Title:
'This Leaving-Out Business': The Poetry of John Ashbery
Author(s):
Charles Molesworth
Publication Details:
The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1979.
p163-183.
Source:
Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Sharon R. Gunton and Laurie Lanzen Harris. Vol. 15. Detroit: Gale
Research, 1980. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type:
Critical essay
Full Text:
COPYRIGHT 1980 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full Text:
The first few books by John Ashbery contained a large proportion of a poetry of inconsequence. Borrowing freely from the traditions of French
surrealism, and from his friends Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, Ashbery tried out a fairly narrow range of voices and subjects. Subject matter,
or rather the absence of it, helped form the core of his aesthetic, an aesthetic that refused to maintain a consistent attitude toward any fixed
phenomena. The poems tumbled out of a whimsical, detached amusement that mixed with a quizzical melancholy. This aesthetic reached an
extreme with The Tennis Court Oath (1962), a book in which no poem makes even the slightest attempt to marshal a rational context or an
identifiable argument. Line follows line without the sheerest hint of order or apparent plan. . . . With the exception of The Tennis Court Oath,
Ashbery's first four commercially published books (the others are Some Trees [1956], Rivers and Mountains [1966], and The Double Dream of
Spring [1970]) included some poems with interpretable meanings and recognizable structures. But reading the first four books together, one is
struck by how precious are those poems that do make poetic sense, surrounded as they are by the incessant chatter of the poems of
inconsequence. Slowly, however, it appears as if Ashbery was gaining confidence for his true project, and, as his work unfolds, an indulgent
reader can see how it needed those aggressively banal “experiments” in nonsense to protect its frailty. Ashbery's later poetry often uses the
traditions of prose discourse, but instead of a poetry of “statement” he has evolved a most tenuous, unassertive language. The first four books,
one feels, would have turned out insufferably banal, or perhaps would have remained altogether unwritten, if Ashbery had faced his subject
directly or made too various or rigorous demands on his limited language. (p. 163)
In some of the poems in [Some Trees], we see a straightforward whimsy such as that often used by Kenneth Koch. The humor remains
deadpan, the juxtapositions being between the high-minded expectations of “art” and the flat, unheroic irony of the disaffected speaker. . . .
Ashbery also includes a few examples of a favorite exercise of the so-called New York school of poets—the formula poem in which a simple
grammatical structure is repeated over and over with bizarre language. This method of generating whimsy may well owe its origin to the surreal
concern with objectif hasard, where the consciously selected “format” is juxtaposed to whatever chance associations the writer can release. . . .
“The vale of dim wolves” and the tragic waltz on “the spitting housetops” [in “He”] typify the imagery of Ashbery's early poetry: arbitrary, coy,
disaffected, “smart.” Moreover, the arbitrary continuation of the poem lies at the center of Ashbery's aesthetic, which seems a flirtation with
nihilism, the fag end Of an autotelic art that apotheosizes symbolism's elevation of style over content. The stochastic movement of the poem
reminds one of the music of John Cage; the levelling of values suggests the painting of Andy Warhol. (pp. 164–65)
Ashbery's poetry sidles up to and slips away from meaning, as each line clearly links to the one before and after it, but the overall context
remains vague and elliptical. Increasingly Ashbery resorts to the contextual devices of prose: pronominals, appositive and subordinate clauses,
logical coordinates, and so forth. But at the same time certain “poetic” devices come to the fore, for example, startling similes, metaphoric verbs,
ambiguous suspensions of predicates, and highly figurative language—what Ashbery calls “the great `as though.'” Often the element of play in
his poetics causes Ashbery to drift into a boring “castles in the air” approach, as if he were testing the limits of significance; likewise, he can
become ponderous when his poetry takes on a pseudophilosophical cast where irony ought to be operating but a sodden rumination drains off
the flow of wit. . . . Each decadent style [suggests Havelock Ellis] must be seen against a classical style from which it has “fallen down,” and
throughout Ashbery's work we catch the dying echoes of English romanticism, especially of those poets most haunted by the past,
Wordsworth and Shelley. These echoes are spawned by Ashbery's relation to language and meaning, a relation that is both tenuous and
diffident, because his feelings are evanescent, and offhanded, and condescending, because his utterance is derivative.
