigan. Much of the artistic collaboration of the time was sparked by simple social proximity; many of the artists and poets lived on the same stretch of West 21st Street during what Dan Chiasson referred to as "the era of cheap New York apartments."

From the beginning of Brainard's career as an artist, Ashbery held his art in high regard. He wrote an essay for the brochure accompanying Brainard's first solo exhibition in 1965, and wrote a positive review in Art News for his third exhibition in 1969. Much later, in an essay accompanying a 1997 retrospective of Brainard's art, Ashbery compared his work to the contemporary pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein but noted that, unlike the distanced, sometimes mean-spirited attitude of pop art with its "subtext of provocation," in Brainard's work there was a kinder spirit of "confrontation without provocation." Brainard, Ashbery wrote, "was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist." While "nice" is a somewhat unusual word for art criticism, perhaps even a dismissive one, Richard Deming said that Ashbery "leads us to think about niceness as being itself something more than a sentimentality or fond feeling—as being an artist's invested stance toward the world," while also considering an argument that "'the nice' is as valid a value in art as either the beautiful or the sublime—or, for that matter, the abject."

Brainard also held Ashbery's poetry in high regard, though he expressed his admiration in a characteristically offhanded way. He named Ashbery one of his favorite poets in a 1977 interview, though he said the poet was "over my head... every now and then I can get into him, and he sweeps me away and I love it, although sometimes he's impossible. My mind wanders off."

The two had worked together several times on smaller projects before The Vermont Notebook. They first collaborated in 1965 for the second issue in Brainard's C Comics series. Brainard drew these comic strips using a mix of his own original characters alongside popular characters appropriated from the likes of Nancy, Archie, Dick Tracy, and Red Ryder, leaving the speech balloons empty. He then invited poets to fill in the speech balloons with whatever they like, with contributions from writers like Guest, Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery.

In the semi-abstract artwork for Ashbery's contribution, titled "The Great Explosion Mystery", Brainard drew speech balloons for various Major League Baseball team logos and shapes of U.S. states. Later, Brainard painted the cover for a 1970 reprint of Ashbery's debut poetry collection, Some Trees, and after The Vermont Notebook he contributed cover artwork for a 1975 edition of A Nest of Ninnies(1969), a novel co-written by Ashbery and Schuyler, as well as Ashbery's collection Three Plays(1978).

Creation
Ashbery wrote The Vermont Notebook while traveling by bus through New England. Despite the book's title, his tour did not visit Vermont. Indeed, he said in 1975 that it had been written entirely in Massachusetts.

He challenged himself to write in longhand—a practice he had by then largely abandoned in favor of the typewriter—and, especially, to write in such an unconducive setting. In a 1984 interview, he compared the process to automatic writing, and called the book a "a kind of messy grab bag as the word notebook implies" and "a catalogue of a number of things that could be found in the state of Vermont, as well as almost everywhere else—another 'democratic vista.'"

Brainard had a deeper connection to Vermont, having spent most summers from 1965 onward in the small town of Calais with his romantic partner Kenward Elmslie. He produced numerous works of art during these summers in Vermont, mostly cutout collages, still lifes, and landscapes. Brainard made the illustrations for VN after Ashbery had already written the book. Same process as his illustrations for Living With Chris by Ted Berrigan
 * Brainard

Publication
The first 18 pages of The Vermont Notebook appeared in early 1974 within the second issue of Z, a small press periodical run by the Vermont-based Z Press. Another portion, corresponding to pages 53–101 of the first edition, was published in Statements: New Fiction from the Fiction Collective, an anthology of avant-garde, genre-defying works of fiction. The acknowledgements section of The Vermont Notebook indicated that the Fiction Collective anthology had been "published previously" and, conversely, Ashbery's bio in Statements indicated that The Vermont Notebook was "shortly to be published in its entirety"; however, the March release of The Vermont Notebook arrived months before Statements, which actually came out in August.

