The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry
288
The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry
288Overview
This concentration on Ashbery's influence on contemporary American poetry provides new methods for interpreting and understanding his poetic achievement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817385422 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Susan M. Schultz is an assistnat professor of English at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. She has published three chapbooks of poetry, including Another Childhood (Leave Books, 1993). Her essays on modern and comtemporary American poetry have appeared in Raritan, Arizona Quarterly, Sagetrieb, and elsewhere. In 1992 she was president of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council.
Read an Excerpt
The Tribe of John
Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry
By Susan M. Schultz
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1995 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8542-2
CHAPTER 1
Typical Ashbery
Jonathan Morse
There's always a problem of running time in historical movies, and you need the clumsy apparatus of player identification, "Lenin, meet Trotsky," and characters telling each other things that we know they already know. The Word can take you back with much less effort.... It's simpler to consider these names as just the names of characters. They're all recognizable as types. —Michael Herr, Walter Winchell
JOHN ASHBERY, too, is just the name of a character. The Ashbery who is the occasion of a special issue of Verse called "John Ashbery's Influence on Contemporary Poetry" is simultaneously (among other things) a poet and a writer of popular journalism, a solipsist who nevertheless writes love poems to an Other, an influence on some poets, and a poet influenced by others. If he could somehow stand out from any of these categories, we would call him a Renaissance man: a kind of character whose role is to transcend character. But Ashbery is not at all at home with transcendence. On the contrary, the convex mirror of Ashbery's multiplex referentiality places the poet on equal terms with every other item in the universe he has created out of souvenirs. Reading Ashbery by reflection, watching the poet continually darken and brighten as he moves through the shadows of the verbal decor, we learn that the thing we call "Ashbery" as we read is only one more item in the room. Amid his collections of words, Ashbery is at home in the typical. What is really original about Ashbery, perhaps, is only his awareness of typicality. Who else in English has thought so tenderly, so optimistically, of the meaning latent in the clichés his readers live by?
I
There's a probability excess. Plus which we don't have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this was an actual simulation.... You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real. —Don DeLillo, White Noise
There it is on the page in the cliché: the meaning, ready to be made readable by subsumption into typicality.
I teach in a high school
And see the nurses in some of the hospitals,
And if all teachers are like that
Maybe I can give you a buzz some day,
Maybe we can get together for lunch or coffee or something.
To read this opening passage from "The Wrong Kind of Insurance" (HD 49–50) is to begin trading in a verbal Confederate money: a currency whose basis in fiat has become transparent to history. Who is speaking, under what authority of meaning? Because the poem has allowed us to see through its language, we no longer trust it to tell us. "I," the entity whose signature is affixed to the bill, is mired in some terrible predicament, but he has only words written on paper to tell us what that predicament is trying to be. Lurching from subject to subject in midsentence but never escaping from cliché, he seems to speak a radically inauthentic language: the language of a poetry performing "in an arena where the simulacrum (the prime time TV melodrama, for example) exerts increasing control over the way business is actually done in the 'real' world."
The floor plan of that arena comes to us from Marjorie Perloff, with the help of Jean Baudrillard. But of course we began knowing our way around as soon as we opened the page to Ashbery. Ashbery's prefabricated blocks of language are, after all, remnants of a culture whose distinctive characteristic is that it makes us think we once knew it. Like Don DeLillo's simulated disaster, it is a type—a read type—of the modern. Ashbery's clichés aren't representative communications from any imaginable history because they aren't capable of representing anything, but as read texts they possess simulacra of meaning, and those simulacra have given them a function: to typify. Specifically, they typify themselves. In the act of being read, they are the words of a pure poetry—that is, a poetry cut off from everything but the verbal. Bound to the customs of a particular tribe living in a particular place at a particular time, they keep us from communicating with any tribal entity except ourselves, reading.
Perloff has perceived that historiographic irony. But to do so she has had to stand outside the arena of the simulacrum. To recognize irony, to recognize cliché as cliché, is after all to avail oneself of an understood standard of authentic meaning. Somewhere in the ideal reading of "The Wrong Kind of Insurance" is a word named right, without quotation marks. But that word remains in deep background. Coming vaguely into view when the book is opened to its poem, right is never more than a silent complicity between the poet and his reader, alluded to but never explicitly mentioned. Not for Ashbery the straightforward decisiveness of a Saddam Hussein, whose quadruple colossal statue of his hand grasping a sword is specifically a casting because casting allows for the realization of the desire to achieve
a perfect fit between intention, built form and the inner experience of the outside world . The knowledge that in every little bump and squiggle which can be seen, felt and maybe even stroked, these were, are, and will always remain His arms is mesmerizing. The effect must not rest on a lie any more than the divine image on the Turin Shroud can afford to be shown by carbon-dating tests to be a fourteenth-century fake.
