Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet

NOTES

1 Two examples that consider Ashbery as a love poet writing to a male lover but do not figure homophobia or the particularity of homosexual desire into their discussions are John Keeling's "The Moment Unravels" and Charles Altieri's "Ashbery as Love Poet." Altieri claims that in love poetry "Demonstrating one's seriousness as a poet becomes inseparable from demonstrating a seriousness as a lover responsive to the ways in which the beloved leads the imagination beyond particulars" (31). While this may be a real concern with connecting to an audience, it squashes the particularity of gay desire into the particularity of the beloved. These particulars are not particular in the same way: while a poet may avoid merely describing the beloved in order to invite readers into his poem, and make himself serious as a poet, we must note, for instance, that Ashbery as a love poet never proposes marriage or seeks to define or reflect his love through reproduction. These are cogent, central, and manifest particulars that cannot be brought "beyond particulars." Altieri proposes a fine way to teach Ashbery's poetry, and his approach is not hobbled by its lack of specificity, but more attention to just such particularities could only strengthen his readings. Keeling on the other hand, while recognizing the beloved as male, recognizes nothing else in "Litany" that could make this observation interesting or worthy of attention. He bludgeons the homoerotic scenes the poem offers into bland comments on the passage of time. For Keeling, acknowledging Ashbery's sexuality is just a step he makes in order not to be patently wrong.

2 Growing up gay did make it into her list of thematics a decade later when she reviewed Flow Chart, "A Steely Glitter Chasing Shadows".

3 Catherine Imbriglio makes the point in "'Our Days Put On Such Reticence'" that with a living author one can never tell how much critical silence around homosexuality is the explicit or assumed wish of the author and how much is the function of cultural pressures (253). However, peeling the author's agency regarding self-representation away from a general cultural silence about homosexuality seems too obviously to exonerate other critics. In the case of Vendler's criticism of As We Know, she ignores the gay thematics of the poems in this book. Even if this is at the behest of the author (which seems unlikely), it does not need to be blamed or excused, but simply corrected.

4 Compare Sedgwick 1-63.

5 Edelman 3-23.

6 Bersani 111-81, where he examines the relation of the homosexual to society through the lens of an origin story about gay children feeling necessarily, in his telling, apart from any community from the outset.

7 Ashbery has explicitly addressed closure as a site of authorial strategy in an interview when he was asked whether he ever played a joke on his readers. Ashbery replied:

A gag that has probably gone unnoticed turns up in the last sentence of the novel I wrote with James Schuyler [A Nest of Ninnies]. Actually, it's my sentence. It reads: 'So it was that the cliff dwellers, after bidding their cousins good night, moved off towards the parking area, while the latter bent their steps toward the partially rebuilt shopping plaza in the teeth of the freshening foehn.' Foehn is a kind of warm wind that blows in Bavaria that produces a fog. I would doubt that many people know that. I liked the idea that people, if they bothered to, would have to open up the dictionary to find out what the last word in the novel meant. They'd be closing one book and opening another. (Stitt 36-37)