 As Reviewed By: |
Yada, Yada, Yada for the Ages: John Ashbery and the New American Sublime |
As Reviewed By: |
Yada, Yada, Yada for the Ages: John Ashbery and the New American Sublime |
A bicuspid rune capped with a question biting off more Parsifalian overtones than it can chew. Could this be part of some ceremony or other? The query looks formulaic, like the kind put to objects in order to lift a prohibition or dissolve a writ of prosecution. Something that has to be said to make something else happen. No closure, no damp gust bringing rain. But wait: what is being asked about in line three concerns the town, not the two turds. And what's that about the weather? Can it be an object, too? Much in these 16 words conduces to fundament without ever bottoming out. Something seems screwy here. Whose Chapel Perilous is this, anyway? The weather has a choke hold on foreseeing Surely the "poet" has to be kidding. Reading this, could one possibly disagree with James Longenbach, who opined in "Ashbery and the Individual Talent" that such poems "might be the warped but inevitable conclusion [sic] of a debased New Critical aesthetic: the poem that does not mean, but is." In this year of questionable grace,
2001, such a dog, even at the end of a bedazzling MacLeish, just will not hunt. A poem may not mean to mean, but if it is to
be in any meaningful sense, it must first (also in a meaningful sense) be a
poem; and in order to be that, it must mean something.
. . . Stumbling from perjured This is pricklier and less reducible to serviceable language than almost any of Ashbery's later poems, even those where he is up to his saltiest tricks. In fact, in its apparent reversion to collage techniques it seems to evoke the sort of
concept-Scrabble fielded in dead-end '60s works like "Europe." The reader has to surrender more than just an insistence on a recount when confronted with this kind of thing, he has to disbelieve in the very suspension giving rise to such a demented afflatus in the first place.
. . .They really resist, --unless it be this by Susan Howe herself:
heroine in ass-skin Poetry like Howe's makes even Ashbery's in-your-face insouciance seem down-at-heels and old hat, not to mention the typographic abstract expressionism of the posthumous Charles Olson, whose final
Maximus Poems (1975) Howe is known to admire. The sort of thing best described as "free dissociation," it apes the trigger-word clustering technique of free-form composition, and leaves arrangements as permanent as coffee grounds in a sink. On this oceloted tree they still think and wonder Ashbery is not always so careless with the proprieties. He can versify or be fine by turns, depending on his mood; and though he doesn't much credit inspiration--"I. . . used to think that I had to wait until I was 'inspired' before I could write, and then I realized that I hardly ever was inspired, so that I'd have to come up with something else," he said in a 1997 interview--his best work is as disciplined and controlled as that of the tightest "strong measures" poets. "Vaucanson," from April Galleons (1987), takes imposture to the brink but leaves it there, amid late Stevensian grandeurs and promontories of elegance the elder Auden glimpsed aglint in the distance in "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno": It was snowing as he wrote. It will take 19 more lines to round off this minuet of lightly flayed
insecurities--knife-thoughts, with neither pages to cut nor commemorative cakes to slice. The anonymous scriptor who allows his thoughts to drift soundlessly onto the page as it snows outside his room is at the mercy of a number of things, not least of which is his own impersonal freedom. He would like a clean break with self-deception but it is not forthcoming. The need (tautological, surely) to bring life to life is, he finds, painful. "It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension / To life, when life is precisely that dimension." To make matters worse, the life he once hoarded now proves unrecoverable: "Life must be back there. You hid it / So no one would find it / And now you can't remember where." Proof that something is wrong is suggested by the appearance of the second person pronoun, Ashbery's dark familiar, which, as in so many of his other poems, provides the tentative "I" underwriting the recessive "he" with an enabling show of shadowy, pusillanimous hands. Clearly, in this dance of the sugar-plum pronomials the double-dream of Self is but a shadowboxer's
pas-de-deux, a way of fencing with identity without having to muster one for the lists. . . . [By] 1738 Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) had exhibited in Paris a mechanical duck which could waddle and splash, beat the air with detailed feathered wings, wag its head, quack, pick up grain, ingest this with swallowing movements, and eventually excrete the residue: for the production of which latter 'it was necessary in a little space to construct a chemical laboratory, to decompose the main constituents [of the grain] and cause them to issue forth at will.' Each wing contained four hundred moving pieces. . . What does an 18th Century French fashioner of mechanical ducks have to do with Ashbery's neurasthenic mise en scène? Only that neurasthenic mises en scène are themselves mechanical contrivances behind which evidence of the human merely flickers, like a custodial flame in a stiff breeze. And that Vaucanson's art could cause to materialize out of moving parts a "clockwork flautist with leather-tipped fingers" who, had he been mechanized to think, might well have had this cross his mind, We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk While it is possible to say of everything this poet has published since
