I've thought for years that the best way to read John Ashbery's poetry is to first throw the instruction manual away and then go for a fishing trip in his various lakes of opaque meanings. Literally, imagine yourself in a boat in the center of a large body of water and cast a line into the water, and then reel in what pulls and makes the line go taut. Whatever comes up is always a surprise, unexpected, perhaps a tangle of things that wouldn't be bound together or linked in any conceivable but in the dreamy but sleepless realm of Ashbery's actively processing mind and attendant imagination.

This might be the closet an American writer has ever come to transcribing the language of their thought process; for all the conventional wisdom about Ashbery's associations with painters, French surrealists and the rush of popular culture, he very closely resembles the method of Virginia Woolf and the still engaging , if topically staid process of stream-of-conscious.

Ashbery's poems are filled with much of the material world, both natural and that which is manufactured, fashioned, contrived and constructed by human agency. In both Woolf and Ashbery, the central voice, the observer renders an image, makes it solid and substances, gives it attributes and distinguishing nuance, allows the thing to be played with as the mind associates, puns, constructs parallel universes and contradictory time lines; sections of books, a cold cup of coffee on magazine, a painting under a cloth, shorelines seen from Italian villas, comic book heroes and the breathing of a grudgingly referred to "you" who is voiceless, without input.

I was aware that Ashbery was an adherent of Wallace Stevens and his notion of the Supreme Fiction, a reconfiguration of the unresolved dynamic between Idea and it's physical expression to the world of the senses, but where Stevens constructed a grand rhetoric to address the generic formulations of the everyday--his poems often times sound like critiques of a reality that is inferior to a divine Idea that makes their formation possible--Ashbery makes more informal, casual, and brings the distanced bewilderment to street level. There are glimmers, glimpses, observations and sightings of the physical detail that assures you that you and Ashbery are living on the same planet, and yet at precisely the moment you come to a reassurance, these details blur and merge with the spill over of many other chats and conversations the poet seems to be having. The poems are not monologues, and one cannot call them a "medley of voices", as Richard Poirier had referred to Norman Mailer's Why Are We In Viet Nam?. "Medley" implies an orchestration of unlike parts made to harmonize, to make sense in ways that give pleasure. Ashbery's voice is singular, his own, and what comes from his typewriter are whatever arguments, debates, interrogations are rumbling through his consciousness at that given moment. While Ashbery is capable of the well turned sentence and even sweet music on occasion, his aim isn't to give pleasure, but rather to make the ordinary and nettlesome extraordinarily weird.It's not that his poems are any more accessible than Stevens--his less daunting syntax actually seem to make his poetry more demanding than Stevens'-- but with patience we can comprehend a language we might actually use , a voice that could plausibly be one we would have in those moments of lost thought, daydreaming, vague yet intense yearning when there is so much we want to bring together for a moment of clarity but are frustrated to find that our senses keep changing along with the world they behold.

Ashbery is the central poet for many critics whose projects intend to layout the raise of urban Modernism in American verse. Marjorie Perloff is someone else worth mentioning as much of who she deals with are city poets, worldly, college educated, unashamedly bookish, and unafraid to employ a more vulgar popular culture, IE comic books, movies, advertising, along with the more swank and sophisticated allusions to high culture, whether literature, opera, theatre, painting.

A connecting thread through much of the poets emerging after WW2 was their ambivalence to the plenitude of culture and media--Dwight McDonald's derided mass culture--and began, in their individual endeavors, to fashion particular styles to sift through the cultural dumping ground each of them were witnessing. Elizabeth Bishop is exquisitely hermetic in her verse, and is much closer to the qualities Stevens praised for poetic surfaces calling their own form into question, and James Merrill , who was something of a virtuoso in sustained, whispering elusiveness.
One sees why some of the poets of the New York School receive more attention from readers and critics, especially the work of Ashbery and Frank O'Hara (and to a lesser degree, the wonderfully digressive poems of Ron Padgett); meanings and intents about the growling contradictory messages of physical reality are dealt with as unresolvable conditions of existence in the work, but the point is how the poet is engaged with their world. It might be said that Ashbery's work makes no sense, and conveys a sense of witness to an ever blooming enlargement of perception. Sheer meaning, hard and fast, is not be found here, but feeling, resonance, introspection are, and it is this several layered ambiguity that keeps a reader up at night, staring out of the window, testing the keyboard as ideas about what we haven't thought about comes in phrases even God himself couldn't explain.O'Hara is not so oblique or confusing--he is popular precisely because he has the lyric capacity to merge his far flung loves of high and low culture and still carry on a rant that achieves a jazzy spontaneity--he is the poet from whom Billy Collins has taken from and tamed for polite company. Ashbery is the stroller, the walker in the city, the flaneur, the sidewalk engineer examining the city in it's constant self-construction, composing a poetry of association that accompanies a terrain of things with inexplicable uses. What seems like a mighty muddle in his writing becomes full engagement of a personality in love with what the senses bring him; at his best the intelligence of the poems is transcendent and there is , in the main, a tangible joy in how he phrases his reactions, responses and retorts to a world that always seems to baffle him in some wondrous way.

Hans Christian Andersen got it wrong,

for when the little brat yelled that the emperor was naked,

the cheering dampened to silence

and the parading naked stopped

and found themselves standing naked next a naked emperor.

