JOHN ASHBERY*
In a review of The Double Dream of Spring which first appeared in
Poetry, Harold Bloom asserted that, on the basis of a poem like
"Fragment," chances "are very good that John Ashbery will come to
dominate the last third of the century as Yeats dominated the first." I
want to argue, however, that the title poem of Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror marks the culmination of a phase of the poet's work
still largely unrealized in "Fragment" and the other poems which
Bloom has graphed as Ashbery's major strain-that is, from "The
Skaters" (Rivers and Mountains) through "Soonest Mended,"
"Evening in the Country," "Sunrise in Suburbia," and "Parergon"
(The Double Dream of Spring) to Three Poems. I would shift the
emphasis from the too elusive and self-referential "Fragment" and
the too diffuse, though beautiful, ThreePoems to works more realized
in terms of the reader, such as "Self-Portrait." I write this aware that
criticism of Ashbery still "remains largely a project" yet certain, as
Alfred Corn suggests, that "everyone ought according to his lights
and darknesses, forge ahead with interpretations-responsible and
as little 'forged' as possible."
Though I agree that Ashbery at his best, as in "Self-Portrait," is
as good a poet as, say, Yeats or Stevens, this is not to say that most,
or even much of Ashbery is as good; his present oeuvre doesn't
approach the scope and bulk of Yeats's or Stevens'-whose does?
And Ashbery will not, I think, dominate the last third of the century
John Ashbery, SelfJPortrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Viking Press,
1975. 83 pp. $5.95.
John Ashbery, Houseboat Days. New York: Viking Press, 1977. 88 pp. $7.95.
Contemporary Literature XXI, 1
0010-7484/80/0001-0118 $1.00/0
1980by the Boardof Regentsof the Universityof WisconsinSystem
(all this sounds like a horse race!) because at worst, as in much of
Double Dream and even in Self-Portrait, he is just plain bad. For
instance, what is one to think of the facile irony and gratuitous
language of these lines from "It Was Raining in the Capital" (Double
Dream):
Until now nothinghad been easy,
Hemmed in by all that shitHorseshit,dogshit,birdshit,manshitYes, she rememberedhavingsaid it,
Having spoken in that way, thinking
There could be no road ahead,
Sobbinginto the intractablepresenceof it
As one weeps alone in bed.
Marcel Duchamp once said that art should irritate; however the
above, though irritating, is inexcusable under any aesthetic banner,
as is the ingratiating ingenuousness of the speaker in "Ode to Bill"
(Self-Portrait):
Or, to take anotherexample:last month
I vowed to write more. Whatis writing?
Well, in my case, it's gettingdown on paper
Not thoughts,exactly, but ideas, maybe:
Ideas about thoughts.Thoughtsis too granda word.
Ideas is better, thoughnot preciselywhatI mean.
SomedayI'll explain.Not today though.
Another highpoint in the evolving self-consciousness of the Contemporary American Writer! And yet, because Ashbery is a poet who
takes chances, this is not surprising. Perhaps it is even inevitable.
Only Stevens and Crane (and Pound unwittingly) in this century
have risked appearing as "poetasters" as often as Ashbery. But
Ashbery does so in a completely novel manner: not the manner of,
say, Stevens who will see how many "sounds of the letter C" he can
force into a single line, or of Crane who will impact a line with so
many associations (not a few known only to him) that even the Rock
of Gibraltar couldn't stand up under such a density of intention.
Ashbery's excesses are of a different sort.
The characteristic Ashbery poem seems to be an intentional
mixture of good and bad, wherein lines of masterful phrasing and
perception are violently juxtaposed against lines of sheer doggerel
ASHBERY
I
119
and debris. "Le livre est sur la table" from Some Trees opens: "All
beauty, resonance, integrity, / Exist by deprivation or logic / Of
strange position." In a nutshell, then: the sudden juxtaposition of the
sublime and base begets beauty. Or, more obliquely: "Might not
child and pervert / Join hands, in the instant of their interest." The
point is that when the ratio of good/bad is highest or, more precisely,
when the poetry and "filler" function in aesthetic harmony, then the
poems reveal a poet of considerable power and originality. "SelfPortrait" is just such a poem, which is not to say that it is a flawless
masterpiece. It is not "Sailing to Byzantium" or "Sunday Morning"
because, first of all, it is a long poem and as everyone knows, long
poems are by definition imperfect. A poem that exceeds one
hundred lines, Poe reminds us, is a contradiction in terms; but
Coleridge knew that "a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought
to be, all poetry." Secondly, this particular poem is not concerned
with the creation of something perfect. As Ashbery wryly comments
in "Dido," the first of "Two Sonnets" (The Tennis Court Oath):
"Though I say the things I wish to say / They are needless, their own
flame conceives it. / So I am cheated of perfection."
