How to Enjoy John Ashbery
A letter to my book group
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For the past six months I’ve been leading a book group in Lake Forest—ten folks who were reading together for more than twenty years before I showed up. It’s my favorite sort of group, mostly unconcerned with keeping up with whatever’s being ballyhooed in The New York Times; instead we read a mixture of classics and contemporary works. They’ve read Proust and Joyce and Nabokov, Woolf and Ballard and Conrad; they’re a formidably well-read bunch, and it’s a pleasure to discuss literature with them entirely for the joy of it, for its own sake. Since I joined the group we’ve read Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, Rachel Cusk’s Outline, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, James Joyce’s Dubliners, and we’ve just finished Yiyun Li’s strange and beguiling The Book of Goose. It’s the very best sort of teaching; I don’t have to grade a single paper!
The one thing they hadn’t read much of before I took over as facilitator was poetry. Like many otherwise supremely literate people, they’re nervous about poetry; too many people have been taught to respond to poems as though they were some kind of test they’re bound to fail, and who enjoys that? We started with 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman, which is kind of starting at the deep end, but I thought they’d respond to Berryman’s tragicomic theatricality and they did, pretty much. Now we’re about to read John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and I think it’s safe to say they’re a bit intimidated. So I wrote them an email, a little guide to enjoying Ashbery’s work, which I reprint here in adapted form for readers of the Fiend.
John Ashbery is frequently spoken of as a philosophical and discursive poet, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens; he is often described as difficult, even inaccessible or hermetic. But I think there’s a great deal to enjoy in his poems: startling turns of phrase, wit, moments of insight, beautiful sounds and images. In the broadest sense, these are poems about the experience of experience. In other words, his poems are rarely about a particular place, person, landscape, or idea; instead, they are self-conscious explorations of what it feels like to think. “Meaning yes, but message no,” Ashbery once said. “There is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.”
Ashbery is perhaps our supreme modern poet of what John Keats called, in one of his letters, negative capability: “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Ashbery writes as he wants us to read, with our judgment suspended, embracing contradiction, skating from one phrase into the next. Ashbery is a very Emersonian poet; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays are best understood as a series of startling sentences, each of which tries to slap the reader into fresh attentiveness, without too much concern for coherence of argument. As Emerson wrote in “Circles”: “Our moods do not believe in each other.” Or as Ashbery wrote in “Homeless Heart”: “Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing.”
It might be helpful to think about Ashbery’s very twentieth-century work (sophisticated, urbane, ironic) in relation to other twentieth-century art forms like abstract painting (he made his living as an art critic for many years) or atonal music. When you look at a de Kooning painting, for instance, you can ask yourself what the painting is “about,” or you can simply enjoy the colors and tones and textures and let the mood of the thing wash over you:
If you listen to a piece of atonal music by Anton Webern, you will quickly become frustrated if you listen for the melody, because there isn’t one. But the patterns of symmetry that organize the music—more visible in the score than they are audible to the ear—will eventually make themselves felt to the listener.
We might isolate something similar to Webern’s atonal logic in Ashbery’s line breaks; he is a master of enjambment, which I’ve come to feel is the key distinction between words broken into lines and a real poem. In Barry Edelstein’s invaluable Thinking Shakespeare, he argues that “characters do their thinking at line endings.” What he calls “the microscopic interval of thought” at the end of a line is not a pause but “an opportunity for thought,” an “energy point” that “launches thought forward.” I believe this device may be at the core of what Harold Bloom bombastically yet accurately called Shakespeare’s “invention of the human”; the sense the plays give us of modern minds in action on stage, listening to themselves think and constantly revising the progress of their thoughts. But whereas Shakespeare’s characters respond to circumstances and each other as well as themselves, Ashbery is always most like Hamlet in soliloquy, albeit a Hamlet constantly tossing on banana peels.