Los Angeles-based Black Sparrow Press published the book on March 26, 1975. The first edition was a run of 2,190 copies, with a list price of $3.50 (equivalent to about $ in, adjusted for inflation). Two special editions were released simultaneously with the regular first edition. An additional 250 numbered copies, signed by Ashbery and Brainard, were sold for $15 each (about $ in ). A "deluxe" edition of 26 hand-bound copies, also signed by both authors, carried a price of $50 (about $ in ). Each "deluxe" copy was labeled with a letter and included a unique, original ink drawing by Brainard.

Following the initial publication, it remained out of print and largely inaccessible for decades. Then, in 2001, Granary Books and Z Press published a new edition. The Library of America included the book's full contents in its 2007 volume of Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956–1987. A short portion was republished in the Spring–Summer 2008 double issue of The Massachusetts Review.

Contents and analysis
The Vermont Notebook contains 47 pages of text and 47 pages of illustration. Ashbery wrote the bulk of the book in the style of prose poetry, although there are segments of verse. It resembles a journal, diary, or travelogue, with each page or "entry" standing on its own to some degree. But according to David Shapiro, the book resists being placed within a single genre or even defined by the terms of its own title, being "not quite a 'notebook'" and "not of Vermont", except for perhaps "a mental, symbolist Vermont". Its overall structure is ambiguous, with critics typically describing it as either a single book-length long poem or as a series of fragmentary, mostly untitled short poems whose beginnings and endings are not clearly delineated as such.

Ashbery uses collage and cut-up technique throughout, borrowing liberally from everyday language. He repurposes clichés of vernacular American English, incorporating the diction of contemplative faux diary entries, banal welcomes into commercial spaces, and paranoiac conspiracy theory babble. In addition to these "simulations" of commonplace American language, he appropriates text outright from other sources—for example, he reproduces found text from a postcard (dated 1949 and signed by "Em & Edythe") and, in the final three pages, the text of his own (otherwise unpublished) poem "American Notes".

List-making
Lists are a recurring structural element. While Ashbery had already made distinctive use of lists in his poetry, and continued to do so long after, the Notebook pushes this tendency to the extreme. In Christopher Schmidt's reading, these lists generate "a kind of dream-like landscape of suburban postwar America, where everyone is an expert on what is for sale and on what brands possess the most currency." Critics have discussed the influence of W. H. Auden and Walt Whitman on the book's extensive lists. Though most of the lists are united by some common theme or subject, some contain errant or misfit items that throw their apparent unity into doubt or make their true scope unclear; for example, a list that begins with "Front porches, back porches, side porches" eventually grows to include "trees, magnolia, scenery, McDonald's, Carrol's, Kinney Shoe Stores."

Most of the lists are presented as pairs in juxtaposition. Some of the pairs are games and crimes; places in North America and names of newspapers; and voluntary or community-based organizations ("Bridge clubs, Elks, Kiwanis, Rotary, AAA, PTA, lodges, Sunday school...") and corporations ("Gulf Oil, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Xerox, Eastman Kodak, ITT, Marriott...").

Another pair of lists is composed of the names of real people, many of whom were Ashbery's friends. While there is considerable overlap and gray area between the two lists, the first tends toward people associated with the commercialized art world and the other toward (implicitly noncommercial) poetry. According to David Shapiro, the "cemetery-like listing" of names ranks as one of the poet's most profound "successes" of the 1970s—but also "one of the most horrific jokes" in his poetry. As the names accumulate, they become an "almost murderous act of 'un-naming'", creating an effect of linguistic derealization and "present[ing] us with the terrible arbitrariness of all language, the names so distant from their seeming objects, torn from their place in everyone's dream of coherence."

Sexuality
One of the few segments of the book bearing a title, "The Fairies' Song" is noteworthy as one of the "poems in Ashbery's oeuvre that are obviously thematically centered around homosexuality." Subjects of the poem, treated in allegorical terms, include the special affinity for "song" or poetry in LGBT culture and the struggles of living as a gay man within a homophobic society.