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) that it is vintage Ashbery, it's useful to inquire just what sort of grapes we are talking about. Having brought out no fewer than twelve books of poems (up to and including the current volume,
Your Name Here) over the last quarter century, Ashbery has maintained a consistency of tone and musical asperity virtually unparalleled in postmodern times. Which is to say, that the reader of
Can You Hear, Bird (1995)--the volume in which "See How You Like My Shoes"
appears--will find little that is new in As We Know (1979) that is newer in
A Wave (1985), or in Wakefulness (1988), or in And the Stars Were Shining (1994). Nor has Ashbery himself been all that helpful recently in throwing light on just what constitutes the Ashbery approach to a poem. When pressed by an interviewer from
Bookforum (Fall 2000 issue), the poet could only characterize the "Ashberian model" as a "stop making sense type of poem, which I guess I've encouraged." When I originally started writing I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn't read poetry much anyway. But I also felt that my work was not beyond understanding. It seemed to me rather derivative of or at least in touch with contemporary poetry of the time, and I was quite surprised that nobody seemed to see this. So I live with this paradox: on the one hand, I am an important poet, read by younger writers, and on the other hand, nobody understands me. I am often asked to account for this state of affairs, but I can't. Irvin Ehrenpreis, a dour inspiriter of pieties to which only lip-service was accorded even in the age of Pope, conceded in the course of a discussion of the poet's work up to and including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in The New York Review of Books that "There is room in our literature for John Ashbery." But he didn't leave it at that. "The poems in his new book," he went on to add, are seldom coherent, shapely, or intelligible; neither their sounds nor their rhythms go far to please the ear; they hardly convey the poet's character in the usual sense. Mr. Ashbery may hope to surprise us agreeably with the leaps or turns of his mind from image to insight and back again; and he may challenge us to make the brightest of these connections ourselves. But most of his work will tire nearly all of his readers. Willing to grant that "this poetry has its design," Ehrenpreis was not at all prepared to allow that just because a will to design was present, all manner of sans dessin else could be granted: . . . When one has shown that there is purpose in his method, one has not endowed the method with attributes rightfully to be sought in poetry. Among the muddles of our critics is the assumption that if an author has persuasive theoretical grounds for his literary practice, the reader ought to be satisfied that what the man writes is good. There is no logical connection between these propositions; and in Ashbery's work the case collapses of its own weight, because so many readers are dismayed when they try (intelligently and seriously) to enjoy his poems. . . . Still, quarrel as we might with Ehrenpreis's conclusions, there is less grounds for quibbling when his talk turns symptomatological; and on that score we should look, as he does, at Ashbery's outspoken views on the poet's rather questionable status and reliability in the world. "Ashbery is not so solemn that he misses the absurdity of his enterprise," Ehrenpreis admits. "He knows the visions are illusory, and that his aims contradict one another. Often, therefore, he turns on himself and ridicules the view of the poet as the light of the world." . . . the impressions of the poet in the act of composing are precisely what define his work; the rain that is suddenly evocative for him, the music that drifts through the doorway. This shifting assemblage of changing sensations is his substance. He may well have a theme in mind--a person, an object--but he does not normally render or describe it. He merely supplies the phrases, images that reach him as he contemplates the theme, which of course the reader is not asked to discover. It also imposes, on a phenomenological as well as aesthetic plane, the perspective (attributable to the convexity of the mirror in Parmigianino-esque self-portraiture) that Ashbery has characterized as being "on the outside looking out," a technique whose effect upon the reader is heightened by a deliberate shifting of attention from a poem's motivating occasion to some of the marvelous things fortuitously allowed to surface in the writing of it: . . .Many times I will jot down ideas and phrases, and then when I am ready to write I can't find them. But it doesn't make any difference, because whatever comes along at that time will have the same quality. Whatever was there is replaceable. In fact, often in revising I will remove the idea that was the original stimulus. I think I am more interested in the movement among ideas than in the ideas themselves, the way one goes from one point to another rather than the destination or the origin. Such reliance on aleatory events in the act of composition is not uncommon among so-called New York school poets. A much anthologized Frank O’Hara poem titled “Why I Am Not a Painter” had as its sole content an account of the process by which the poem itself came into being through a creative interchange between himself and the painter Mike Goldberg. It's worth quoting in its entirety since its (no less Creeley-esque) "drive, he sd, for / christ's sake, look / out where yr going" ad hoc-ism is so closely akin to the Ashberian method of operation: I am not a painter, I am a poet. The poem O'Hara anecdotalizes was actually composed between June and August in 1949, and takes up just over four pages of his
