Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets

John Ashbery: The Poetics of Uncertainty

John John Ashbery brings out the best and the worst in people who care about contemporary American poetry. The best is exemplified by the reception he has gotten throughout the years from the officialdom of poetry: so many awards, so much honor, such a plenitude ofvociferous praise, so many plaques, so many laurel wreaths, so many barrels ofcash. His first book, Some Trees, was selected by W. H.. Auden for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1956. More recently, as the dust jacket to his Selected Poems tells us, «His 1975 volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a member of the National Academy and Institute ofArts and Letters and the National Academy ofArts and Sciences. Twice named a Guggenheim Fellow, he was awarded the annual fellowship ofthe Academy ofAmerican Poets in 1982. In 1985 he received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship." Currently he is a chancellor of the Academy ofAmerican Poets. What makes this muchness of recognition odd is the fact that so many serious readers ofpoetry seem to have no idea ofwhat Ashbery's poems are about. Robert Boyers, for example, has spoken of the frustration he feels when trying to teach Ashbery's poems to undergraduate students: Some of us have tried, with small success, to explain Ashbery in the classroom , concluding that a great many complete poems, and large portions of others, resist any kind of explanation. Other more gifted interpreters have concluded that even where ordinary readings work, they discover nothing of genuine consequence in Ashbery's thought.1 Boyers' last comment (which has the distinction of being both a left-handed compliment and a cliche of much of the criticism devoted to Ashbery's work) has a certain accuracy, if one is willing to accept the rather odd notion that some ideas in works of art are more important than others. Thus we might say that some of Ashbery's poems do indeed seem as inconsequential as they are comprehensible, for example, "The Instruction Manual," which I will discuss later. But it seems equally true that other ofhis poems are both comprehensible and intellectually challenging, as Laurence Lieberman has demonstrated in his excellent discussion of the poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." 2 This is a minor point, however, compared to the error Boyers makes when he assumes that Ashbery- apparently as all good poets ought to do -wishes to make traditional thematic sense in most or all ofhis poems. Such is simply not the case. What, if anything, Ashbery does wish to say-or, more accurately, what he wishes to accomplish-in his work is a complex matter that needs to be addressed from several perspectives. We might begin by considering the way meaning is achieved or perhaps avoided in "Two Scenes," the first ofAshbery's poems that most readers are likely to encounter: it appears both on the opening page of Some Trees and on the opening page of his Selected Poems, published almost thirty years later in 1985. The poem is appropriate to my exercise for two other reasons: it is relatively short, which means we will have an easy time keeping its details in mind, and it is typical ofAshbery's practice generally. Each of the scenes is presented in a single stanza, and I will comment on them in order: We see us as we truly behave: From every corner comes a distinctive offering. 20 JOHN ASHBERY The train comes bearing joy; The sparks it strikes illuminate the table. Destiny guides the water-pilot, and it is destiny. For long we hadn't heard so much news, such noise. The day was ""arm and pleasant. "We see you in your hair, Air resting around the tips of mountains." The first two lines seem to invite the reader into a poem about the revealing behavior of an "us," perhaps the poet and a friend or friends, perhaps the poet and his readers. l~he first piece ofspecific evidence to appear, however, is not a "distinctive offering" of a way "we truly behave," but a train that bears joy and strikes table-illunainating sparks. The logic is puzzling, and it seems clear that, if readers want these first two sentences to cohere, then they are going to have to supply something from their own imagination. So let's say...