Disseminating "circumference": the diachronic presence of Dickinson in John Ashbery's "Clepsydra." - woman poet Emily Dickinson; poet

NOTES

1 See Rodgers for a useful discussion of the development of this trope in Dickinson's oeuvre.

2 John Shoptaw notes a number of Dickinsonian references in Ashbery's work. He argues that "While Ashbery's poetry is as representative and inclusive as Whitman's, it is also as misrepresentative, exclusive, and restrained as Emily Dickinson's" (2). Though this claim is an interesting one, the allusions that Shoptaw cites do not in themselves constitute a sustained examination of the relationship between Ashbery's and Dickinson's work.

3 In describing the relationship of the present self and text (these two blur in "Clepsydra") to its past self and poetic past, Ashbery says "It intensifies echoes in such a way as to / Form a channel to absorb every correct motion. / In this way any direction taken was the right one" ("Clepsydra" 198-200). And at the poem's close, he affirms that "this / Wooden and external representation / Returns the full echo of what you meant / With nothing left over, from that circumference now alight / With ex-possibilities become present fact" (246-49).

4 For a useful discussion of the application of Bloom's influence theories to Ashbery, see Geoff Ward's subchapter "Anxieties of Influence."

5 Though several of Bloom's six revisionary ratios could be applied to "Clepsydra" and its invocation of Dickinson, none of them seems to me to adequately describe the peculiar relationship that Ashbery has to Dickinson in this poem. The frankness with which the poem both depends on and exposes its fear of the prior writer prevents it from being a candidate for the ratio tessera, in which a poet "antithetically 'completes' his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough" (Anxiety 14). Neither is appophrades applicable to "Clepsydra": Ashbery is not actually holding his poem open to Dickinson's work, even though he makes peace with her at the end. Rather, Ashbery is claiming for himself the figure of circumference without displacing Dickinson, because of the very nature of that figure, which suggests a transcendent poetic whole.

It is interesting that Bloom himself, in "Hard Moments," calls "Clepsydra" a failure "because its solipsism, like that of Stevens's 'The Comedian as the Letter C,' is too perfect" (56). A reading that takes into account "Clepsydra"'s relationship to Dickinson rescues it from this charge, and also calls into question Bloom's description of the poem as one "that neither wants nor needs readers," consumed as it is with "Ashbery's entrapped subjectivity" (56, 57). "Clepsydra" is engrossed with the problem of its author's subjectivity, but although this subjectivity is frequently entrapped, it is also threatened by the subjectivity (or the poetic record of this) of Emily Dickinson.

6 The gaps that this dismemberment makes are difficult to notice because of "Clepsydra"'s structure: it is a relentless torrent, flowing continuously onward as does time itself. (In some places the urge to flow becomes a struggle, manifested by the disjunctions in syntax and logic; or perhaps as it roars and pours it overflows the banks of syntax.) The poem's impulse is to prevent a rending of its fabric, "that circumference now alight / With ex-possibilities become present fact" (248-49) that is its whole.