Collected Poems. It is titled "Oranges: 12 Pastorals," and its formal character may be described as either prose or very loose Whitmanian free verse, depending on one's terminological bent. We're interested in the language that you call breath, Flow Chart is pretextually disposed to treat of Ashbery's mother's death, yet circumvents that pretext, not in order to evade its determining occasion, but to make use of its disruptions and set about caulking spaces importunistically created by her absent presence with reclaiming and compensatory language. Behind the poem's background lament of "How trivial the music" lies the idea of consecrating a place in poetry for the language his mother's life and death gave rise to. There is no compulsion whatever on the part of the poet to find, or otherwise "ad lib-erate," language capable of translating him across a chasm of ennui opened up by her dying. To be sure, boredom yawns, as it does on all such occasions, as a psychic space demanding to be filled; and, indeed, for as long as Ashbery has been penciling in time's bubble spaces with poetry, he has been pinpointing boredom as the last enemy to be conquered, as a zone of enervation in which skirmishes with swoosh-stripers of the Great Plain are permitted, but only if they taper off before pitched battles occur. And flies still tax us with their lesson: when will we give up? In order to After such knowledge, what equivocation? Surely a fit punishment for having made taffy-pull sentences like these is to be made to serve
them--and in some place notably drabber, more rife with disingenuousness even than here, in this harebrained, right-brain Ashberian-model Atlantic City of the
faux-poem, where they swive and plummet like oversexed lemmings. Yet Ashbery knows that this is the only sense today's poetry can make, and that he can't for the life of him, as distracted from distraction by distraction as he is, stop making it. (Neither does the fact that making poems like
Flow Chart is to him as natural, as apparently uncomplicated as making water, raise his desire level to see his propensities nudged toward diversification.) Which may be why T. S. Eliot's third Quartet, "The Dry Salvages," might seem to some to be echoing through the increasingly empty halls of Ashbery's later verse. Its idiom is, to invoke the terms of Eliot's own phrase from a later quartet, "familiar," "compound" and "ghostly": a form of speech inviting of the reader's sympathies while preserving its aloofness through some recondite ritual of deft equivocation. If
a sponsor must be designated for such a form of speech, it would not be someone like Melville, the lies of whose Confidence-Man (from the 1857 novel of that name) hang nastily upon apocalypse, but some lesser hacker into humanity's hard drive, a magniloquent loser for all seasons who, if John Shoptaw's study of Ashbery's work,
On the Outside Looking Out (1994), is to be believed, is an anonymous and circumspect "homotextualist," cruising men made out of words in poems fashioned, so far as anyone can tell, out of thin air. [Ashbery] has succeeded in creating a body of work that defeats the effort of Criticism to preside over the reading of poetry. Ashbery's poetry is vaporous and steamy and eludes the hermeneutical grasp. To understand Ashbery one can only read more Ashbery, and if the insights that accrue to that reading seem somehow insubstantial once one has departed the text, that is not to be wondered at, for Ashbery is the poet laureate of Spaciness, that touchstone of the sixties Zeitgeist that here has found its mandarin apotheosis. The spaciness is certainly there, but the "sixties Zeitgeist" is somewhat harder to spot, especially since there has never been a "zoned out," Cheech and Chong zaniness about what Ashbery is about. Or at least not since
The Tennis Court Oath, a book Ashbery still thinks needed to be written but wishes fervently someone beside
himself--or less beside himself than he had been when he wrote it--had. For decades now, critics have been not as much concerned with what makes Ashbery run, as
who. If there is a Bloomian strong poet lurking behind the Ashbery modus