"The Tomb of Stuart Merrill" from Self-Portrait includes this
self-reflexive, and even self-congratulatory, "prose" stanza:
I have become attractedto yourstyle. You seemto possesswithinyourwork
an airof total freedomof expressionandimagery,somewhatinterestingand
puzzling.After I readone of yourpoems,I'malwaystemptedto readandreread it. It seems that my inexperienceholds me back from understanding
your meanings.
As the struggling reader-speaker admits, there is a radical aesthetic
at work in Ashbery's poems, an aesthetic which, to be simplistic, is
willing to embrace all the detritus of contemporary American life
and language because it exists, because it is out there. This, in turn,
follows from the assumption that the poem exists not in some
immaculate sphere but as an object in this world, our post-McLuhan
landscape which includes Time magazine and Mary Hartman and
disco music and so on ad infinitum, ad nauseum. "He had mistaken
his book for garbage," muses the narrator of "Europe." What this
means in aesthetic terms, though, is that the poet who attempts to
register as precisely as possible the nuances of his particular
consciousness along with whatever comes into that consciousness
must not exclude some word, image, or idea because it is not
120
|
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
"poetic," because it does not fit into his preconceived notion of what
the poem should be. Thus, in the "New Spirit," Ashbery says: "I am
to include everything: the furniture of this room, everyday expressions, as well as my rarest thoughts and dreams." An aesthetic of this
sort which asserts the pristine integrity of the poem is staggering
indeed.
In "Cezanne's Doubt," Maurice Merleau-Ponty speculates on
just this kind of stance with characteristic penetration:
He speaks as the first man spoke and paintsas if no one had ever painted
before. Whathe expresses,therefore,cannotbe the translationof a clearly
defined thought, since such clear thoughtsare those which have already
been utteredby ourselvesor others. "Conception"cannotprecede"execution." Only the work itself, completedand understood,is proof that there
was somethingratherthan nothingto be said.
The poet's "rage for order," then, is to find the poem "as it takes
form" in the world, to capture that spontaneous organization of
things we perceive as we perceive them. The "execution" is the
"conception"; the act of writing is itself the poem. It is as if one were
to deduce an aesthetic from Eliot's famous notion of how a poem
comes into being:
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly
amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is
chaotic, irregular,fragmentary.The latterfalls in love, or readsSpinoza,
and these two experienceshave nothingto do with each other, or with the
noise of the typewriteror the smellof cooking;in the mindof the poet these
experiencesare alwaysformingnew wholes.
The difference is that whereas Eliot is concerned with "amalgamating" or with "forming new wholes" out of disparate experience,
Ashbery is concerned simply to register the experience with as much
immediacy and precision as possible, and then leave it to the reader
to "amagamate" or "make it whole" for himself. That this is both an
interesting and a somewhat puzzling aesthetic goes without question.
The contemporary reader, fat on the almost instantaneous pleasures
of an advanced capitalist culture, regards these kinds of demands on
his attention and "understanding" with inevitable wariness. What is
he to do with a poet who, while wondering if "meaning could be cast
aside some day / When it had been outgrown," is simultaneously
screaming (under his breath of course): "I will tell you nothing!
ASHBERY
|
121
Nothing, do you hear?" But it is against just this sort of resistance
that Ashbery's aesthetic triumphs, so that
as the discoursecontinuesandyou thinkyou arenot gettinganythingout of
it, as you yawnandrubyoureyes andpickyournose or scratchyourhead,or
nudge your neighboron the hardwoodenbench, this knowledgeis getting
throughto you, and takingjust the formit needs to impressistelfuponyou,
the formsof yourinattentionandincapacityor unwillingnessto understand.