Ashbery, of course, is neither actor nor painter nor musician; he is a poet and his medium is words, and words mean things, so it can be harder for a reader to just let the thing happen the way we let paintings and music happen. But this is the stance I’d encourage you to take if you can. And reading aloud is always a good idea; Ashbery’s free-verse lines can seem prosy at first glance, but he had a profound ear and there’s a great deal of music in the words, even as each line proposes scenes or ideas that the next line complicates, contradicts, or simply wanders from.
This doesn’t mean Ashbery has no subject. Like Stevens, and like William Wordsworth, he is chiefly concerned with the power of imagination: its sources, its (in)communicability, and the paradoxes that arise when we start listening to language unfettered from its context—or rather when language itself provides the context. Here’s one of my favorite Ashbery poems, from his 1981 book Shadow Train:
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.
It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.
The first time you read this poem, just skate along its surface, picking up on its repeated guide words: poem, miss, plain, play, you. With wistful offhandedness—Ashbery’s signature affect—these words express the poet’s desire to connect with the reader, even as that connection eludes him because of the slippery nature of words themselves, caught as they are in the dialectic between system and play. The poem continually corrects or revises itself (“Well, actually, yes”—a characteristically discursive move) in a supremely Emersonian way. And I think “It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters” is a key line, because it asks us to think not as readers but as writers: we sit behind the typewriter with the poet, composing the poem in our imaginations. You is the reader, who may or may not exist—that’s the poet’s predicament, which is maybe Ashbery’s supreme subject. And I don’t think it’s an abstruse subject at all, because the poet’s predicament is the human one of wondering how and whether we can connect with others while remaining ourselves. A predicament that takes on an additional charge from the latent but ever-present queerness of the poems; Ashbery rarely, if ever, writes about being gay, but he’s always writing from the coded, sometimes campy position of a midcentury gay man—from what critic John Shoptaw has called Ashbery’s “homotextuality.” But part of Ashbery’s Emersonian genius is to believe his own thought: “that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men.” Not just semi-closeted midcentury gay men are so playfully thought-tormented; it’s you, and it’s me.
Maybe this dynamic is most present in the title poem from Self-Portrait, in which the hand of the painter (Parmigianino) both invites and deflects the viewer, “as though to protect / What it advertises.” The viewer paradoxically occupies the position of the painter himself as he gazes into the convex mirror of the title at his own bemused face; such is the situation-relation of Ashbery to his readers. The “you” in an Ashbery poem is always a hopeful subject-object that may not be there, or may not respond; this accounts, I think, for the melancholy yet buoyant quality of his work. It’s an affect to which I find myself ever more addicted, “in cold pockets / Of remembrance, whispers out of time.”
This is an excellent guide to reading middle period Ashbery especially. I feel, though, like his work begins to shift considerably away from his playful philosophic/epistemic mode toward a more comedic and absurd one beginning with Can You Hear, Bird? This was roughly when he became influenced by James Tate. My wife first got into Ashbery by going to one of his readings and realizing how funny--intentionally funny--much of his late work is. Wakefulness moves back into the older mode somewhat and merges strengths, which is why it is such a lovely book. Anyway, just a few thoughts. I enjoyed your clear formulations here--it's all very helpfully teachable.
One more thing, though: I feel that deep inside Ashbery's work there is a sincere religious sentiment based on love of how people speak--a sacred regard for vernacular. This is something one must experience to really understad. When you really get into his work it can be transformative in a way poetry seldom achieves. Like Stein (but unlike all but the very late Stevens) there is also a kind of visionary communication enabled by Ashbery's poetry that shows a rare and special perspective toward existence--more Rothko than Jackson Pollock, at least for me. Sorry, if this sounds rather vague and hand wavy, and I certainly do not mean this as criticism of your essay. I've never tried to teach this to my students, but I have hoped something like it rubs off on them anyway.
In September of 1974 I was a freshman at The University of the South Sewanee and an aspiring poet. At the library I picked up the August edition of Poetry magazine and opened the pages to find Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. It was one of the strangest and uncanniest reading experiences of my young life. It was if I were reading something I had written or was going to write. I knew but didn't know that was the moment my "career" as a poet ended. But reading that poem was like listening to your first jazz album and it's Kind of Blue. It's all downhill after that.