operandi, he (or she) has yet to be identified. Beyond such obvious and already much discussed influences as W. H. Auden and Wallace Stevens (along with some lesser known French surrealists of the '50s and '60s, the most frequently named of which is Pierre Martory, a personal friend of the poet's, whose work he has on occasion translated), no smoking gun has been found that might point to a ringer in Ashbery's ancestral woods. . . . [F]irst, I doubt I could add anything of value to the critical literature concerning the certifiably major poets whom I feel as influences. W. H. Auden, chronologically the first and therefore the most important influence, as well as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams at times, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam. . . . Poets who have meant a lot to me at various times are F. T. Prince, William Empson, the painfully neglected English poet Nicholas Moore, Delmore Schwartz (once thought a major poet), Ruth Herschberger, Joan Murray, Jean Garrigue, Paul Goodman, Samuel Greenberg: I could go on, but you get the idea. . . . The idea is of course that "going on" (in the sense of spinning one's wheels) generates its own ideas, and so gets no one anywhere worth arriving at. An influence is but the fitful tracing of a portal: it will peak early in the fuss made over an "in" poet and tends to disappear from the board before "sell orders" can even get out onto the floor of the Exchange. Influences tend to cancel each other out but some influences are more equal than others, and so wink at the brim more insistently. Elizabeth Bishop, for instance, whom Ashbery is not loath to acknowledge as a corporate muse, seems often to occupy the seat of Chief Inspirational Officer: A cold spring:
Of much greater value to an understanding of how poetry comes into the world is the role played by that "smaller group [of poets] whom one reads habitually in order to get started; a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down. . .poets I have at some period turned to when I really needed to be reminded yet again of what poetry is." And who might they be? Well, to anyone who has been reading Ashbery more or less continually since
Some Trees and Rivers and Mountains, their names are likely to come as something of a shock. To cut the suspense short, they are: John Clare, Thomas Lovell
Beddoes, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, David Schubert,
and--bonus points in part withheld--Raymond Roussel, "for whom I feel enormous empathy, though I can't say that reading him ever directly inspired me to write. The influence came in a curiously backward and indirect way, so that I was only conscious of it much later, and am still discovering traces of it I hadn't realized were there." Influences matter only when their matter is of little influence. Granted nothing could be more
"Ashberian" than that, but damn it, Alfie, what's it all
about? Unfortunately, I'm not very good at "explaining" my work. I once tried to do this in a question-and-answer period with some students of my friend Richard Howard, after which he told me: "They wanted the key to your poetry, but you presented them with a new set of locks." That sums up for me my feelings on the subject of "unlocking" my poetry. I'm unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled. . . On occasion when I have tried to discuss the meanings of my poems, I have found that I was inventing plausible-sounding ones which I knew to be untrue. . . (Other Traditions, 1) . This note of plaintiveness, if not distinctively Ashberian, is plucked from a chord we've heard before. Eliot has sounded it, as has Stevens, Hart Crane, Samuel Beckett and a host of other selectively tongue-tied Esperantists of the Neue Zeitgeist. Those poets who don't sound it tend routinely to be the "No ideas but in things" people, and even they lament, as has Robert Creeley, both in verse and out of it, poetry's resistance to being claimed as occupied territory: I've said I feel myself to be a poet who is given to write. And I'm even awkward about using that designation, that is, to call myself so, a poet--because I do not feel I have that decision in it. Yet the complexity of the dilemma seems to me a very real one. How shall we understand [William Carlos] Williams' painfully marked insistence just before the close of "The Desert Music": I
am a poet! I But in his haste to
disclaim Ashbery may have filed his own claim to a fait accompli (largely ignored in America) that has been shaping verse in the United States since the end of World War II. A switching of roles has occurred between poetry and criticism, which American academe's tryst with French Theory over the last 35 years confirms. It used to be criticism's task to run the power grid of interpretation in the arts, and that of poetry, painting, and music to express, articulate, and where possible
nail reality, wherever one caught it flicking its tongue or baring its fangs. It is now apparent that what seems foreign, disproportionate, even
ugly about much of the verse that got written in this period, having taken off in the flight path of the Whitman revolution, was later diverted, first, through the Poundian rain forest and then, more wrenchingly, the Carolinian outback, home to Black Mountain's foundering fathers (and, in the wake of the expulsion from Eden during the mid-'50s, strict constructionists). Once there, this phenomenon (now no longer a revolution but a
fait accompli) found itself gasping on the strand, where the only audible poetic strains (where once the "desert music" of W. C. Williams had wafted) were those of the Beats and their love-children, the rock poets of the '60s. In the wake of these developments and the interregnum they gave rise to, the rather narrow enthusiasms of the youth movement all but put an end to technically articulate poetry's business as usual. In its place was a Berlin wall of sound crescendoing into one disconcerting rock festival after another. This depressing state of affairs continued until the early '70s, when, along with other more promising (if only because more literate) sounds, the sussurant wave-runs of Ashbery and his catamarans, at times almost rivaling the
