I’ve put a moratorium on my thoughts for the past few weeks for personal reasons. That being said, today’s post is the culmination of a much-needed rupture in the mental pressure vessel and a recent descent into John Ashbery’s early poetry, so mind the length. I needed to be inside Ashbery’s early work because on the surface it requires very little thought and so one can easily sink away into it.

Ashbery’s early poetry is built on the simultaneous consent of absurdity and plausibility, resulting in a poetics that is at once baffling and revealing. While superficially it tends to resist meaning, it is in itself a poetics of meaning, calling into question the reliability of the mind and our forms of expression, which is almost always language. Some dislike Ashbery’s poetry for its presumed difficulty, however what must be understood is that the poetry is unabashedly self-aware of its nonsensical semantics. T.S. Eliot writes, ‘The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.’ Ashbery is very indirect, using seemingly disjunctive salvos of words in order to force his poetry into his own meaning.

Although Ashbery does not aim to declare meaning, I don’t think it can be said that he does not mean. In fact, almost all of Ashbery’s poetry is an explication on the social context in which he lives. He seems most concerned with the manner in which our consciousness handles direct, corporal experience. Ashbery, once an art critic in both Paris and New York, was at one time relegated to—and so is acutely aware of—our ‘madness to explain’; he apparently concluded that our desire to explain is futile, as the translation between human consciousness and the language it uses to express itself so often fails. For this reason Ashbery puts forth something like a Derridean poetics, riddled with play and slippage, exploiting our desires for a transcendental signified but never cutting the carrot from the string. It becomes impossible to give ‘A description of the blues’ for language cannot adequately describe the feeling that the blues has in its listeners; (‘[W]ords are only speculation / (From the Latin speculum, mirror): / They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music’ (Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror)). Ashbery is deeply conscious of this inability when he writes, ‘I am not ready to line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation’ (‘The Skaters’).

Just as it is unlikely to find meaning in a single brush stroke of an abstract painting, so too is it unlikely to find meaning in a single word or even poetic line. The importance of Ashbery’s work is found in ‘the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from / abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract’ (‘The Skaters’), just as the movement of an abstract painting draws the eye back and forth to its indeterminate focal points until an impression is left in the viewer. Ashbery is truly able to turn the page into a canvas and—in the medium of poetry—Ashbery’s poetry seems closest to gestural abstraction.

The most important question we can ask in regards to Ashbery (or any poet, for that matter) is, ‘Is anything given?’ Here, the answer is yes. Many of Ashbery’s poems give two things. First, it affirms the instability of the mind and in this way becomes a poetics of and on thought:

So much has passed through my mind this morning
That I can give you but a dim account of it:
…
…the human brain, with its tray of images
Seems a sorcerer’s magic lantern, projecting black and orange cellophane shadows
On the distance of my hand …. The very reaction’s puny
And when we seek to move around, wondering what our position is now, what the
arm of the chair.
‘The Skaters’

This is a poetics of the mind; a poetics that is finding difficulty in what to choose to write about in a world brimming with things; a poetics that captures the vacillating nature of the thoughts and actions of the men and women of recent centuries. It is also, however, bereft of a soul because it lacks the soul’s ‘room, [which is] our moment of attention’ (Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). It is also bereft of both revelation and a transcendental signified, it just merely is. And so there is nowhere to turn to but back to the poem itself, back to the surface, for ‘The surface is what’s there / And nothing can exist except what’s there’ (Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). What is there is a poem building its poetry on the process of building poetry; this is our second affirmation: the meaning is the process.

Though John Ashbery’s poetry oftentimes seems nonsensical, it is truly a poetry that captures the world in which we live, both externally and internally. Not only does it touch upon the interiority of humankind but it also deals with how we locate our interiority outside of ourselves. While abstract expressionism has had a great impact on Ashbery, he is also deeply attuned to theories of semiotics and neurology. In this way, he can capture more than he appears to because social-cultural constructs are built on language and our understanding of it. While Ashbery’s lines can seem incongruous and even illogical, they are perpetually aiming at something larger than the page can maintain, just as all great art does. Ashbery is able to cleverly manipulate poetry through his use of linguistic technique into something of a theoretical rant that uses disparate language, observations, and even voices to force meaning into something seemingly superfluous. Wallace Stevens greatly inspired Ashbery, and it seems that many of Ashbery’s poems do what Stevens’s ars poetica ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ does:

This endlessly elaborating poem
Displays the theory of poetry,
As the life of poetry. A more severe,
More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life….

Here’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (if you get through the whole thing you get a gold star). Here’s a link to ‘The Skaters’.