Across the Millennium: The Persistence of John Ashbery

Moramarco, Fred

Across the Millennium: The Persistence of John Ashbery

WAKEFULNESS. John Ashbery.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998

GIRLS ON THE RUN, A POEM. John Ashbery.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999

YOUR NAME HERE: POEMS. John Ashbery.

New York: Farrar, Straus &, Giroux, 2000

OTHER TRADITIONS. John Ashbery.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000

As UMBRELLAS FOLLOW RAIN. John Ashbery.

Lenox, Mass.: Qua Books, 2001

CHINESE WHISPERS. John Ashbery.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002

IT'S NOT EASY KEEPING UP WITH JOHN AsHbery's work. Chinese Whispers is his twenty-first book of poetry and throughout the nineties and the century's turn they have been coming at us at the rate of nearly one every year. Here are five in four years, plus a book of essays that deepens our understanding of the underpinnings of his work. (One other title from a smaller press that I've not yet gotten to appeared in 2001.)

For me, Ashbery has always been a poet of lines rather than of poems. Lines like

the clock ticked on and on, happy about

being apprenticed to eternity.

(Wakefulness)

and

Please don't tell me it all adds up in the end.

I'm sick ofthat one.

(Your Name Here)

and

On wings of windows, parties, songs,

Comedy and mystery, the world drenches us.

(Chinese Whispers)

and

and, entering the bizarre world of Henry Darger's illustrated novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the GlandecoAngelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, in his book length poem, which has mercifully shortened Darger's title to Girls on the Run:

It's as if Darger's figures are talking directly to Ashbery, insisting that he re-transcribe their "story." But you have to use the word "story" loosely here, because in Girls on the Run, lines like these often lead us to other lines they seem totally unrelated to; pronouns shift, images undergo metamorphosis: "slush" is paired with "feathers," "graffiti" is found under "frozen mounds of yak butter," and "arroz con polio" turns into a sailing vessel; elegance exists side by side with the most impossible banalities, and we are in the self-contained world of a disturbed and disturbing mind, one that seems profoundly innocent as well as obsessively driven. As readers of Girls on the Run will learn from the dust jacket, this is the mind of Henry Darger (18921972) a reclusive "outsider" artist who spent his much life compulsively drawing figures of little girls with short skirts and penises and writing stories about them. Ashbery attempts to replicate that world-or at least create a parallel sort of a world in his book-length poem-but apart from introducing his loyal audience to the absolutely singular world of a lifelong recluse, this book exercises little hold on the reader. One page reads pretty much like the next, and there is little narrative glue to hold the poem together. On the other hand, narrative glue is never spread on very thick in Ashbery's work, and the shifting ground of GiHs on the Run is familiar territory for his fans.

Commenting on John Wheelwright's evaluation of Laura Riding's poetry in Other Traditions, Ashbery points out that poets "in writing about other poets tend to write about themselves." Then he says this about Wheelwright's own work:

Even where I cannot finally grasp his meaning, which is much of the time, I remain convinced by the extraordinary power of his language as it flashes by on its way from somewhere to somewhere. At times it seems like higher mathematics; I can sense the 'elegance' of his solutions without being able to follow the steps by which he arrives at them. In short, he is a poet from whom one takes a great deal on faith, but one does it voluntarily. His conviction is contagious.

Surely this observation describes a good many readers' response to Ashbery's work as well. It certainly describes mine. "The language flashes by on its way from somewhere to somewhere." This is quintessential Ashbery, turning language into life, which also, by the way, flashes by on its way from somewhere to somewhere. These books are filled with illuminating flashes.

"No matter how you twist it," he writes in the title poem of Wakefulness, "life stays frozen in the headlights." Another quotable and luminous line that ushers us into the world of the awakened that is assembled in this book. The word "wakefulness" : has the usually Ashbery resonance: awake, a wake, wakeful, fullness-it's a whole world full of wakes. Dreams and sleeplessness are evoked throughout as are various other transformative states. One thing always leads to another, and becomes another. Change, of course, is life's only constant, though we nearly always resist it. Ashbery has some fun with his own resistance, wanting to pummel it altogether: "Take this, metamorphosis. And this. And this. And this." ("Baltimore"). Words them- ' selves seem to change into things, but of course those things are merely other words: "We thought we had seen a few new / adjectives, but nobody was too sure. They might have been gerunds, or bunches of breakfast..." ("Last Night I Dreamed I was in Bucharest"). Change accelerates, permeates everything: "We, meanwhile, have witnessed changes, and now change / floods in from every angle." But Ashbery goes on to make it clear that he is a jester of change: "Stop me if you've heard this one, but if you haven't, just go about your business." ("Added Poignancy"). The cliches that resonate through his poetry in the hands of virtually any other poet would bring the work down, but his purposeful use of them calls our attention to their literalness, and the way, in some senses, they help us to resist change by freezing our repetitive gestures in language. In Wakefulness you will find a "pack of liars," "no release in sight" (a shrewd transformation of "no relief in sight") "for what seemed an eternity," "There are no two ways about it," "I put two and two together," "I'm within my rights," "Anyway, what can I tell you?" "if it's the last thing we do," "The rest, as they say, as they say, is history" (the repeated "as they say" makes this a kind of meta-cliche), "it was one for the books," "burns the midnight oil," "all is shot to hell," "it gives me goose bumps," "there is something to be said for everything," and "It is definitely time to move on" (many politicians' favorite).