For it is certainthat you will rise from the bench a new person, and even
before you have emergedinto the fulldaylightof the streetyou willfeel that
a changehasbegunto operatein you, withinyourveryfibersandsinews...
This strategy, with its dialectical mode, finds its consummate
expression at the very beginning of Three Poems:
I thoughtthatif I couldput it all down, thatwouldbe one way.And nextthe
thoughtcame to me that to leave all out wouldbe another,and truerway.
clean-washedsea
The flowerswere.
These are examplesof leavingout. But, forgetas we will, somethingsoon
comes to stand in theirplace. Not the truth,perhaps,but-yourself.
Although Ashbery here suggests two ways of making a poem, both
modes are simply facets of the same aesthetic, and that aesthetic,
whether it is "to put it all down" or "leave [it] all out," asserts that
the poem is not a whole unto itself but a function of the dialectic
between what the artist has expressed (not necessarily what he
intended) and what the reader actively realizes.
When the poem by definition remains in a raw state ("a l'etat"),
there are going to be moments, especially in a long poem, when this
aesthetic fails and the poem suffers. The obvious excesses of
Ashbery's aesthetic are, then, "Europe" (leaving it all out) and
Three Poems (putting it all down). "Self-Portrait," however,
incorporates both modes in a dialectical relationship. Corn comments:
A typicalextendedpoem will launchitself, or maybewake up to find itself
alreadyin transit,throwout a fertilesuggestion,makeconnections,go into
reverse, change key, short-circuit,sufferenlightenment,laugh, nearlygo
over the edge, regarditself with disbelief,irony, and pathos, then sign off
with an inconclusivegesture.
122
|
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
This is an accurate description of the dynamics of Ashbery's long
poems, but it fails to do the necessary evaluating, to criticizethe work
so persuasively understood. This is not surprising. Both critics and
poets have been trying to understand what Ashbery has been up to
since he began writing. But if we no longer doubt the authority and
integrity of his work, we still have not effectively come to terms with
the work itself from a critical standpoint. As with all "original"
artists, critics for many years (excepting Howard, Bloom, and a few
others) have done nothing but "criticize" his work albeit without
understanding it; now that they finally understand the Ashbery
poem, none of them wants to criticize it.
But (as Jarrell knew) criticize we must, if we are to get any
perspective on Ashbery's poetry at all. To return, then, to the
negative implications of his aesthetic-when the risk fails, the poem
suffers. For instance, I can't imagine anyone admiring the manner in
which Ashbery uses the word "asshole" in the following passage
from "Self-Portrait":
"Play"is somethingelse:
It exists, in a society specifically
Organizedas a demonstrationof itself.
There is no other way, and those assholes
Who would confuse everythingwith theirmirrorgames
Whichseem to multiplystakesand possibilities,or
At least confuse issues by meansof an investing
Aura that would corrodethe architecture
Of the whole in a haze of suppressedmockery
Are beside the point. They are out of the game,
Whichdoesn't exist until they are out of it.
The word "asshole" immediately tips us off not to the "suppressed
mockery" but to the pervasive cynicism of this whole passage, a
cynicism which is hardly an attribute of great poetry. The "beside the
point" phrase is a sure indication things aren't perfect here, and the
stocks-and-bonds conceit (parody?) is finally neither interesting nor
good.
But these kinds of failures are unusual in "Self-Portrait,"
although there are other sorts of imaginative lapses, such as
Ashbery's insistence on including critical jargon (lifted usually from
other disciplines) within the poem:
ASHBERY
|
123
This would be the point
Of invadingthe privacyof this manwho
"Dabbledin alchemy,but whose wish
Here was not to examinethe subtletiesof art
In a detached, scientificspirit:he wishedthroughthem
To impartthe sense of novelty and amazementto the svectator"
(Freedburg).Laterportraitssuch as the Uffizi
"Gentleman,"the Borghese"YoungPrelate"and
The Naples "Antea"issue fromMannerist
Tensions....