The question ought to be not if the Emporer is naked but rather if the observer is blind. My take is that if one thinks there is nothing to Ashbery's poems, they are bringing nothing to their readings, Willingness is the key; something of oneself needs to be invested in reading the poems in order to find parseable verse. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I've always thought of O'Hara as the city stroller (Lunch Poems).

olyeller:

I've always thought of O'Hara as the city stroller (Lunch Poems).

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 treaded. 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.

Blind? I don't think so. What I don't see is why it's necessary to deliberately make writing so recondite. I plowed through Lisa Randall’s "Warped Passages" and marveled how she

made a difficult subject easy. But I can’t see making a relative easy subject impossibly complex.

I’ve read Convex Mirror and while there were lines that were quite inspired, the poem as

a whole left me cold. I also thought, that except for comedy and narratives, poetry is a parsimony of phrasing, a distillation of experience in a fierce economy of words, not a confusion of nouns

verbs and modifiers. I think that a in a hundred years from now Ashbery will read mainly

by graduate students writing their theses on late turn of the century poetry, while

Robert Frost will still be selling in book stores, if they still exist. It’s the poet’s job

to bring something to the reader that will make him want to explore further.

When a poem is intentionally made obscure, well why bother?

Blind? I don't think so. What I don't see is why it's necessary to deliberately make writing so recondite.

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 manuver through his diffuse stanzas worth the work.

I plowed through Lisa Randall’s "Warped Passages" and marveled how shemade a difficult subject easy. But I can’t see making a relative easy subject impossibly complex.

I also thought, that except for comedy and narratives, poetry is a parsimony of phrasing, a distillation of experience in a fierce economy of words, not a confusion of nouns.

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 sensesations 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 competant prose composition.

I think that a in a hundred years from now Ashbery will read mainly by graduate students writing their theses on late turn of the century poetry, while Robert Frost will still be selling in book stores, if they still exist.

Perhaps, and so what? This is not an adequet reason to dismiss Ashbery's work.

It’s the poet’s job to bring something to the reader that will make him want to explore further.

This is what Ashbery does, and I'm certainly not the only reader who has given closer examination to literary forms and how they can give us a different take on "reality" from having read him and other interesting poets composing along the cutting edge.

Actually I agree with most of your position. Except well-written prose can also

create ambiguity. It's a matter of degree, and the subjective sensitivities

of the reader. My tastes are for deceptive accessibility. That is, a poem

that appears clear and concrete until you reread it and suddenly

start getting confused by the unraveling layers of meaning.

The concrete imagery draws you in and suddenly you find yourself

drawn further into the work. Ashbery presents such a mountain

of confusion that I’m not hooked. Beyond doggerel which is objectively

bad because it violates basic rules of writing, it becomes

subjective as to which poem is better than another. If you like Ashbery

enjoy.

This is a fine statement of your poetic instincts, and I would agree whole heartedly with your remarks that an artfully isolated image can enlarge a reader's awareness and bring them into a new world. But poetry works in many ways, with Ashbery being an exemplar of one of many approaches. It's readability that I go for, and Ashbery is far more readable than the equally dense Ezra Pound. Pound for me is just so much sludge, while Ashbery is a sheer glide.

Strange, I find Pound a bit more readable than Ashbery, though they're both not

exactly champions of clarity. Pound was a bastard as a person, and so was Frost,

whose poetry I admire. . Ashbery offends no one.

richard:

Ashbery offends no one.

Yes. I met Ashbery in the Seventies when he did a reading at an artist's loft in downtown San Diego, where he seemed chatty and very pleasant to be around.

I was intrigued and pleased by this bit: "Whatever comes up is always a surprise, unexpected, perhaps a tangle of things that wouldn't be bound together or linked in any conceivable but in the dreamy but sleepless realm of Ashbery's actively processing mind and attendant imagination. This might be the closet an American writer has ever come to transcribing the language of their thought process... he very closely resembles the method of Virginia Woolf and the still engaging , if topically staid process of stream-of-conscious." In my experience, what goes on in Ashberry's succesful moments is akin to what very often takes place with e.e. cummings, James Tate, Gertrude Stein, and certainly Wallace Stevens. We are being urged to experience the direct and the immediate, which is not the same thing as being asked to understand something or know its meaning. In other words, the emphasis is placed on awareness, as opposed to analysis, and the sort of awareness that Ashberry and the others I mention invoke calls temporarily for a different kind of consciousness (whether it's streaming or not). Henri Bergson, whose work I understand today but may not tomorrow, spoke of a "certain intuition to be seized" by focusing and directing concsiousness on a convergence of diverse images and ideas, thus creating at least a notion of duration. In that duration we have an experience; a "sense of the eternal now," is what Norman Friedman calls it. It is not an integration of thought and meaning so much as a "rising above them." Stein called this "the excitingness of pure being." That kind of focussed experience is an order of transcendence, in my view. It only happens in the duration, and being slowed down by Ashberry's anarchic, radically structured, and confounding lines aids the process. Progress is dampened so that we, if willing, may have a moment of perception or awareness. The question is whether we ought to allow our pleasure in a particular state of being to supersede our understanding what that state means. I would say yes, because poetry helps us experience language so that great moments can be known without knowing their meaning. Detractors ask an honest question when they wonder if radically alterred language provides real substance or an empty exercise. In other words, without meaning or explication, they suspect that in Ashberry's lines there is nothing there. But by escaping what Edith Sitwell called "the sleep families of proper words and phrases" we can discover that WE are there in those lines.