Water Music of Handel or Telemann in sonic elegance, but not infrequently suggesting
Peri Bathous played on a water closet and dually conducted by Stockhausen and Cage, could once again be heard over the din. Of handedness and the Brothers Handedness, Reacting superficially, the anti-Ashbery claque will no
doubt scream "foul" and raise their dog-eared copies of Stein's
Tender Buttons (with all their pages uncut) into the air, as though a half-dozen of one
were enough to deep-six the other. It would be useless to say to such a rabblement: Yes; of course the poet who wrote "A French Stamp" has
Tender Buttons under his belt and probably a good deal more of that unreadable excelsior with which
The Making of Americans and other Steinian doorstops are stuffed to exploding. But
Tender Buttons as depth-of-field is hardly Tender Buttons interposed as
meaning--not to mention the fact that by thrusting the soundstage of Stein's ship-in-a-bottle far beyond her achieved level of word-painting in that 1923 work, Ashbery has made it virtually impossible for anyone to imagine his work sharing the same aural, let alone kinetic, space with hers. Which is not to say they don't share a tropism for what Shoptaw terms the "homotextual," or the "misrepresentative poetics" of encrypting homosexual experience. But take away the attraction to Stein's use of "narrative abstraction" (to borrow another term of Shoptaw's), and it appears that more has been made of Ashbery's having acknowledged in 1957 that Stein's
Stanzas in Meditation had furnished him with "a general, all-purpose model which the reader can adapt to fit his own set of particulars" than the superficial commonalities detectable in their styles warrants. Of handedness and the Brothers Handedness, Language, even nonsensical
language--which these three lines are not--cannot help but coagulate into clouds of connotation when having no other purpose than setting words and their associations to dancing. Handedness, the Brothers Handedness, even-handedness, back-of-the-handedness, handy-handedness, jerk-of-the-hand to a handful of jerks, jerks in a circle, circle jerk. How far should this sort of thing be carried? Is it possible, once started down this road, to stop? Who knows, but either way, continuing or discontinuing is an oft-told tale, or rather two oft-told tales, and each a tale of yore of necessity a yore-ish tale; but then, what tale isn't? The Brothers Handedness sound sinister in a playful sort of way (or is it playful in a sinister kind of way?), though not at all grim, even if it's hard not to have the Brothers Grimm cross one's mind en route
to--where? To the fifth century, perhaps, when Yore, one of its more noted scribes, inked in details as was his wont. (A noted scribe he must have been or how would we know of him 1600 years later?) But wait, haven't we been down a road very much like this before, one slickly traveled by a really smooth postmodern negotiator of road-slicks and the rainbow patches their language lays
down--not in poetry, but in the prose of one Donald Barthelme? Innovation begins with a finding. Barthelme had to find an unoccupied space where narrative had not previously been. The visual arts had preceded him; he followed. He would be the Max Ernst of writing. His subject matter would be versions of reality posited by the world--its language, its images, its tacit assumptions, its public being--that he would then inspect with an irony and a wit as diligent as Ernst's. He then goes on to show, proleptically and in high-definition detail, how the Barthelme sentence got its spots: The opening sentence of the entry on menstruation (Règles) in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie is purest Donald Barthelme. "Les Groenlandoises," it says, "n'ont point de règles." The voice is disembodied, oracular, in full assurance of its authority, and unembarrassed that it is speaking nonsense. For Flaubert, connoisseur of such idiocies, this sentence would have been simple evidence that the Enlightenment frequently talked through its hat. The historian of science sees in this bogus assertion the stubborn persistence of medieval credulity. Now that we have Barthelme's deployment of such sentences, one after another, as if intoned through a surrealist megaphone, we can see in it one of the surest strategies of his art. And that of Ashbery, though the "full assurance of its authority" has suffered some dilution at the hands of forces unknown and disadvantages brokered by dilatory opportunism and embalmed cliché. The typical Ashbery utterance (it's not always a "sentence") sounds something like this bit of Forrest Gump-erei, from "Eternity Sings the Blues" (1995): "If I ever found myself here again I'd do something / about fixing the holes in the landscape / and healing the sick, though there's about / as much chance of that as finding a used lottery ticket in a dungheap." Or this, from "Point Lookout" (same year): "For this we must become hedgehogs again, blindly entertaining all the philosophy of light." Each served up without the megaphone, but heavy on intonation, with a side of surrealism. But then there's this, from "Lost Profile" (2000): As if the air were pure lightning "Lost Profile" lives in a different drawer of the vanity dresser than the other two verse samples, if only because its clichés sound less recycled than made to endure a facelift. Rather than
