Sunday, October 12, 2008

A tad harsh ...

... I think: On Ashbery, Language, and Meaning. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I think John Ashbery writes too many poems - or at least publishes more than he should. But there are some very good poems in Chinese Whispers, to name just one of his collections.

Update: Here is part of what Bryan Appleyard had to say in his review of Ashbery's A Worldly Country:
The trick with Ashbery is to relax. You are not going to get what you expect, nor, in all likelihood, what you want. But what you will get will be beautiful, strange and, above all, unique. Ashbery is stricken by the sheer discreteness of things.
"You shall never have seen it just this way / And that is to be your one reward," he wrote in "The Ecclesiast" and, in "Houseboat Days," "but it is the nature of things to be seen only once. " This may make things seem, as he puts it here, "terribly complicated," but, he adds, "simple enough when gazed at directly. "
The infinite one-offness certainly makes the writing of poetry difficult. We are accustomed to generalizations in verse. Indeed, I suspect the reason Ashbery is often classified as "difficult" is not the strangeness of his approach, but his refusal of the grand, generalizing statement. Here he provides, as he has done many times before, a deliberately clumsy pastiche of such statements in the title poem. He also provides plenty of what appear to be clear statements, but which, on closer examination, either negate themselves or seem to be made by some voice other than his own.
There is, of course, one necessary statement - that there are no viable statements. It is from this apparent desert, this barren mappemonde, that poetry, the beautiful, must be constructed. It cannot be the language of statement or, indeed, of crisis. To dramatize a crisis - another aspect of "familiar" poetry - is to make a kind of statement. And so Ashbery writes simply of his moment-to-moment engagement with life, whatever that may be, avoiding at all costs a "foolish consistency" - an Emerson phrase that crops up, startlingly, in the poem "Promenade. " For Emerson such consistency was "the hobgoblin of little minds" and, uncertain and unclear as Ashbery may be, there is nothing little about his mind.


Post bumped up.

11 comments:

  1. I dunno, I think this assessment of Ashbery is dead-on. It articulates exactly what is problematic about his writing, just as the same thing is problematic about Language Poetry. They may not look the same, but the aesthetic is identical.

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  2. Dana Gioia has called Ashbery a great minor poet. I wouldn't put it that way. I would compare him to those painters known as "little masters," not so much because their mastery is little as because their themes and focus tend to be more modest. As Ashbery himself put it in "Wastrel":
    I feel like one of St. Ursula's virgins
    taking a last look at shelving rock and tree,
    sailing into what must be the ineffable . . .

    Ashbery is often simply playful, a spinner of verbal bagatelles, and he has perhaps been overpraised, but I don't think he deserves to be dismissed.

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  3. Well, I don't think he's ever going to be totally dismissed, if only because he's been so often over-praised that he will appear in anthologies, and therefore the canon, for generations. He won't be going away.

    What I seriously object to is the ridiculous idea that he's our greatest living poet. There are so many better poets who are also still alive. That's part of the overpraising, which I think happens whenever someone is obscure for the sake of being obscure: "Wow, I can't understand this, so it must be good!" That sort of thing. Even if the root of the over-praise is somewhere else, that's an argument I've heard a lot in his defense, and it's an argument that just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The comparison to the Language Poets is again apt.

    The critique of his shallowness, which is apparently intentional on the poet's part, in the original article is well-taken. A further critique is that he's taken an idea and run with it, all the way into a dead end. It's not imitatible, and it's not a school.

    I never said he wasn't fun to read, and I never said it wasn't a shallow bit of skimming fun. Brian's points are understood. But the very uniqueness that Brian points out is also his Achilles heel. He's written himself into a dead end, and he is at this point very much repeating himself, and has been for several books.

    There are plenty of other poets who refuse the grand generalizing statement, yet they are not obscure for the sake of being obscure. In fact, the refusal of the grand generalizing statement, which was so prevalent in the Victorians, was effectively driven home as early as Pound's first manifestoes on poetry, and has been a value in most poetry ever since. Ashbery hardly invented that attitude, nor did he perfect it; he has taken it so far, however, that he has painted himself into a corner that I doubt even he can get out of.