And so on: art history as poetry. When Allen Tate saw an early draft
of Lowell's Life Studies he said: "But Cal it's just not poetry!" What
would he say about the above passage? This is filler and if it is not as
interesting as Wordsworth's was to Frost, it is acceptable nonetheless
to the tolerant reader not because of its obvious irony but because,
with the hint of a smile, he is readying himself for the next flight of
pure poetry.
And there is poetry of the purest sort in "Self-Portrait" for,
when the gamble pays off, the payments are big-the poetry does
what poetry has always done and, we hope, will continue to do: that
is, "to bring the whole soul of man into activity." What is remarkable
is that Ashbery does it as often as he does, and in such startling
fashion in this last and most jaded third of a century. Who today can
equal the sustained quietness and elegance, the subtle modulations
into metaphor of these lines:
you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realizethe reflection
Isn't yours. You feel then like one of those
Hoffmancharacterswho have been deprived
Of a reflection,except that the whole of me
Is seen to be supplantedby the strict
Othernessof the painterin his
Other room. We have surprisedhim
At work, but no, he has surprisedus
As he works.The pictureis almostfinished,
The surprisealmostover, as when one looks out,
Startledby a snowfallwhicheven now is
Endingin specksand sparklesof snow.
It happened while you were inside, asleep,
And there is no reason why you should have
124
|
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
Been awakefor it, except that the day
Is ending and it will be hardfor you
To get to sleep tonight, as least untillate.
In an age of hysteria and the cult of personality, these lines are a kind
of blessing. They fulfill Coleridge's conditions for "essential
poetry": "first, that not the poem we have read, but that to which we
return with the greatest pleasure" possesses genuine power; second,
that none of the lines "can be translated into other words of the same
language without diminution of their significance."
And yet, what is radical about the above passage is not its
complex of tone and trope but its lack of overt artifice. The poem
unfolds from the previous "art history" passage to the above so
swiftly, and with such ease, that one almost forgets what one has
read. In Richard Howard's terms, this is truly "a poetry of
forgetting." Or to extend his argument: in most of Ashbery's work
from Rivers and Mountains to Self-Portrait the voice not only carries
the verse, but the verse is almost nonexistent. Hence, although
"Fragment" is written in ten-line stanzas, the enjambment and
stanzaic structure of that poem result no more in verse than the prosy
lines and "paragraph" stanzas of "Self-Portrait" do. And this makes
sense with respect to a poet like Ashbery who, because of his
epistemological standpoint ("All time / Reduces to no special
time"), must deliberately avoid all rhetorical emphasis.
To accomplish this de-emphasis of rhetorical stress, Ashbery
flattens the language in order to produce, if possible, an absolutely
even tone, a tone which strives for a sameness of texture so that, as
"Some Trees" puts it, "These accents seem their own defense." It is
not unlike the way in which painters after the pictorial revolutions of
Gauguin and Cezanne sought to stress the surface density, or
flatness, of the painting in order to acknowledge the literal
properties of the painting itself. This kind of tonal flatness, or selfreferential quality, reaches its extreme in the Ashbery of "Clepsydra."
But what Bloom has said of "Clepsydra" is true, for me, of
"Fragment" and much of Double Dream-"the tone, however
miraculously sustained, (is) too wearying," with the net result that
the poem "gives the uncanny effect of being a poem that neither
wants nor needs readers." Of course, excesses of this sort are not
uncommon in the work of many contemporary painters, especially
that school with which Ashbery has been so laboriously associated,
the New York Abstract Expressionists. Unlike most contemporary
ASHBERY
|
125
painters, Cezanne knew that, given the impulse to accentuate the
picture surface, it was still necessary to retain the illusion of "deep
space"-what Frye calls "design"-or the painting would become
merely decorative. It is precisely the lack of this "deep space" which
makes poems like "Clepsydra" and "Fragment" inaccessible. In
"Self-Portrait," Ashbery counters the extreme hermeticism of the
earlier poems by reintroducing tonal modulation and, more
importantly, by reinstituting a quasi-narrative context.