No; the shroud and the monument can pass current for reality in a command economy, but Ashbery has trouble issuing commands. Least monumental of poets, Ashbery concedes at the outset that he is writing fiction; that "The Wrong Kind of Insurance" is an assemblage of words whose only guarantee of meaning is the ephemeral consensus of a particular social class at a particular moment in its history.
The poem's point is that this chatter is the world. It cannot be transcended, not even in the painful revision of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, which forms the core of "The Wrong Kind of Insurance." In a world which exists, like Ashbery's, only to acknowledge its verbality, the ground of existence can never be more than yet one more word. What Wordsworth felt in periphrasis as
joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
could be given a succinct name by Stevens's Man on the Dump: "the the"; but naming is something Ashbery can't do. A name is a reference to something unique; it implies that there can be something unique. But the function of Ashbery's words is only to typify. His poem's "Yes, friends" is an utterance in generic context: a voice from a television set in its darkened room, saying that we are all lost in type together, spectators whose function is only to guess that we are spectators, passive before the world's play.
Yes, friends, these clouds pulled along on invisible ropes
Are, as you have guessed, merely stage machinery,
And the funny thing is it knows we know
About it and still wants us to go on believing
In what it so unskillfully imitates, and wants
To be loved not for that but for itself [.]
(HD 50)
And yes, we are friendly all the way to the end of the program. Warm words go with the genre. But investments in typicality always leave us in debt, with a net loss of the "the," the definite article. When the set goes dark, we are left only with what Ashbery calls "that emptiness that was the only way you could express a thing" ("The New Spirit," TP 12).
II
That, at any rate, is the cliché. Just as there are novelists whose created worlds notoriously mean only the à clef—D. H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe—Ashbery is ordinarily known as an artist who lives in a wholly contingent universe consisting solely of culture. To think of Ashbery and of the novelists in that way is to generate a complementary pair of modes of biography. Novelists rewrite their extraverbal life into a descriptive grammar of themselves; Ashbery sublimates all that is nonverbal of his life onto the page, becoming (as Milton said a poet must) himself a true poem. Within the poem, as Ashbery says in "The Wrong Kind of Insurance," "all of our lives is a rebus." To read a rebus, we must leave the page and refer elsewhere, reaching back in memory as we rethink the association between things and the sounds we represent them with. It is a gesture of tribal solidarity. But to think of Ashbery as the creator of the rebus, faithfully drawing the picture words forth from himself, is to see him as one of those "poets so private they speak for us all," a citizen of Byzantium.
Sharing our language, a writer shares our perceptions; some such formulation is the ordinary assumption that makes reading possible. But the typicality of Ashbery's language is a more general matter than that. For Ashbery is a poet of the ancient Platonic lineage, one whose object—whether or not he has consciously articulated it—is to escape language and its clichés, abandoning to the forever baffled efforts of mere reading the vain effort to represent reality in words. While the reader is left holding a squirming body of interpretation, the poet makes his escape to Byzantium with his booty of the ineffable. That much of a conclusion, at least, is available to reading.
"The Tomb of Stuart Merrill," for instance (SPCM 37–39), is constructed of a nested series of allusions to French politics and Our Boarding House, a comic strip from the 1930s about a blowhard of the W. C. Fields type who is given to quoting Kipling. In the crypt, however, Stuart Merrill himself, an American-born French symbolist poet, remains expatriated from representation. To be a subject of one of Ashbery's tombeaux is to be translated into the alien.