blow smoke rings through the wax lips of American surrealism, the speaker of this canny aside stirs a gallimaufry of Chekhov, Cavafy, Barthelme, Beckett, and other unnamed, even unnameable, literary savors, all without for a moment convincing us that the spent casings of emotion littering the floor are not in fact blanks, or that what we've just read is not an elaborate simulation of regret of no greater moment than a second's second thought. Lynn Keller, citing some of Ashbery's own comments on his verse, writes that "Throughout his long poems [he] is interested in the 'inaccuracies and anomalies of common speech'; with a kind of torquing of usual usage he renews the resources of the banal and clichéd language as he tries to get at 'a general all-purpose experience. . .in which anybody can see reflected his own private experiences without them having to be defined or set up for him.'" The woman with the confused soul keeps calling. Fault
such music, if you can. Though wafted in from a farther room, its tight phrasing
seems pre-fitted to the ear it strikes. Its title may have been chosen to keep the troops intimidated ("On First Listening to Schreker's
Der Schatzgräber," from the 1994 collection And the Stars Were
Shining), but a poem exuding this much self-confidence is capable of cutting a formidable swath through the stoutest ranks of suspicion and contempt. Every line seems to radiate with a bravura whose smirk declares, "Meaning or just being doesn't do it for me. After years of watching other poets toss and turn on beds of hot coals or cold nails, I've found something better, something
cool that only I can pull off reliably, time after time." Given the number of imitations both outright and subtle that he has consistently flooded the poetry magazines and anthologies with, such a show of flattery in its sincerest form makes it hard to argue that Ashbery, pale Galilean though he may in no way be, hasn't conquered. Life in Japan is one of the most famous with all these --that fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos, whether strutted in the original recipe of an Irvin Ehrenpreis or cock-a-doodle-doed in the "extra crispy" of a James Longenbach? Perhaps the answer to these questions has been staring us in the face and for one reason or another we've not seen it for what it is. It might very well be this: Ashbery has figured out how to hot-wire the willing reader's central nervous system by using the conducting plates and foil of language to bypass all the standard conduits of ignition--contextual recognition, predictable sequencing of "argument," and dictional homogeneity. William Burroughs did it rather crudely with "cut-ups"; Ashbery, being his own cut-up, does it with the smoke and mirrors of what has to be the most finely modulated and tonally sophisticated verbal Musak ever to be piped in to the elevators carrying the high-tech American soul to capitalist Nirvana. It is drawn from every tributary of modern psychographia except the popular or "rube" monoculture whose effluent is TV and Hollywood movies, and which courses through caverns measureless to man, down to the sunless sea of Monday Night Football and the Country Music Awards. It is not only packed to the gills with talk, its gills are stuffed to bursting with all the overbuilt subdivisions of yatter-table talk, shop talk, small talk, talk about talk. The Ashbery page is arguably the noisiest page in all American poetry. If Wallace Stevens was the Loyola of hedonism, Ashbery is the Melanchthon of navel-gazing. But it's all High Table stuff. Even when the talk doesn't center on esoterica like Schreker's Das Schatzgräber or William Byrd, poems like "Unreleased Movie" (from April Galleons) and "Military Pastoral" (from Can You Hear, Bird), in which a discernible shifting down from the arcane occurs, read more as though a high chair were being pulled up to the High Table than the High Table were being deserted altogether. (E.g., the poem "Mutt and Jeff," from And the Stars Were Shining, sports a Hölderlin epigraph.) All of which makes it difficult to tell not when Ashbery isn't writing well--"See How You Like My Shoes" or "The Decline of the West" shows how small a problem that represents--but just what distinguishes good Ashbery verse from his better or best verse. The fastidious reader will experience no minor frustration in trying to figure out how this splendidly tonsured peruke, titled "Free Nail Polish-- Cool enough. Granted, --differs substantially from this layered triumph, "The Laughter of Dead Men": Candid jeremiads drizzle from the lips, --or this truly unbeatable, knock-your-socks-off boule-de-joie, from the 1988 title poem "Wakefulness": Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me. The man who would call what has just been cited "a featureless wordscape with no phraseography to speak of" would, to quote Randall Jarrell, "boil his babies up for soap." He would also have no idea what constitutes poetry in this or any age, regardless of how many hours he has logged in becoming
au courant with what is currently chasing the rabbit around the track in poetry circles. |
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