    The Emerson quote about consistency, which I completely agree with in general terms, can also be turned back towards Ashbery, in that his rejection of sense, meaning, depth, resonance, and presence in his poems, and his conscious attention to the surface layers has been entirely consistent since he developed this poetic voice. Again, nothing new.

    In other words, all these arguments in Ashbery's defense don't really stand up. Again, I never said that he isn't fun, nor would I tell anyone not to read him. (And I do often get attacked for pointing out his limitations and flaws; there are some fans that are so fanatical that they take any critical comments as personal attacks on the master.) What I am saying is that there is no there there, as it were. There's nobody behind the curtain, and there's no echo coming back from the well. It's all smoke and mirrors.

    Which is fine. But it's nothing on which one can build a poetics. This is why the overpraising is so ridiculous, as it tries to do just that.

    One final thought on why the overpraising is so ridiculous. Calling him our greatest living poet is like saying that the Fragonard (he of the pretty surfaces, of the shallow Rococo decorative girls on swings with butterlfies) is of the same order of painter as Michelangelo. It's absurd. I do agree that Ashbery could be considered a great minor poet; but he's not a minor great poet.

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  4. That's a pretty fair argument for the prosecution, Art. I have no idea who the greatest living poet here or anywhere else, and whoever it is it's probably best for him or her that it not be bruited about. One thing about Fragonard, though. I agree he is no Michelangelo, but he's not as frivolous as he is often taken to be. I used to spend a lot of time in front of a couple of huge paintings of his in the National Gallery. Yes, people on swings enjoying themselves - oblivious of the clouds massing on the horizon that would drive them from their games and destroy their way of life. I can never forget standing there and thinking that this seemingly lightweight painter had seen the shallowness around him - and depicted it - more clearly than just about anyone of his time.
    Ashbery's poems, I have observed, make a lot more sense and seem less obscure, if you read them as if they were collages of conversation lifted from an art opening. He was for many years an art critic. He must have been present at countless such events. I think they are a major influence on his style. A poetic counterpart to Fragonard is really not all that bad. Ashbery might even like it himself. (And, by the way, isn't this a nice civilized discussion?)

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  6. Though I find Michelangel oone of the most boring and awful of painters- not his medium. All so tediously, relentlessly, bloody epic, as someone famous and brilliant might have once said. Grand-scale kitsch: groups of monumental figures of not particularly subtle or vivid inner lives, and in attempting to be more than life are very much less than life.
    As the genuinely great painter El Greco said of Michelangelo: "A good man, but he can't paint."

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  7. I liked Houseboat Dayss (which was given to me for a B-Day present the year it appeared), I think, better than the rest; but, I do agree with Art concerning the different between a great minor poet and a minor great poet.

    Who, though, would you or you or you consider a great living poet of our time on this continent or across the pond, even? I had this conversation with Martin Levin, book editor at The Globe, and we were trying to think of one based solely on how a collection had kept us burning up the pages and knocking our socks off.

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  8. Good point, Andrew, now that you mention it. Michelangelo is a great sculptor. I'm a Botticelli fan myself. And Poussin. And Chardin.

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  9. Stone probably as a medium suits perfectly the monumentality of his instincts- philosophical/religious/artistic, and he's also great with charcoal which manages to enforce a kind of humility of scale, allied to its sculptual aspects. There's far more to painting than coloured in draughtsmanship, though, and much too subtle for him.
    Humility is probably key here. He tries to bludgeon his way to truth with his army of titans, and then balancing this uber-masculine art with extravagant colour- as shown by the restoration work...all in all produces for me a borderline comical vulgarity.

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  10. Another good point, Andrew, about the works in charcoal.