Worse: the specific text of this French poet's epitaph is a letter in English prose. Read in quotation marks as if it has existed prior to being translated onto the page, this text comes to warn us that we will never be able to read through words all the way to significance. "'After I read one of your poems,'" say the words, "'I'm always tempted to read and reread it. It seems that my inexperience holds me back from understanding your meanings.'" The addressee is presumably the character named John Ashbery, an extrapoetic personage hovering somewhere off the page. But of course it is impossible for us readers outside Byzantium to be sure. "You" is a potent word for Ashbery; it is the central term of his great love poems. Other important words are "understanding," "meaning," and "hold back." Whatever its origins off the page, therefore, the letter as read has become a part of the ritual that lies at the heart of Ashbery's poiesis: a perpetual tribute of nostalgia offered to "you," the lover absent in time. The poet's memory and the reader's letter yearn equally, establish themselves in a common emotion, merge "I" and "you" in a single hypostasis. That, if anything, is the poem's clef: an extrinsic datum of the poem's origin in the poet. But of course the letter waiting to descend on the page is forever too soon to be read. All of us are held back by inexperience.
In that respect we share a culture which extends outward from poetry to pervade the American sensibility, whose clichés Ashbery has taken for his own typicality. When something descends on the supermarket in White Noise and rearranges the shelves, a new and terrible inexperience holds back the shopping carts.
There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on the packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.
At the tomb of Stuart Merrill, however, a poet writing in a foreign language, the codes are less infallible. There we are given to read only the fragments of a grammar, an unfinished question followed by the answer to a question which remains, terribly, unasked.
The canons are falling
One by one
Including "le célèbre" of Pachelbel
The final movement of Franck's sonata for piano and violin.
How about a new kind of hermetic conservatism
And suffering withdrawal symptoms of same?
Let's get on with it
But what about the past
Because it only builds up out of fragments.
(SPCM 38)
In the terror of the unasked, unaskable question there lies the cultural symptomatology we share with this poet of our time. Ashbery speaks out of his characteristic wistfulness, DeLillo out of an emotion a little simpler. There are differences. But we probably read both texts through eyes blurred in the same way by the emotion of recognition. At last, we think: somebody knows that "Let's get on with it" is a command waiting for Godot; at last somebody understands. We even have our own clichés to help us typify what we are reading—words like "alienation" and "paranoia" and "the condition of postmodernism"—and these clichés are capable of taking the place of actual read experience. In fact, the impression I get when I talk with readers of Ashbery is that many of his poems achieve their typicality not as experience but as retrospect. Having fully entered memory, they exist there solely as the experience of having been read, like Look Homeward, Angel at the age of seventeen. They are synecdochic; they have come to stand for the entire range of experiences that we call nostalgia.
III
Understanding this typicality in historical terms, John Koethe has been able to fit Ashbery to a chronological table of differentiae as follows:
The exemplary poem of thirty years ago was characterized by a strong speaking voice.... [I]ts style was marked by literalness, a clipped diction, an avoidance of indeterminacy, an insistence on the concrete and the particular, and the calculated refusal of rhetorical effect. It rarely acknowledged its status as writing, and its attitude toward the impulses of romanticism was one of irony and condescension.
The generic poem of today seems quite different.
Koethe goes on to apply such words as "nostalgic," "passive," "tenderness," and "[dissociation] ... from everyday ideas of rationality and control" to the present era of poetic history—the era par excellence of John Ashbery, a poet whose influence on other poets (this is Koethe's thesis) has therefore yet to define itself. The poet Ashbery has been present in our language, leaving us tokens of himself; now the poet Koethe must account for the way he nevertheless keeps vanishing before our advances on him, like an image in a convex mirror. Considered that way, as a recuperative historical construct, Koethe's strangely effaced Ashbery is a realization in critical form of what Emily Dickinson said about the way we take in the world:
Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object's loss—
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to it's Price—
But Ashbery has revised that text.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Tribe of John by Susan M. Schultz. Copyright © 1995 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsForeword: A Short Article or Poem in Response to the Work
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part 1. New Readings of Ashbery
1 Typical Ashbery
2 Ashbery as Love Poet
3 Coming Full Circle: John Ashbery's Later Poetry
4 John Ashbery's Landscapes
Part 2. Explorations of Influence
5 The Absence of a Noble Presence
6 Purists Will Object: Some Meditations on Influence
7 Nimbus of Sensations: Eros and Reverie in the Poetry of John Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach
8 Ashbery's Menagerie and the Anxiety of Affluence
9 Periodizing Ashbery and His Influence
10 Fossilized Fish and the World of Unknowing: John Ashbery and William Bronk
Part 3. Ashbery and Postmodern Poetries
11 Taking the Tennis Court Oath
12 The Music of Construction: Measure and Polyphony in Ashbery and Bernstein
Afterword: The Influence of Kinship Patterns upon Perception of an Ambiguous Stimulus
Works Cited
Contributors
Index