ASHBERY'S PASTORAL ART

1 8 Y A S H B E R Y ’ S P A S T O R A L A R T G I U L I O J . P E R T I L E New York School Pastoral? It might seem counterintuitive to speak of John Ashbery, the principal figure in the New York School of poets, as a pastoral poet. Ashbery’s verse has always dwelt on the heady distraction of metropolitan living, its haphazard and abstract qualities tuned most closely to the blur and sensory alienation of the city. A poem such as ‘‘Da√y Duck in Hollywood’’ exemplifies this conjunction of urban living with an urban aesthetic influenced above all by stream-of-consciousness and surrealism: Something strange is creeping across me. La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars Of ‘‘I Thought about You’’ or something mellow from Amadigi di Gaula for everything – a mint-condition can Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged Stock – to come clattering through the rainbow trellis Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland Fling Terrace. 1 9 R In the rush of disconnected, commodified detail, the speaker is overwhelmed. He tries to process it but has no time to respond aesthetically or a√ectively; he proves unable even to fully register the discomfort evinced in the first line. And yet while the experience described in the poem is unquestionably a ‘‘city’’ one – the address suggests a busy intersection, and the list of objects the detritus on a city street – the phrase ‘‘rainbow trellis’’ and the street name itself, ‘‘Highland Fling Terrace,’’ evoke, if only fleetingly, a rural green space. Ashbery grew up not in the city but in the farmland of Sodus, New York, near Rochester, and he has often repudiated the idea of a ‘‘New York School’’ of poets. He has described New York itself as a place inimical to poetry, an ‘‘anti-place, an abstract climate’’ – a description that the urban experience described in ‘‘Da√y Duck’’ bears out. Thus it is perhaps not so surprising that we should find, even in this poem, evidence of a counter-strain, an attempt to escape the onslaught it describes. If ‘‘Da√y Duck’’ itself seems written not from the ‘‘margins of our technological society’’ but from its center, elsewhere in Ashbery’s poetry those margins are more fully explored, and what we might understand as the pastoral impulse of his work is more fully borne out. Ashbery’s poetry can hardly be described as nostalgic for Sodus; to speak of it in terms of the pastoral must mean, therefore, something other than picturesque recollection or nostalgic longing. Indeed the ‘‘pastoral’’ itself goes beyond rural imagery to involve engagement, generally quite self-conscious, with one of the oldest literary genres we know. And it involves, also, attitudes, problems, and questions relating to literature’s place within social and political life. Ashbery’s poetry belongs to the pastoral tradition in these strong senses as well. The title of Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees (1956), already implies a pastoral orientation. The poems, it suggests, will not only be about trees; they are themselves in some sense trees. The collection announces itself as a gathered o√ering at once precious and humble, a modest garland of ‘‘first fruits’’ in earnest of more to come. It thus participates in the signaling that is typical of pastoral, as do the titles of individual poems: ‘‘Eclogue,’’ ‘‘A Pastoral .’’ Such titles let us know in advance something about the poem or collection, and that in turn helps us imagine its setting 2 0 P E R T I L E Y and its speaker, even, broadly, its subject matter. They invoke generic precedents in order to guide the reader’s expectations, sacrificing individuality and particularity for the sake of asserting their place in a specific, codified tradition. Several of Ashbery’s readers have picked up on the pastoral strain in his work, but while they recognize that it goes beyond nostalgia, they have read...