John Ashbery (1927–2017)

Not a complete waste. "Faust" and "Idaho" adumbrate narratives; "The Unknown Travelers" might deploy a metaphor? "Europe" has ambition, and I almost enjoyed "Rain."

And yet, you would do just as well to cut up and re-assemble any favored lines scattered throughout the project, and in most cases would end up with a poem at least as coherent as any that those lines are removed from.

Maybe I lack the receptivity or preparation necessary to appreciate what's going on here, and I'm probably show more imagining things, but there are moments when even the poet seems to share my ambivalence about his endeavor:

"...the child's scream/Is perplexed, managing to end the sentence."
"...all was a bright black void"
"He had mistaken his book for garbage" show less

HOTEL LAUTREAMONT | read 2021-02

Poems collected in "HL" are absurdist, dream-infused. Most are inscrutable: I wonder why the title. I pick up no particular theme or even tone, and primarily read to appreciate specific phrases or images, and the wordplay. There are many puns, though not the variety which prompt laughter, rather bemusement or a question as to why it was used. (And curious if they made the copyediting slower, with readers mistakenly thinking any were errors. I wonder, too, if show more Ashbery would find that amusing.)

Part of my attraction for Ashbery's verse (despite not achieving a strong sense of understanding it) is the many points of intersection in interests: film (Guy Maddine, specifically); the sense that literature was missing the potential of collage (a la WSB); his efforts in producing stageplays alongside Edward Gorey. (Cover design for the 1992 Knopf edition of Lautreamont was a piece by Joseph Cornell.) Strong pointers suggesting that if we both value those things, I should pay attention to other things he's interested in, even if not immediately apparent why.

Reading the verse collected here + random selections from "Uncollected Poems" (such as "Hoboken") + chronology, I found the LOA description quite apt to my experience: colloquial yet dream-like and specific, not easy to grasp yet scans easily.

Ashbery’s poetry challenges its readers to discard all presumptions about the aims, themes, and stylistic scaffolding of verse in favor of a literature that reflects upon the limits of language and the volatility of consciousness. - Poetry Foundation biographical blurb, and I saw that in what I read.

to read:
FLOW CHART
AND THE STARS WERE SHINING
CAN YOU HEAR, BIRD
WAKEFULNESS
GIRLS ON THE RUN
YOUR NAME HERE
UNCOLLECTED POEMS show less

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
By John Ashbery
1990, Penguin Books
Paperback, 96pp

"I know that I braid too much my own / Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me. / They are private and always will be."

Reading John Ashbery's poetry is like taking a highly subjective tour of someone's interior thoughts without guide or compass. Blobs of thought break off and float before our eyes. Metaphors interrupt chains of ideas. Declarations overlap one another. And everywhere language blooms, show more smears of color across sinuous vistas. Aside from the titular poem, which has garnered no shortage of critical acclaim, "Fear of Death" and "No Way of Knowing" stand out as enigmatic containers of consciousness, cloaked in meticulous language. Harold Bloom, a notoriously harsh critic, put Ashbery in the line that extends from Whitman through Hart Crane, and the poems in this Pulitzer Prize-winning collection affirm that pronouncement. show less

I’m intrigued by Ashbery’s obsession with forgetfulness and lost time in Planisphere. So many of the poems in Planisphere suggest speakers who see their lives as if from outside themselves, as debris, or fragments, sources of which they forget. In “The Later Me” the speaker “shrinks” from the earlier version of himself—a version of himself that has been repressed and even wished to be dead. In “B____’s Mysterious Greeting,” the speaker nostalgically dreams of the famous show more French salon Les Deux Magots being located in New England— the first American wilderness—and the intellectual wellspring of Transcendentalism. But Americans writers fled America for Les Deux Magots. I wondered if this was a subtle critique of the kind of American intellectualism (ie Emerson) Ashbery has never cared about in his career—like a Situationist misprision of a Paris map used to navigate the streets of London. Ashbery has always cared more about Surrealism, European poetry, Stevens-style High Modernism, and the urbane. The landscape is a stage (Paris or New England)—“The drawn curtain of a snow shower.” I note the whiteness of such a landscape—and the seeming heteronormative values of the middle class mall shoppers having sex that Ashbery depicts in that landscape. The speaker giggles at his apparent foolishness in expecting difference to happen in this landscape. This is a landscape where the self is erased or hides invisibly in whiteness, among “those self-forgetting trees.” (It might be pushing it, but I picture the Hudson Valley where Ashbery lives). Another image of snow is also linked to the disappearance of someone who desires to make a connection: “Who dials the phone and is further gone into snow/ than the mass of individuals could be?” (“Idea of Steve”). Forgetfulness seems to be linked to self-diminishment and lost time. In “For Fuck’s Sake,” there is the image of people among stalks forgotten by the tide, and in “The Logistics” a visit to the past is seen as “time lost.” One of the perplexing questions I have about all of this is whether or not Ashbery sees forgetfulness and self-erasure as a problem or as an opportunity, and how this ties into his poetics. Meghan O’Rourke, in a piece for Slate advising us how to read Ashbery, finds that "He is the first poet to achieve something utterly new by completely doubting the possibility—and the value—of capturing what the lyric poem has traditionally tried to capture: a crystallization of a moment in time, an epiphanic realization—what Wordsworth called “spots of time.” Ashbery has updated the lyric poem by rejecting this project, finding it fundamentally inauthentic." I think she is right, but I think we are seeing something a little different here. To settle on “a spot of time” is to memorialize and thus to point toward death. Indeed, for some poets, this loss of time, the passage of time, the approach of death, the loss of youth and the experiences of the past, would lead to deeply metaphysical and perhaps somber “August” or “late” poems trying to accept the eventual end-- mutability the most prevalent poetic subject of all time. In “Giraffe Headquarters” he mocks the “tragic, unquestioning, amusing love of youth” and reduces life to pulling on pants over underpants. There is the hint of death in the line “In five months my service expires” but note how it comes through the pastiche filter of consumer culture-- the language of someone discussing a warranty plan or a cable tv package. Given that pastiche, I find it difficult to take seriously the sentimental line that follows it : “Then we shall be together always.” I did an interesting experiment that rewards this reading; I read all of the last lines of the book. Try it. There’s hardly a whiff of deathly pathos. For Ashbery, perhaps all of this loss is a boon? Could it be that what was once a rejection of lyric epiphanic closure (finality) for him (on an aesthetic basis) has been actualized into rejection of closure as death? Planisphere is a book that enacts continuous life affirmation? I think the question is important for me because it helps deepen my understanding of Ashbery’s counter-intuitive model of lyric. show less