Sometimes Ashbery deconstructs a cliche as he uses it: "You know I adore ceremony, / even while refusing to stand on it," ("Homecoming") and sometimes he even avoids a cliché and then calls our attention to the avoidance by putting it back in: "We were kept waiting / right up until the announced departure, / and so became part of humanity. Part and parcel, I was going to say." ("The Earth-Tone Madonna"). There is a great deal of comedy in this book, but the overall mood of it is not comic. It is more the mood reflected in the photograph on the dust jacket in Vilhelm Hammershoi's painting, Open Doors, Strandgade 30. The painting exists on the axis of painting and photography, a turn of the century (igth to 2oth) photo realism that anticipates, in a darker, more somber way, the interior spaces in many of Joel Meyerwitz's "Cape Light" photographs. Hammershoi's empty interior spaces, doors open leading to other rooms with doors open, and just a sliver of light peeking through a distant window is something of a metaphor for the poems inside. We're drawn from the emptiness to the light, but the carefully rendered doors with their perfectly recreated brass fittings, the sharp-edged detailed archways, the dark wooden floors, all evoke our admiration as well. In the same way, Ashbery's poems elicit our admiration for his attunement to the language of our time in its extraordinary variety and flexibility. he seems to get it as exactly as Hammershoi "gets" his doorways.

Years ago Ashbery visited one of my classes in contemporary poetry and we were reading his much-anthologized poem, "Leaving the Atocha Station." The first line ofthat poem is "The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness." A student in the class asked him what arctic honey was, and he answered, "It's probably something cold and sweet." I thought ofthat while I was reading the short poem, "Laughing Gravy" in Wakefulness. I can hear that same student's voice asking "What is laughing gravy?" and hear Ashbery's answer: "It's probably something funny that you pour over meat." Left over from the early New York School of Poetry days in Ashbery's work is the notion that two words rubbed together create a new entity, whatever those words are.

So in addition to "laughing gravy" we get "wolf factory" (not a place where they make wolves, but a place where wolves work: "All the wolves in the wolf factory paused / at noon, for a moment of silence." ("Laughing Gravy"), a "goateed scorpion" (well, maybe if you look close enough) "scarecrow bones" "And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws," among many other creatures, artifacts, and things that are constructed solely from language. Ashbery's penchant for this kind of linguistically generated reality can be ultimately traced to his early fascination with Raymond Roussel, the French surrealist and subject of his master's thesis. In "How I Wrote Certain of My Books," Roussel outlines a "formula" for creating a distinctive reality from language alone. Each line, each word, impinges on the next, alters its meaning, shapes the future direction of the work: One reads the poetry with an alertness for these interactions. A puzzling poem like "Many Colors," for example, begins this way:

There is a chastening to it,

a hymnlike hemline.

Hyperbole in another disguise.

There is no way to read this stanza literally. "Chastening" to what? A hymnlike hemline is one of those Roussel like creations; "Hyperbole in another disguise" seems an interpretation of "a hymnlike hemline." The only way to read it is to try to find the connective tissue: chastening=punish, make better=religion=hymnlike (via sound)=hemline= Hyperbole=via sound and meaning=in another disguise. Now take what you have and find an image for it. Next line:

The title of Your Name Here evokes those tourist posters and newspapers where a personalized name can be written in headlines. The dust jacket says specifically that the title was suggested by Spanish bullfight posters which have a blank space where you can put your name in along with other famous bullfighters. seeing it on the cover of a book of poems, especially a book featuring the photograph of a handsome and exotic Egyptian movie star, in a white dinner jacket and bow tie, gives the viewer a similar sense of vicarious participation. We are invited into this world. John Ashbery is writing about us. So I can paste in my own name: Fred Mommarco, {poems} by John Ashbery. How thrilling!

The book's opening poem ushers us into "This Room," (its title) with the Magritte-de Chirico-like opening line:

The room I entered was a dream of this room

As are all the rooms we enter in poetry. And maybe in "real life" as well. The poem proceeds as one side of a dialogue between poet and reader, the poet posing as jester and clown:

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.

The oval portrait

of a dog was me at an early age.

After a few more absurdist details about light, sound, and the food we eat, the poet-narrator asks

These clear, simple lines epitomize the paradox of the poet, writing in the solitude of his room, "making up" lines for readers he will never know. "You are not even here," except if you put "your name here" as the book's title invites us to do. Then we can enter this room that is a dream of this room.