In his preface to The Art of the Novel, Henry James compares
the imagination to a balloon which is tied to the earth. The reason
"Self-Portrait" succeeds where others of Ashbery's longer poems
fail is that here the poet has some "earth" to which his peculiar
imagination is attached. Most Ashbery poems begin in medias resthat is, the voice and ensuing associations start from some undiscernible time and place and move, via an "allusive, associative and
disjunctive method" (Corn), to some equally undiscernible time and
place with the end result that the reader is left somewhat interested,
but thoroughly puzzled. In "Self-Portrait," Ashbery uses as "base
situation" the painting by Parmigianino from which his imagination,
essentially meditative, can depart and to which, after his discursiveness has carried him away from the "earth," he can safely return:
How manypeople came and stayeda certaintime,
Uttered light or darkspeech that becamepartof you
Like light behindwindblownfog and sand,
Filteredand influencedby it, untilno part
Remainsthat is surelyyou. Those voices in the dusk
Have told you all and still the tale goes on
In the form of memoriesdepositedin irregular
Clumpsof crystals.Whose curvedhandcontrols,
Francesco,the turningseasonsand the thoughts
That peel off and fly awayat breathlessspeeds
Like the last stubbornleaves ripped
Fromwet branches?
In this magnificent passage, the sudden invocation to Parmigianino,
exemplifying the kind of tonal modulation mentioned before,
signals the speaker's return to his "subject."
Structurally, this oscillatory "mental action" is not unlike that
which occurs within most of Wordsworth's longer poems. However,
whereas in Wordsworth's poetry the axial, or centripetal force is an
emotion-man's relationship to Nature and the sustaining power
126
|
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
thereof or, as Bloom observes, the quest for an "earlier glory"-the
axis of "Self-Portrait" (the painting) is strictly incidental, and not the
source of the poet's themes and associations. Put another way, the
adoption of a subject is simply a strategy, a way of getting things said.
Although Ashbery is concerned with a "possible sublimity"
(Bloom), it does not function in the way that an "earlier glory" did
for Wordsworth since, as early as "Some Trees," Ashbery knew that
"the world not only contains the poem but is his poem" (Howard). In
"The Painter," his answer to Stevens' "Idea of Order at Key West,"
Ashbery first endeavored to explain "his prayer / That nature, not
art, might usurp the canvas," but
Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white.
Ashbery's central vision, or poetic source, from Some Trees to SelfPortrait, has always been that "only in the light of lost words / Can
we imagine our rewards." Or as he reiterates in the penultimate
paragraph of "The System" (Three Poems): "we are rescued by what
we cannot imagine."
Thus the great moments in "Self-Portrait" come when the poet,
unencumbered by traditional notions of how to make a poem and
what to say, unencumbered even by his own mannerisms and
strategies, simply lets the poem become itself, thereby maximizing
Steven's dictum that "the theory of poetry is the theory of life":
This thing, the mute, undivided present
Has the justification of logic, which
In this instance isn't a bad thing
Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling
Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result
Into a caricature of itself. This always
Happens, as in the game where
A whispered phrase passed around the room
Ends up as something completely different.
It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike
What the artist intended. Often he finds
He has omitted the thing he started out to say
In the first place. Seduced by flowers,
Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though
Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining
ASHBERY
|
127
He had a say in the matterand exercised
An option of whichhe was hardlyconscious,
Unawarethat necessitycircumventssuch resolutions
So as to create somethingnew
For itself, that there is no otherway,
That the historyof creationproceedsaccordingto
Stringentlaws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplishand wantedso desperately
To see come into being.
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer Prize, the
National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award;
it would not have been surprising then, if Ashbery's latest effort did
not live up to the standards of his previous book. "The danger for the
American poet," Auden once said, "is not of writing like everybody
else but of crankiness and a parody of his own manner." The nemesis
of self-parody, along with his recent canonization by the critical
establishment, is a formidable obstacle that Ashbery must overcome
if he is to continue writing first-rate poetry. Rest assured, however,
that Ashbery is as strong as ever; the proof is his seventh volume of
verse, Houseboat Days, which if not his "very best book" is
nonetheless a representative addition to the canon. And considering
the canon, already a remarkable achievement by any standards, this
is no oblique praise.
