John Ashbery and Hyperpastoral Suburbia

The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of a hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.

John Ashbery, “The System”

The ever-expanding body of scholarship on John Ashbery features three recent book chapters analyzing Ashbery’s pastoral poetics. Timothy Gray’s Urban Pastoral (2010), a study of the New York school’s concerns with nature, hails “the country boy who calls out from Ashbery’s lyric landscapes” (44). Ann Marie Mikkelsen’s Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011) brings similar attention to the poet’s rural upbringing before performing a series of queer readings of his pastoral poems. Although lacking a systematic focus on pastoral, Marit J. MacArthur’s somewhat earlier study, The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery (2008), examines the poet’s nostalgic “preoccupation” with his rural childhood and his literary “attempts to imagine or reconstruct a more settled life” (148). One narrative advanced by all three critics holds that Ashbery’s origin in Sodus, a farming community in upstate New York, motivates his poetic interest in presenting the countryside as a retreat. Furthermore, because he moved as an adult to New York City, and because land development has transformed locales like Sodus, Ashbery’s pastoral poems evince a recurrent sense of loss. Although MacArthur includes a discussion of suburbs in her chapter on Ashbery (190–95), neither she nor the other two critics acknowledge the centrality of suburbia to Ashbery’s pastoral poetics. Ashbery has never lived in this environment, and yet he frequently imagines suburbia and uses suburban speakers in his engagements with the pastoral mode. Indeed, no critic of any stripe has yet offered a thorough account of suburbia’s presence in Ashbery’s work.¹

This essay aims to provide that account while complicating an available interpretation of suburbia’s significance to Ashbery’s poetry, an interpretation in which suburbia affords a symbolic setting for the poet’s discursive wanderings in general. Among the critics to observe such itinerancies are Andrew Ross, Mary Kinzie, Bonnie Costello, and Angus Fletcher;² but Willard Spiegelman has gone furthest toward linking Ashbery’s wanderings to suburbia. “It might be most accurate to call Ashbery a suburban poet,” Spiegel-man posits, because “[a]s in the United States, where contexts fluctuate or have positively disappeared, in Ashbery’s poetry the lack of a center signifies the lack of a centered self and of a central culture” (143).³ Such an explanation, which simultaneously regards suburbia as a metaphor for the postmodern self and names the landscape that this self must negotiate, facilitates an interpretation of the opening lines of “The System” (1972). In these lines the poem’s speaker senses that the current order—whether cultural, technological, social, political, or personal—is malfunctioning, and that this problem may culminate in a psychological Big Bang. The potential explosion through “the extremities of life, the suburbs” might lead the speaker “to where the country is” (Collected Poems 280). But if the “extremities of life” are suburbs themselves, then the “country” cannot exist beyond them. It follows that, without a center or accessible destination, the poem proceeds in Ashbery’s well-known desultory manner. However, attention to the passage’s pastoral thematics enlarges its complexity. The logic of the passage makes “suburbs” synonymous with “country,” the latter word connoting both countryside and nation. In one sense, Ashbery recalls the commonplace, euphemistic substitution of “country” for “suburb,” but in another sense, he encounters an impasse for the pastoral mode. If the countryside and the nation are suburbanized to their edges, then how can the poet locate a rural retreat and avail himself of the “center” of identity and expressivity that the pastoral mode would supply? As “The System” indicates, Ashbery’s discursive wanderings through suburbia consistently stem from, and lead to, a pastoral...