But not so fast. The title poem, which concludes the volume, poses a series of questions about perspectives. How can we live in a dream and live in reality at the same time? How can a writer devote his entire life to writing, "the spooky art," as Norman Mailer now calls it, and also live fully in the experiential world? Is human life of central importance in the universe, or are we a cosmic army of ants marching towards nowhere? Put your name here, and answer these questions:

The comedy here takes the usual Ashbery turns. The bar is the social world, the public world, and the reclusive world is the world of the writer. Lines 2 and 3 introduce perspective-a colony of ants, perhaps humanity viewed from a distance, heads toward the writer to give him his subject. The funny self-referential simile-ants as small as ants-only appear that way from afar. Look at them up close and they seem to be able to carry tall trees in their mandibles. The leader of the ants wants to pass this on to the poet, but he is obviously unable to talk, being preoccupied with larger matters. But don't take any of this allegory too seriously. I'm just playing around, Ashbery tells us in the next comic lines:

Ashbery's playfulness always has a serious edge. Here the ants are even more clearly allegorical, inhabiting the main boulevard of one of the world's most "civilized" cities. Humanity is not an "either/ or" phenomenon; it is a "both/and." We are ants who socialize in Paris; angels, as someone said, strapped to the back of mules.

"Poetry," Ashbery is quoted as saying, in a recent issue of Poetry Flash, "is mostly hunches." One of those hunches, which permeates nearly all of his work, is that the life we experience individually is remarkably similar under the covering of each of our skins. And these similarities give us a collective life that often remains unexpressed because we live together on the surface. So when we hear an expression ofthat interior landscape, we recognize ourselves in it, even when it is presented "impersonally," as it is in most of Ashbery's work. In a sense, his work remains the embodiment of T. S. Eliot's "impersonal theory of poetry," as recorded in that seminal essay of Modernism, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." For Eliot, the process of creating art meant for the artist "a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." You will find few direct references in Ashbery's oeuvre to specific, identifiable events in his life. Well, yes, we know when he first saw Francesco Parmegianino's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and we get several hints from various poems about some aspects of his early family life, but compared to many of his peers, Ashbery's personal life is virtually invisible in his work. So when we come upon a short poem in Your Name Here entitled "The History of My Life" we sit up and take notice. Especially because the first two lines refer very specifically to a traumatic childhood event:

Once upon a time there were two brothers.

Then there was only one: myself.

The sheer clarity and poignancy of these linestheir fairy tale quality, their understated sense of loss, and the childlike simplicity of the diction add up to a deeply felt personal statement, rare in Ashbery's work. The language here is less important, for a change, than the sentiment. As if sensing he is picking at a very deep wound-Ashbery's younger brother died at the age of nine-he quickly lightens up the poem, while at the same time telling us that experiencing the death of a sibling can cause one to grow up a lot before he's ready to:

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,

even. There was I: a stinking adult.

"A stinking adult" puts a smile on our face-Ashbery is always vacillating between the unbearable heaviness and unbearable lightness of being, as if moving between the two make both extremes bearable. The inverted syntax ("There was I") followed by a colon and the passe phrase, "a stinking adult" almost makes us see the young wounded John, having to be a "man" before he is ready for it. The poet's formative years-his early rejections, his acceptance of his own value system, and his moving beyond self-deprecation and toward self-acceptance is the subject of the middle stanzas of the poem, a capsule, almost generic, life history:

But the poem closes with a fundamental human irony: all the skills, knowledge, self-awareness and self-acceptance that we develop over a lifetime is shadowed by our awareness of our own mortality and its relentless impinging on our consciousness that with each day, we move toward our last.

Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking

it up, for what seemed like months or years.

These last three lines of the poem are a dark memento mon, taking us back to the existential loneliness of the first couplet. For all the narrator's talents, achievements and mid-life successes, his life is bracketed by loss-as are all of our lives, in one way or another. "Common sense tells us," Vladimir Nabokov wrote in a haunting sentence from his autobiography, Speak, Memory, "that our lives are a parenthesis between two eternities."

The contents of As Umbrellas Follow Rain, a book published by a small Massachusetts press, is largely repeated in Chinese Whispers, Ashbery's newest book. The title refers to a British version of the game Americans call "Telephone" or "Gossip," where people sit in a circle and someone whispers a story to the person next to him or her and so on around the circle until the last person recites aloud the final version, which usually differs significantly from the original story. Ashbery first refers to this game in a telling passage from "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," where he relates it to the artists' persistent desire to find words or images to convey the present, which necessarily distorts it. The present is constantly in flux and any attempt to "fix" it in a work of art is doomed to a certain kind of failure. Here's the logic of "Self-Portrait":

This passage provides us with a substantial insight into the title "Chinese Whispers," which refers, I think, to the way a work of art "circulates" in the world, from one reader or viewer to the next, from one critical interpretation to another. It is, to use another of Ashbery's titles, the "flow chart" of the work-how it gets from the mind of the artist into the common cultural currency of the society. So the next time you read an Ashbery poem, whisper a few lines of it to the person next to you, send it around the room, and you'll find yourself at the end with a microcosm of a new Ashbery poem, the language as surprising as a sun shower on a cold winter night when all you expected was a pinker kind of green tea.

FRED MORAMARCO is the editor of Poetry International, published annually at San Diego State University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

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