Houseboat Days opens with "Street Musicians," a poem which
intimates in inimitable Ashbery fashion what the remainder of the
book will do:
So I cradlethis averageviolin that knows
Only forgottenshowtunes,but argues
The possibilityof free declamationanchored
To a dull refrain,the year turningover on itself
In November, the meat more visibleon the bone.
We recognize the Ashbery of old: the fondness for musical analogies
and shifting metaphors; the subtle sense of irony and understatement; the long, prosy lines; the polished surface. Another familiar
though less obvious feature of his ductus is the peculiarly selfreflexive effect of his poems, as if the severe artifice made the
128 |
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
repressed emotion (or meaning) emerge all the more strongly. This
"leaving out business" is not unlike the strategy Hemingway
developed in his first short stories: "You could omit anything if you
knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the
story and make people feel more than they understood."
Yet as Ashbery himself reminds us, these new poems will be
more literal, the subject more visible; one particularpoem, "And Ut
Pictura Poesis Is Her Name," hints at the complex mechanics behind
this slight shift in intention:
The extreme austerityof an almostemptymind
Collidingwith the lush, Rousseau-likefoliage of its desireto
communicate
Somethingbetween breaths,if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understandyou and desertyou
For other centersof communication,so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.
"Collective Dawns," precariously skirting the Scylla and
Charybdis of confessional verse, rhetoric and sentimentality, illustrates the new Ashbery:
I write you
This bread and butterletter, you my friend
Who saved me from the mill pond of chill doubt
As to my own viability,and fromthe proudvillage
Of bourgeoiscomfortand despair,the mirroredspectaclesof grief.
Although close to the bone, this kind of poem works because of
Ashbery's unique gift for abstraction: the abstract, musical rhythms
provide the necessary distance from the subject so that the emotion,
though powerful, is refracted like light in a prism. "Rhythm
substituting for meaning," as the speaker says in "The Skaters," or,
as he says in "Syringa,"
It too is flowing,fleeting;
It is a pictureof flowing, scenery,thoughliving,mortal,
Over which an abstractactionis laid out in blunt,
Harshstrokes.
ASHBERY
|
129
This does not mean there is a musical surface "behind which lies,
more or less hidden, meaning (Truth)" but, as Roland Barthes
explains in The Pleasure of the Text, "Text means Tissue . . . the
text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this
tissue-this texture-the subject unmakes itself." The poem, then,
avoids the dichotomous categories of descriptive criticism; it cannot
be paraphrased, "known":
Its subject
Matterstoo much, and not enough, standingthere helplessly
While the poem streakedby, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaminghate and disaster,but so turnedinward
That the meaning,good or other, can never
Become known.
Not static but fluid, form is the ceaseless, and seamless, interpenetration of rhythm and meaning, text and tissue.
And yet, when Ashbery's mode of abstraction is not rooted in
sufficient emotion, the rhythm becomes too rarefied, the meaning
too hermetic and, consequently, the poems become like mirrors,
mere surface. This turning inward, turning away from the subject
still remains a problem for the Ashbery of Houseboat Days; there
remain, for instance, dense, opaque lyrics such as "The Grazing
Grain":
The tires slowlycame to a rubberystop.
Alliterativefestoons in the sky noted
That this branchybirthplaceof presidentswas also
The big frigidaire-cum-cowbarn
wheremendicant
And margravealike waitedout the results
Of the naturalelections. So any opennessof song
Was the plainerway. O take me to the banks
Of the Mississippiover there, etc.
The facile irony and hyperbole of this passage, together with other
residual mannerisms in the book-abrupt shifts into colloquial
speech ("Why you old goat! Look who's talkin' ") and labored
neologisms ("human stick-to-itiveness")-will annoy most readers.
Yet these irritating devices are an indispensable aspect of the
Ashbery persona, and in the end, as the speaker of "Collective
Dawns" counsels us, it is the whole, the rhythm of the thing that
counts:
130
I
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
The old poems
In the book have changedvalue once again.Theirblackletter
Fools only themselvesinto ignoringtheirstiff, formalqualities,
and they move
Insatiablyout of reachof bathosand the bad line
Into a weird ether of forgottendismemberments.