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  11. It comes down to whether you appreciate the conflations Ashbery artfully manages as he penetrates the psychic membrane between Steven's Supreme Fiction, that perfect of Ideal Types and their arrangements, with the material sphere that won't follow expectation, nor take direction. I happen to think that much of the interstices he investigates are raesults of artful wandering; Ashbery is a flaneur of his own musings, and the Proustian inspection of the reconciliations between the arenas provide their joys. Had I thought Ashbery over rated and a bore, I'd have turned my back on critical praise of him and left him cold; I have a habit of keeping my own consul regarding reading preferences, as I'm sure all of us do. But continue to read him I do, over several decades.

    Not a rebel, not a polemicist, hardly a rabble -rouser who makes speeches and writes incendiary essays against injustice, Ashbery is an aesthete, a contemplator, an intelligence of infinite patience exploring the spaces between what concioiusness sees, the language it develops to register and comprehend experience, and the restlessness of memory stirred and released into streaming associations. Ashbery's are hard to "get" in the sense that one understands a note to get milk at the store or a cop's command to keep one's hand above their head, in plain site. Ashbery's poems have everything the eye can put a shape to in plain site, clouded, however, by thoughts, the cloud bank of memory. He wrestles with the still-engaging problems of Aristotle's metaphysics, that the things in the world are only the expression of an Idea of that thing, which exists prior to manisfestation. It's a slippery metaphysics, an guarantor of headaches, but Ashbery wears the problem loosely; he pokes, prods, wonders, defers judgement, and is enthralled by the process of his wondering. Reaching a conclusion for him seems to mean that he is done writing, and no poet wants to think that they've used up their vocabulary.


    One might think that the mtvU audience might be more attracted to arch romantic and decidedly urban poet Frank O'Hara, whose emphatic musings and extrapolations had equal parts rage and incontestable joy which gave a smile or a snarl to his frequent spells of didactic erudition. He was in love with popular culture, with advertising, movies, the movies, he had an appreciation of modern art, he loved jazz and ballads, he loved being a City Poet.He was more the walker than Ashbery, I suppose, or at least he wrote more about the going to and coming from of his strolls. unlike Ashbery, O'Hara loved being an obvious tourist in his own environment, and didn't want for a minute for his poetry to leave the streets, cafes and galleries where he tread. Ashbery is more the stroller who gets lost in his associations triggered by what he beheld. Ever more the aesthete than his fellow New York Poets, he was interested in things a little more metaphysical, that being that the reality that exists in the inter-relations being the act of perception and the thoughts that are linked to it, which branch off from the perception and link again with another set of ideas, themselves connected to material things observed and remembered. O'Hara was immediate, like the city he loved, while Ashbery allowed his senses the authority to enlarge his perception, to explore the simultaneity of sight and introspection.

    In a strange way, Ashbery is the more sensual of the two, willing to examine that even the sacrifice of immediate coherence.I'm not a fan of difficulty for the sake of being difficult, but I do think it unreasonable to expect poets to be always unambiguous or easily grasped. Not every dense piece of writing is worthy by default, of course, and the burden falls on the individual talent. Ashbery's writing, for me, has sufficient allure, resonance and tangible bits of the recognizable world he sees to make the effort to maneuver through his diffuse stanzas worth the work.

    Poetry is the written form where ambiguity of meaning and multiplicity of possible readings thrives more than others, and it's tradition is not a parsimonious use of language, but rather a deliberate expansion of what words pieced can do, what meanings they can evoke, and what sensations they can create. Prose is the form that is, by default, is required to have the discourse it carries be clear and has precise as possible. Poetry and poets are interesting because they are not addressing their experiences or their ideas as linear matters subject to the usual linguistic cause and effect; poetry is interesting because it's a form that gives the inclined writer to interrogate their perceptions in unexpected ways. The poetic styles and approaches and aesthetics one may use vary widely in relative degrees of clarity, difficulty, and tone, but the unifying element is that poetry isn't prose, and serves a purpose other than the mere message delivering that is, at heart, the basic function of competent prose composition.

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