TOP29-DES27
This Old Poem #29:
John Ashbery’s Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a
Landscape
Copyright © by Dan Schneider,
10/12/02
READ THIS BLURB!:
John
Ashbery is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Can You Hear,
Bird, a volume of art criticism and A Nest of Ninnies, a novel
co-authored with James Schuyler, published by the Ecco Press. His 1975
collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer Prize, the
National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1995,
Ashbery received the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, and in
1997, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for
Poetry. He teaches at Bard College.
Fairly innocuous Web patter, right? From it he does not stand out from any other DWM Academic. But he does. For better or worse John Ashbery is the most influential DWM poet of the last 40 years. I descried & decried his hand in the bastardized verse of James Tate, & will momentarily dissect a lesser poem of his. But before I get to the poem I feel a need to state that JA wrote 1 of the few GREAT books of published poetry in the last 50 years- the 1975 classic Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror. Before that he had some hit & miss stuff, & after he tanked, BIG TIME! Convex seemed to signal the arrival of JA into the pantheon. Unfortunately, the next quarter century he would cannibalize that book’s remains. I forget who described him as a ‘good minor poet’, rather than a major poet- but that’s as apt a description as I can think of. The 50 years after his death will bear this out as his literary stock nosedives. Yet, even Convex he was capable of some transcendent moments in verse- this poem from the same-titled book:
Some Trees
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter
morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
Not since
Wallace Stevens could a poet be so lyrical & evasive. The Languagist Horde
rushed to claim him. New York Poets formed a hither-to-then unknown of clique to
include him, & young poetasters on campuses across the country, decided to
emulate him in workshopped-to-death ecstasy. Unlike WS, however, Ashbery’s
peak soon came, & a long- but swift- descent followed. JA’s abstrusions
also find him curiously linked to the High Modernists Ezra Pound & T.S.
Eliot, although WS is more a direct precursor, & personally stated hero, to
JA. Both often write of the mind forming ideas & topes about the nature of
thingness. WS held to the belief that is was the unknowing of thingness that was
the basis of ‘poetry’. JA differs in that he believes the mind knows &
MUST know, even if sotto voce to itself. Strangely, for such insistence, JA is
the far more deliberately comic poet. True, he often falls flat on his face- as
with this essay’s titular poem, then- again- he is more self-consciously pop.
1 might compare WS’s wistfulness to a Rene Magritte painting, whereas JA is
Andy Warhol through & through. Both play with reality, but JA loves reality
more, & is more grounded. His poems fail to reach Stevensian heights because
of this need to be ‘pop’. The connection to EP & TSE mainly comes from
JA’s allusions to a style in order to provoke the idea of feeling associated
with it. He also is more concerned with the present than the past, than they
were. Often a JA poem will use the wordly stylings of journalism, advertising,
governmentese, business memos, scientific data, or pop psychology. EP & TSE
were rooted in the Provencal & other older traditions, so much so it
probably prevented both from maximizing their careers like JA’s indulgence of
pop did his.
Not to
mention his obsession with clichés. JA believes that in all our thought
patterns we are trapped in the off the rack world; that we can’t get beyond
these conventions. To him they sever us from direct experience. To JA this is
the rationale for his poetry- a ready-made conceit to be exploited. &, damn,
he dug that baby deep! See?
Unfortunately,
clichés are the refuges of the worst writers, not the best, & soon JA had
exhausted his mine. By the late 1970s JA was on the receiving end of some tepid
(need I say poetry criticism had by then ceased to be savage?) reviews. He began
a counteroffensive in some works of prose & in published interviews.
Here’s 1 from the late 70s. The piece was called On the Value of Criticism; on Good Working Conditions for Poetry,
published in the San Francisco Review of Books, November 1977. The
interviewer was 1 Sue Gangel:
SG: How do you feel about formal criticism of your work?
JA:
Criticism, in general, has less and less to do with my work. I’m sometimes
kind of jealous of my work. It keeps getting all the attention and I’m not.
After all, I wrote it.
I really don’t know what to think when I read
criticism, either favorable or unfavorable. In most cases, even when its
sympathetic and understanding, it’s a sort of parallel adventure to the
poetry. It never gives me the feeling that I’ll know how to do it the next
time I sit down to write, which is my principal concern. I’m not putting down
critics, but they don’t help the poetry to get its work done. I don’t have
much use for criticism, in general, even though it’s turned out I’ve written
a lot, mostly art criticism. Very few people have ever written a serious mixed
critique of my poetry. It’s either dismissed as nonsense or held up as a work
of genius. Few critics have ever accepted it on its own terms and pointed out
how I’ve succeeded at certain moments and failed at other moments at what I
was setting out to do. I will quote one of my favorite lines from Nijinsky’s
journal: "Criticism is death." He doesn’t elaborate on that
statement at all.
