It’s time to post the first extended essay, for the eyes of paid subscribers only. Hopefully this one will give a sense of what these longer pieces will be like—and future ones will probably be unlocked, since it’s still the first year after all.
Welcome to Ashberyland, where life feels like a safe if stultifying vacation, landscapes and buildings can transform themselves with equal felicity, and Popeye the Sailor has been granted the ability to control lightning.
Ashbery is arguably the single household name in a field as pluralized as contemporary American poetry appears to be. It may be strange that this poet, whose work is so Europeanized, so surrealistic in atmosphere and esoteric in tendency, should be a fixture of US literature, considering he lacks those demotic qualities of plainspokenness and accessibility that are such desirable American traits (if you ask someone like Billy Collins). I don’t hear people reciting a pithy Ashbery line at parties the way they do with, say, Robert Frost.
It’s true, Ashbery’s poetry is “difficult” and “hermetic” (his word). A given Ashbery text stands independently of our set of reading schemas we have for navigating this or that literary experience. What should we get, for example, out of the first two stanzas of this poem called “Quick Question” from the collection Can You Hear, Bird:
We took to the lake / in small boats. / The once-in-a-lifetime flood / was approaching on dainty, centipede legs. / Something about the gestalt / told me not to release this comment to the wire services / before the various motivations were rehashed.
This was the next day. / Only a few empty cans met the gaze. / “Sprinkle it!” the children advised. / Matter of taste, he thought. / Or matter of boobs.
Perhaps many readers can enjoy the madness for its own sake. Ashbery devotees would encourage you to bracket what the language means for a second, and focus on how nicely the words sound together. The rhythm of “Matter of taste, he thought. / Or matter of boobs” has a regular snap to it. Even in the stark, decisively dry tone of contemporary poetics, a sound pattern runs through “lake,” “dainty,” “day,” “gaze,” and “taste.”
That’s all fine, but to go back to the referents, there’s something funny about a flood disrupting a middle class outing on a lake, and that it approaches on “dainty, centipede legs.” It’s not just the absurd mental image of giving a big volume of water legs; placing the comma after “dainty” means these are not centipede legs that are also dainty, but that daintiness and centipede-likeness are appositive descriptions given to the legs of the flood. None of these words matches the “correct” level of power and portentousness of a natural disaster. The use of a copula verb in “was approaching” keeps the threat pinned to the background of this leisurely tableau, and colors the whole event through the sultry lens of the boat enjoyers.
This is difficult to immediately or directly grasp, but difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Ashbery’s hermeticism doesn’t mean his poetry is strictly meaningless, although they lack thematic specificity. Contemporary classical music seems to have abandoned the tried and true norms of melody, harmony, Sonata form, and all the rest, in favor of experimental compositions that, yes, are the embodiment of depression and anxiety, but also “open up our ears” to new sonic possibilities. In a similar way, Ashbery reads to me as refusing the conventions of lyrical poetry to foreground a specific dimension of literary style for us.
In a word, it’s about the texture.
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