In many ways, Rivers and Mountains is Ashbery's most frustrating book, for it avoids the total meaninglessness of The Tennis Court Oath yet
lacks the richness of The Double Dream of Spring. . . . “ The Skaters,” [however,] is in many ways the quintessential Ashbery poem, the
epitome of his career. Mixing bland, straightforwardly prosaic passages with the most inane, jumbled poetry of inconsequence, “The Skaters” is
a nervous tour de force, a paean to solipsism and an anguished cry against its imprisonments. . . . [A distinctive feature of Rivers and
Mountains] is the poet's tendency to break up the flow of surreal images with occasional axioms, though these sometime take the form of
bemused rhetorical questions or half-resuscitated clichés. This contributes to the “literary” feel of Ashbery's antiliterary attack on meaningful
structure and universalizing particulars. (pp. 165–67)
[“The Skaters”] introduces clearly one of Ashbery's most insistent self-questionings: what should he put in, and what leave out?...But most
evident here is Ashbery's fear of the banal, the “dense or silly,” as well as his craving for the truly fresh, the “novel or autocratic,” and more
importantly his sense that it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between them. The resort to surrealism can be seen as a response
to this fear, for surrealism's levelling of values mixes the mysterious and the mundane, and so seeks to solve the problem by embracing it. At the
same time, the impulse toward inconsequence can be seen as an elaborate flight, a defensive reaction against this fear of meaninglessness; thus
the poet celebrates his own “carnivorous” quest for the meaning he knows will always elude him—unless he abandons his search and accepts
reality as it is. (pp. 167–68)
Other hallmarks of Ashbery's style show up in “ The Skaters” and throughout Rivers and Mountains: most noticeably, a fear of social reality
and a dire, overwrought emotionalism. These are central to the problem of putting in and leaving out, for apparently Ashbery is far from
thoroughly comfortable in the role of aesthete or plangent late romantic. The very ambitiousness of “The Skaters” indicates he wants to
address a wide spectrum of reality, even if large hunks of modern-day reality are simply not assimilable to his style and he must resort to
rhetorical questioning. . . . (p. 168)
Ashbery's Rivers and Mountains demonstrated that he was in many ways still our most private and our most public poet, an egoist and an
exile. But the style was becoming clearer with each book, and the paradoxes, cultural and poetic, were intensifying. Ashbery's poetry had
attained the acme of defensive irony, yet it also offered a way beyond what had become such a limiting aesthetic. Even if Ashbery could not
decide what to put in and what to leave out, at least he had clearly identified this as the problem; however, as the later books were to show,
stating the problem did not always reduce it, let alone dispense with it. “All right. The problem is that there is no new problem,” as he says in
the opening of the last section of Three Poems (1972). What saved Ashbery from the dessication of defensive irony was not just his hunger for
innovation, or his return to romantic themes, but his willingness to come round (and round and round) onto the sources of his own feelings, as
well as to speak openly about the nonappearance of feeling. We can even speculate that his sense of an audience grew more secure and
slightly more public, and he slowly began to abandon his sense of being no more than a coterie poet. But we shouldn't make too much of this;
the hermeticism is part of his project, and Ashbery will probably never achieve the freewheeling humor of Kenneth Koch or the feckless selfdefinition of Frank O'Hara.
Much of the particular feel of Ashbery's poetry comes from the tension between its proselike discursiveness and the random, sometimes
elliptical tenuousness of its associate gatherings. The “self” in a typical Ashbery poem will almost stumble over a defensive displacement of
what is really affecting him; at the same time, reticence never appears as a real possibility. This self wants your attention, but he is counting on
your good taste not to inquire too rigorously or peremptorily. The author-reader contract is a conspiratorial one for Ashbery, as he writes not
simply for those “in the know,” but for those who can dally at will. (pp. 169–70)
But something else that makes up the feel of Ashbery's poetry—it is both the cause and effect of its distinctive quality—can best be described
as its essentially proselike movement. Ashbery eschews the ordinary lyricism of verse, seldom bothering with rhyme or alliteration or strict
meter. At the same time the prosaic run of his sentences is neither Pateresque nor euphuistic. This prose quality goes hand in hand with the flat,
affectless tone as well as with the wan, etiolated attitude. The run of his argument, the flow of the poem's display of itself, suggests a ruminative
impulse at work. Very seldom do the metaphors result from the pressure of emotion, and we miss the metermaking argument that Emerson asked
of poetry. Often the metaphors and similes seem illustrative rather than functional, supplied to the reader as a courtesy, lest the sinuosities of
the ego's search for a balance between a too-ready order and a hopeless chaos weary him beyond limits. This part of Ashbery's aesthetic is
clearly pushed to extremes in his Three Poems, where the dense Jamesian prose is studded with clichés. Obviously Ashbery felt the ordinary
reader's demands, for fresh images and authentic if not desperate emotions, could be utterly denied. . . . Three Poems isn't a hoax, despite the
self-indulgence of its format and its seeming refusal to mediate its feelings into a language public enough to allow response. The work's main
concern is the theme of individuation, the reemergence of a new self out of the old. This theme, central to much contemporary American poetry,
is of course an important modernist preoccupation as well. With Ashbery, the temporal aspects of the theme emerge forcefully, and his book
becomes a severe meditation on time—the trappings of time as well as the trap of temporality. In fact, the two tutelary deities seem to be Walt
Whitman and Marcel Proust. The poem seeks to embrace contradictions by recovering the past; but the recovery, or at least the attempt to
recover, throws up such a welter of conflicting and unresolved emotions that the confusions of the self, rather than its individuation, become
the dominant focus. (pp. 171–72)
Despite its circuitous structure, Three Poems does have at least a partial climax and resolution, though its third and final part, “The Recital,”
returns to a questioning and questing mood. It's in the middle section, “The System,” that Ashbery adduces a tentative “lesson,” for the book
does have a moral hunger at its core, obscured though it often is by epistemological complexity and aesthetic play. (p. 174)
The middle section of Three Poems is Ashbery's grandest attempt to answer the unresolved problems, problems of mind and self and value that
are the legacy of English romanticism. In many ways this is Ashbery's most serious writing, where his project is most insistently questioned;
but at the same time it is where his defensiveness is most perplexing. We can understand his nervousness, his radical ambiguity, and his
polymorphous syntax only if we grant that the book is a grand elliptical commentary on a problem that is never directly stated. As such, this
section presents the reader with the central difficulty in reading Ashbery: one senses an enormous uneasiness, but the high level of play and
the almost choking egocentricity of the language call into question the author's ultimate seriousness. Should the reader be convinced of the
validity, let alone the lucidity, of Ashbery's vision, he still must grapple with how this vision can be mediated into the world of his everyday
experience. The complexity, in other words, might argue not so much for a long tradition of meaning, or a shared cultural crisis, as for a unique,
idiosyncratic formulation that forbids any social application of whatever solace or transformation it might putatively offer. (p. 175)
[The] idealism of Ashbery continues to be his first burden and his final blessing. . . . [Three Poems] is studded with willed and longed-for
consolations, but unremitting dolor is finally its major tone.
Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) contains a mix of poems and one masterpiece, the title poem. There are even a few lyrics that
seem almost “regular,” as if they could have been written by any number of other poets; they have more or less expectable metaphoric
structures and thematic content, and their language is scarcely surreal. This group includes “ Fear of Death,” “Mixed Feelings,” and “As One
Put Drunk into the Packet Boat,” and these poems show how far behind are the puerilities of The Tennis Court Oath. There is another group
of poems that reads like a series of glosses on the complex meditations of Three Poems: “ Ode to Bill,” “Voyage to the Blue,” and “Grand
Galop.” The last of these presents the most succinct expression of Ashbery's concerns and strategies, though it is itself hardly a concise poem.
. . . “ Grand Galop” . . . skillfully weaves a set of reflections together with musings on the very act of gathering and sorting and releasing such
reflections. The poem clarifies much that was baffling and unproductive in the earlier books. However, there are at least two poems of
inconsequence in Self-Portrait, “Sand Pail ” and “Foreboding,” and the dogged nonsense of these two is at least fitfully present in some other
poems as well, the “Farm” sequence, for example. So it is too early to announce that Ashbery has abandoned completely the practice of
surrealism in its most inconsequential aspects. But Ashbery does seem more intent on circling reality than on arbitrarily dipping into its
recesses and surfaces, as if he has realized (and commendably accepted his realization) that the search for patterns is, at the very least, more
interesting than the willful neglect of all consequentialness.
With his masterpiece, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” his circlings become majestic. As the title suggests, this poem is a meditation on
solipsism, but it is also a cry against temporality as well as a celebration of the commonplace attempts we make to overcome its ravages. The
poem is unusual in several respects, at least for Ashbery. For example, it is a rare instance of his announcing a fixed subject for a poem, in this
case the Renaissance painter Parmigianino's masterpiece of “distorted” perspective. Also, Ashbery quotes not only Vasari on Parmigianino's
work, but a modern art historian as well, gracefully blending in these “objective” reports with his own thoroughly subjective reading of the
painting. . . . But what provides the masterly dimension of the work is its philosophical seriousness. Ashbery's connoisseur's eye and his deep
affection and puzzlement in the face of Parmigianino's art have found ample expression through a poetry that draws on both the “ordinary
language” philosophy of the British tradition and the phenomenology of modern French and German thinkers. But the philosophical reflections,
questions, and formulations are all lightly cast; the poem never resorts to a technical vocabulary. And the meditation on art serves admirably to
focus the poem's energies as they arise out of a grappling with everyday experience and the “classic” problems of epistemology and time. (pp.
176–77)
[What] art offers, especially an art redeemed from temporal dissolution, is a radical form of “otherness,” an evidence of another human will and
consciousness, much like ourselves perhaps, but insistently other, hence again mundane and mysterious. This otherness spreads out from the
“enigmatic finish” of art to our common activities. . . . This is the poem's central insight, its highest truth, and its most reassuring consolation,
suspended as the poem is between slight and profound changes, near and remote distances. “The ordinary forms of daily activity” have
attracted Ashbery all along, as if the aesthete in him needed just this ballast to steady him in the swells of self-exploration. (pp. 178–79)
The absence of sustaining warmth and integrating knowledge will always be Ashbery's true subject, his lasting concern; for him nothing is
more fundamental. The surfaces of mundane reality are reality, yet only our much more than superficial reflections can make us realize that, and
Ashbery's poetry will probably always be suspended between this admission of defeat and a calm claim of victory. (p. 179)
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Molesworth, Charles. "'This Leaving-Out Business': The Poetry of John Ashbery." The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American
Poetry. Charles Molesworth. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1979. 163-183. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Sharon R.
Gunton and Laurie Lanzen Harris. Vol. 15. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Mar. 2013.
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