Ecological themes
John Shoptaw observed that "five pages of seemingly parodic discourse, calmly inventorying ecological disasters, are taken verbatim"

Through observation of "environmental transformation in scenes of dumps, commodified suburban landscapes, and altered ecosystems," The Vermont Notebook reveals "how systemic disruption might be collectively felt before it is fully understood, but also how we can ignore or misperceive disturbing signs."


 * 2014 In The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith, Christopher Schmidt advocated for reading The Vermont Notebook as subversive ecopoetry with a queer sensibility, and a "critique of pastoralism and of a nature poetry that would see wilderness as a masculine retreat from the wastes of the city."

Illustrations
Illustrations in India ink
 * Description of the illustrations as they are/Brainard's process and relationship to the text

Brainard: "I divided it up by pages and I started in the middle and just tried to add to the poem but not to illustrate it. I tried to relate at certain points but in factual ways, not in emotional ways."

"This is typical of the way Brainard worked with text, because he believed that illustrations in the strict sense of the word destroy writing by making it too specific."

"Brainard gave a look of offhand ease to the pictures he made for his friends' publications. Most of these were small press productions, books of poetry by Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Kenward Elmslie, John Ashbery, and others ... Poets in this milieu have a liking for the American vernacular, which they employ with admiration, irony, and the occasional burst of silliness. In the faux anonymity of Brainard's illustrations, their variations on everyday speech found the visual equivalent of a sounding board. What Brainard shared with his poet friends was an esthetic of the ordinary accepted, and transformed but not betrayed—not made fancy—in the acceptance."

Not ekphrasis As sequential art, it is not narrative but nevertheless the sequence accumulates meaning and the whole is greater than the sum of its2 parts.
 * Critical interpretation


 * 2009 Encyclopedia of the New York School of Poets: "The juxtaposition of drawing and writing are crucial to the full experience of the book, creating otherwise impossible, fantastic, and complete images."

Critical reception
The Vermont Notebook received little critical notice upon release and continues to be seen, in general, as a comparatively minor book within Ashbery's overall body of work. Ellen Levy said it "may be the least discussed of Ashbery's books," while Ron Silliman asserted it was one of Ashbery's "most under-appreciated" books. Geoff Ward deemed it "his most underrated text," noting that although critics had received his earlier collection The Tennis Court Oath with the "most abuse," they had "merely ignored The Vermont Notebook altogether." The book's relative critical neglect may have been a result of its longstanding scarcity and unavailability.

Comparisons with Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Published in May 1975, Ashbery's collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror largely overshadowed The Vermont Notebook. Self-Portrait won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award—remaining, to date, the only book to win all three awards—and established Ashbery as one of the preeminent living American poets.

Critics have typically regarded The Vermont Notebook as more avant-garde than Self-Portrait—for example, John Shoptaw called it "a wastebasket for all the extraneous poetic matter ruled out by its famed contemporary." To some critics, it was not merely less conventional than Self-Portrait but even fatally niche by comparison, appealing only to Ashbery's immediate social circle in the avant-garde. David Bromwich gave it a passing mention in his contemporaneous review of Self-Portrait, labeling it "a queer little pseud of a book" and "a heartfelt salute to old peers" that reflected Ashbery's beginnings as "the poet of a coterie." By contrast, for Bromwich Self-Portrait represented the culmination of Ashbery's irrepressible talents, showing him to be "the property of a larger audience" and "the great original of his generation" who "belongs, in fact, to everyone interested in poetry, or modern art, or just the possibility of change." In a 2003 review for World Literature Today, John Boening echoed the sentiment that The Vermont Notebook catered to Ashbery's New York School peers but offered little to a general audience: "One gets the feeling that there are likely a number of inside jokes here for the cognoscenti who used to gather in the Village or the Hamptons, but one can grow daffy trying to tease them out.... What this wacky (a term used in one of the cover blurbs) experiment adds to Ashbery's reputation is anyone's to guess."