Note, JA’s coyness even in direct questioning. The important point,
however, is that what he actually says has been said countless times before. JA
seems to, for the interview contains many other such gems of nothingness,
actually believe his own stated ideology on clichés. This is remarkable as it
is well-known that most poets blow with the wind. They are whores for the moment
of self-congratulation. To his credit, JA- for better or worse, is himself.
Unfortunately, that ideology has nailed him into the poetic coffin his career
now is in.
Part of the problem is that which afflicts most poets- he is utterly
predictable- no, you won’t know WHAT snippet of conversation or newspaper
story will appear- BUT you know WHEN an overheard snippet or a news story will
appear! JA, in a sense, is also like the Ab Ex fraud Jackson Pollock- a 1 note
wonder dripping this & that here & there, regardless of whatever the
subject might be. Is it any wonder that he is the most critically acclaimed
& written about poet going? After all, like JP, anyone can drip paint. He
even has his notorious Tribe Of John acolytes. Yet, JA denies his import
to these, or any other cult. He stated, after the Languagists knelt before him,
that he is not a Language poet because he believes that language depends on
references to meanings generated outside language. & what would JA be
without his personal water boy- the dastardly dumb critic Harold Bloom who
decries every piece of tripe published by JA post-Convex as ‘his best yet!’.
Both he & his sick betitted twin, Helen Vendler, relentlessly attempt to
place JA on a par with Walt Whitman, EP, TSE, & WS. EP & TSE are
arguable but the bookends- no way. But HB persists with such skewed logic as
this: ‘Ashbery's persona, at least since his great book The Double
Dream of Spring, is what I remember describing once as a failed Orphic,
perhaps even deliberately failed.’ Note how HB’s standard is himself!
Since he once said it it must be swallowed by the masses, therefore he can feel
free to 2nd his own motion! HV goes off the deep end in the other
direction, citing JA as not a lineal descendant of 1 WW (Whitman) but another WW
(William Wordsworth). He is, to her, a 20th Century Romantic. Oy!
Like those poets, she sees his poetry as a means to becoming more herself- the
poem is the instrument of self-knowledge. Read this & chuckle- it’s a
criticism of JA’s abysmally bad 200+ page poem
Flow Chart (the worst book length poem since Ted Hughes’s 1977
abomination Gaudete (in Ted’s mind you CAN hear the concrete drying!):
‘In my own case, by entering into some bizarrely tuned pitch inside myself,
I can find myself on Ashbery's wavelength, where everything at the symbolic
level makes sense....The irritating (and seductive) thing about this tuning in
is that it can't be willed; I can't make it happen when I am tired or impatient.
But when the frequencies meet, the effect on me is Ashbery's alone, and it is a
form of trance.’
But, the TOJ acolytes, especially Ann Lauterbach, & James Tate have
gotten some pastings, too. New Formalist diva Mark Jarman (himself- guess what?-
a bad poet) rips JA & his influence on the TOJ. Oddly, he includes
Minimal-to-the-point-of-nothingness poetaster Robert Creeley amongst the TOJ!
This, all the while ripping discursiveness. The piece was called The Curse Of
Discursiveness: ‘Where these poets go right they ignore Ashbery's mode
entirely. The invective is so strong, one surmises, because Ashbery's presence
is so large.’
Notice anything, my readers, in these snips from other critics? That the
fundaments of poetry are NEVER directly addressed? Pop shrinkism, politics,
philosophy, but never poetry. Perhaps JA’s most abysmal effect is that his
appearance may have heralded the age of the critic not dealing with the poem via
the poem, but with the poem via the poet (or the poet’s experiences, or those
experiences put forth, etc.). Let’s dice that & hit this of-reprinted
supposed ‘comic meditation’ which has the typical JA hallmarks- a painterly
title & pop culture out the wazoo! It’s from JA’s late 1960s book The
Double Dream Of Spring:
Farm Implements and Rutabagas in
a Landscape
The first of the undecoded
messages read: "Popeye sits in thunder,
And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,
Not a particularly bad poem, but not good either. It’s chief flaw is that very discursiveness. Note how the title connects to the last line’s being Popeye’s emergence from revery. Also, that it is a satire on the very idea conjured up by the title. This poem merely needs trimming, especially Olive Oyl’s soliloquy, which serves no purpose but to bore many readers in to not finishing the poem. I have done some similar things- especially the playing off of a given idea- in my painting poems from my The 49 Gallery sequence. I’ve just done it better & more consistently. Let’s simply tighten this poem up & see it improve.