For the most part, this self-pronouncement is true of any representative poem in the book: the poem as a whole transcends the sum
of its parts.
Despite evidence to the contrary, notably "The Grazing
Grain," Ashbery's great unacknowledged gift is his sense of humor.
"The comical that does not make us laugh" (Barthes), like his gift for
abstraction, restores a poem to balance. Often, when a poem seems
on the brink of disaster, Ashbery's comic strain flashes like a
Chaplinesque gesture to transform apparent catastrophe into a coup
de maitre. "Daffy Duck in Hollywood," whose precursor surely must
be "Farm Implements and Rutabagas" from The Double Dream of
Spring, exhibits the poet at his wackiest, complete with a catalogue
straight from a Cornell "shadow box" or a Rauschenberg "combine":
La Celestinahas only to warblethe firstfew bars
Of "I thoughtabout You" or somethingmellowfrom
Amadigi di Gaulafor everything-a mint-conditioncan
Of Rumford'sBakingPowder,a celluloidearring,Speedy
Gonzales, the latest fromHelen ToppingMiller'sfertile
Escritoire,a sheaf of suggestivepix on greigedeckle-edged
Stock-to come clatteringthroughthe rainbowtrellis.
Quite unexpectedly, though, the poem ends on a rather subdued,
lyrical note, an indication of where Ashbery is moving in these later
poems:
Life, our
Life anyway,is between. We don't mind
Or notice any more that the sky is green, a parrot
One, but have our earnestwhere it chanceson us,
Disingenuous,intrigued,invitingmore,
Always invokingthe echo, a summer'sday.
Similarly, true to the argument of "The Street Musicians," "The Ice
ASHBERY
131
Cream Wars" begins casually enough, albeit in rather abstract
termsAlthough I mean it, and projectthe meaning
As hardas I can into its brushed-metalsurface,
It cannot, in this deterioratingclimate,pick up
Where I leave off.
to reveal, like a Frost lyric, a deeper intent, a darker nuance:
-only
And the truthbecomes a hole, somethingone has alwaysknown,
A heavinessin the trees, and no one can say
Where it comes from, or how long it will stayA randomness,a darknessof one's own.
This dark kingdom, of course, is the inevitable terrain of the interior
paramour, one which Mark Strand and Ashbery have explored with
depth and precision.
Like Strand, and Stevens before him, Ashbery has a penchant for
metapoetics: that is, for discoursing on the poem as he is in the
process of writing it. In this mode, the genesis and development of
the poetic impulse become an inseparable part of the poem's texture,
its tissue, as in Strand's "Untelling" and Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in
a Convex Mirror." But unlike Strand, because he is closer to
Stevens, Ashbery continually returns in his poems to theoria, the
realm of philosophical speculation. In "What is Poetry," he
meditates on his passion for ideas:
Tryingto avoid
Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving
The mistresswe desire?Now they
Will have to believe it
As we believe it.
Echoing the Stevens of "Asides on the Oboe," Ashbery inverts the
memorable trope of Valery's "Aurora": "What were you up to last
night, / Ideas, mistresses of my soul." Ideas, the life of the mind, are
an essential element of the poem, just as essential as "beautiful
images." For Ashbery, to be concerned with ideas is to be concerned
132
|
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
with the Idea of the poem; poetry, as Stevens said, is the subject of
the poem.
In "Crazy Weather," Ashbery looks back on his poetic history,
the history of his texts:
You are wearinga text. The lines
Droop to your shoelaces and I shallneverwant or need
Any other literaturethan this poetryof mud
And ambitiousreminiscencesof times when it came easily
Throughthe then woods and ploughedfields ...
The speaker, because he can never hope to approximate the "simple
unconscious dignity" of his earlier poems, laments his poetic
maturity and the difficulties that inevitably accompany such a
standpoint: crankiness, self-parody, sterility. In "Syringa," the
speaker asks: "Why pick at a dull pavan few care to / Follow, except
a few birds of dusty feather, / Not vivid performances of the past."
Still, knowing that things must change, that according to the ancient
cycle every season of death is followed by a season of rebirth, the
older poet hints that "some late sample of the rare, / Uninteresting
specimen might still be putting out shoots for all we know" ("Crazy
Weather"). The past infuses the present; poetic history becomes
itself a source of further explorations, further discoveries.
Houseboat Days offers evidence of these explorations and
discoveries in the form of lyrics-"The Other Tradition," "Wet
Casements," "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name," "The Ice
Cream Wars," "Blue Sonata"-and the meditative "Syringa," all as
fine as anything Ashbery has written to date. "Wet Casements,"
probably the strongest of the lyrics, fulfills the difficult promise of
"Street Musicians":
I shall use my angerto build a bridgelike that
Of Avignon, on whichpeople may dancefor the feeling
Of dancingon a bridge. I shall at last see my completeface
Reflected not in the waterbut in the worn stone floor of my bridge.
I shall keep to myself.
I shall not repeat other'scommentsaboutme.
With this severe assertion of humility, Ashbery rejects the dangerous
narcissism of the solipsist. The result is a radical reduction of the
expansive self ecstatically proclaimed in Whitman's "Crossing
ASHBERY
|
133
Brooklyn Ferry," the verse fulfillment of Emerson's sublime word.
Ashbery's achievement is to accomplish this exacting gesture and
thereby lay bare the austere grandeur of a minimal, yet significant
self; "Wet Casements" splendidly answers Barthes' definition of
"bliss" (jouissance): its "split subject . .. simultaneously enjoys,
through the text, the consistency of its selfhood and its collapse, its
fall."
I must mention, finally, the extended "Fantasia on 'The NutBrown Maid' " because it is the most ambitious poem of Houseboat
Days and, hence, demands to be compared with its predecessors.
Having in a sense perfected the kind of poem which found its first
imperfect utterance in "Clepsydra" and "The Skaters" (Rivers and
Mountains) and its consummate expression in "Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror," Ashbery has not been content to crank out diluted
versions of past successes. Well aware of the dangerous implications
of Auden's fatidic statement about American poets, he knows "it
isn't enough / To just go on singing." In order to thrust himself into
new landscapes, new voices, Ashbery has returned to his poetic past,
in this case "Fragment" from The Double Dream of Spring via the
fifteenth-century English lyric, "The Not Browne Mayde." Suffice it
to say that, although "Fantasia" is a frequently wonderful improvisation on "The Nut-Brown Maid," it does not finally stand on its own
terms. Like "Fragment," it is flawed by excessive hermeticism
coupled with a lack of emotional emphasis.
The speaker of "Fantasia" submits that the "Force in the green
wood may have ebbed" and that "not everyone can afford the luxury
of being . . . at the center, / The perfumed, patterned center"; yet
later on in the poem, he claims that "the curve" will include him if he
remains as he is. In the end, though, it does not; the poem does not
coalesce into a whole but remains a collection of fragments, albeit
sometimes dazzling ones. Ashbery's defense:
But probablythe musichad more to do with it, and
The way musicpasses, emblematic
Of life and how you cannotisolate a note of it
And say it is good or bad. You must
Wait till it's over. "Theend crownsall,"
Meaningalso that the "tableau"
Is wrong.
If, as the speaker of "Syringa" insists, the poem does not have to
conform to certain arbitrary, say neoclassical, notions of artistic
134
1
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
merit (assuming Ashbery is punning here on the French critical term
tableau); if we agree to judge a text according to pleasure and
therefore "cannot go on to say: this one is good, that bad" (Barthes),
still we can maintain that the poet has done this before, and done it
better. In a nutshell: "The whole man is waking up" in "Fantasia,"
but he is not yet on his feet.
Houseboat Days does not include a longer poem to compare
with "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"; it does include, however, a
handful of lyrics to satisfy even the most rigorous reader, poems that
show Ashbery unquestionably on his feet and dancing like those
imagined people on that imagined bridge in "Wet Casements." In
these poems, the poet manages to "flash light / Into the house
within," and we again remember there is nothing like an Ashbery
poem just as there is nothing like a Debussy prelude or a Kandinsky
improvisation.
Robert Miklitsch
University of Buffalo
ASHBERY
|
135