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Ashbery hors cadre

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Hélène Aji
, 
Agnès Derail

“Is Anything Central?”: Politics in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Antonia Rigaud

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  • 1  Ashbery received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critcs Circle Award and the Nati (...)
  • 2  Melena Ryzik, “An 80 Year Old Poet for the MTV Generation,” The New York Times, August 27, 2007: h (...)

1There is something historically peculiar about the fact that Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror established Ashbery’s position in American letters as an unofficial national poet of sorts, since the collection seems from its very title to point its readers in the direction of the self and individual experience rather than of the polis. Ashbery seems to stand in contrast to the tradition of American poets, from Walt Whitman to Robert Lowell, who explicitly represent themselves as political poets in the American grain. In the citations of the prizes Ashbery received for SPCM1 as well as the collection’s critical reception at the time, the poet was perceived as an eminent and representative voice of 1970s America. At the tme that the collection came out, it was generally recognized that Ashbery was making the leap from his position in the avant-garde where his reputation went back to his second book The Tennis Court Oath to a writer who was central to contemporary American poetry, becoming later one of those rare great poets who became recognized in popular culture to the point of being chosen, at the age of 80, by MTV2 to become its representative on U.S. campuses.

2Ashbery’s moment around the time of the country’s bicentennial is all the more politically interesting insofar as a mere eight years before the collection’s publication, he had been embroiled in a heated controversy about the role of politics in poetry, in which he seemed to go against the main current of the time. The controversy stemmed from his obituary for Frank O’Hara in which he underlined the absence of politics in O’Hara’s poetry:

  • 3  J. Longebach, “Ashbery and the Individual Talent”, p. 103.

Frank O’Hara’s poetry has no program and therefore cannot be joined. It does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern society; it does not speak out against the war in Viet Nam or in favor of civil rights; it does not paint gothic vignetes of the post-atomic Age: in a word, it does not atack the establishment. It merely ignores its right to exist, and is thus a source of annoyance for partsans of every stripe.3

3These lines read as an indictment of the recent and contemporary trends in American poetry, such as the countercultural poetry of the Beats with Allen Ginsberg, or the Civil Rights poetry of writers such as Amiri Baraka or Gwendolyn Brooks or the Vietnam war protest poetry of someone like Denise Levertov. Ashbery seeks for the poet a literary position that would go against the contemporary grain of protest and counterculture, but does not necessarily reject the politcal. He was atacked by critc Louis Simpson in an artcle in The Nation for refusing to use poetry as a vessel for politcs, but one might argue that his opposition to contemporary protest poetry, made unquestionable in the text’s anaphoras, is not an opposition to politcs. Rather, this statement seems to call for a form of poetry that would be radically concerned with resistance, a form of poetry that “cannot be joined”, “that ignores” and that is “a source of annoyance”. Behind indictng contemporary protest poetry, Ashbery seems to give a second and perhaps deeper definition of poetry, one evocatve of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” and which seems to install the poet’s much-discussed difficulty as a politcal position of radical opposition. As a citzen, Ashbery was not averse to politcal action (his answer to Louis Simpson listed a number of politcal actions he had partcipated in), but his work seeks to oppose any politcal labelling. His position is neither traditional and conservatve nor inflected with the tones of lefist protest poetry, it is rather deeply concerned with poetry as an ideal to be separated from the contngency of contemporary politcs and to be fully recognized in its deeper politcal dimension as the locus of resistance.

  • 4  The poetic voice can be situated as such in its language, images and references which all seem to (...)

4The contrasted ways in which he was received at different political periods does not suggest a change in his position, but rather a change between cultural moments: from Louis Simpson’s accusation for his “anti-political stance” in the mid 1960s and his somewhat marginal position compared to most artistic (and political) gestures in the 1960s, he became the spokesperson for 1970s America. The complexity with which Ashbery envisions the political might have been unwelcome in the Manichean 1960s but seemed to capture the ambiguities of the 1970s, particularly as the country’s image of its own power was suffering hits such as defeat in Vietnam and the oil crisis, which shed an unexpected light on America’s inherent vulnerabilities. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror invites its readers to a meditation on the mood of the United States in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Cold War era, presenting the poet’s singular “version of America” (SPCM, l, v. 12, p. 44) as a meditation on the state of life of a certain kind of self, in a certain class (metropolitan, urban, white, a little exhausted and nostalgic4) in late-capitalist America. The country is however not the object of prophetic pronouncements as one finds in more straightforward political poetry, the prophetic is here replaced with stammering unfinished pronouncements which seem to question the very possibility of expressing political ideas and ideals. It is indeed part of Ashbery’s paradoxical political project in SPCM that he brings us to question ordinary language and its political and ethical possibilities for the community.

5This paper will look at Ashbery’s poetry in its opposition to “political poetry” and the way he displaces the political, but remains very much concerned with the polis throughout SPCM. I will first consider that the collection seeks to capture the zeitgeist of the time, saying more about the American community than might be supposed by the willful solipsism of its title. Ashbery’s refusal of political poetry extends to a refusal of a political voice as the poems all seem to refuse the very possibility of a political position, replacing the prophetic with a stammering. Beyond these gestures, the Ashberian poem calls for a reappraisal of ordinary language and its ability to create a community. It is ultimately in his poems’ resistance to easy understandings that Ashbery situates the political, calling on the poet’s ability to communicate with his readers despite the slipperiness of ordinary language.

A Nation’s Portrait in a Convex Mirror? Locating the Political

6Despite their apparent obliqueness, the poems in SPCM propose a way of seeing the reality of mid-1970s America, painting a landscape of the country that relies on a myriad of small details which, taken individually in Ashbery’s typically disjunct presentation and paratactic style, might blur the big picture, as though we were seeing it at too close a range, but which also allow us to move back and see how these blurs and pointllist phrases capture the reality of the American scene and a certain self within that landscape.

  • 5  Tom Wolfe, “The ’Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, New York Magazine, August 23rd, 1976.
  • 6  Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, (...)
  • 7  The recurrent landscapes of the collection seem to belong to an area roughly corresponding to Ashb (...)
  • 8  Williams, William Carlos, In the American Grain, New York, New Directions, 1925, paragraph 1.

7The poems involve a public America (of highways and cities) and a domestic one (of gardens, suburbs and vacation spots) through which the self is explored. They can be read in the context of the 1970s, a time of liberation of mores, a retreat inward in what Tom Wolfe famously called the “Me decade”5, where the energies of the great political protests of the 1960s were turned into more inward-looking perspectives or in the turn towards the therapeutic sensibility Christopher Lasch analyzed in his 1979 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism6. SPCM can be read as a cultural object in the line of these two essays that tried to capture the turn to individualism in the 1970s, since the poems seem interested in capturing a mood, in bearing witness, through glimpses, to the reality of life in this post-industrial world while centering on individual and private experience. Ashbery’s poem-paintings however go beyond a mere record of the times as they espouse the Renaissance tradition of the “bizzaria” (l, v. 188, p. 73): they are disjointed, they multiply perspectives and hence play with the reader’s expectations of perspective and scale. Ashbery’s art prefers small-scale images and experiences rather than the large vistas of the Whitmanian tradition. The poet seems to claim in “City Afternoon” the impossibility to “seize America” (l, v. 5, p. 61), yet it is tempting to say that the collection of vignettes actually “does define, after all” (l, v. 11, p. 61). His verse reluctantly yields up a landscape of cultural signs – far from the “natural wilderness” of the American myth7, but it practices the capture of what William Carlos Williams called “the American grain”. Williams sought to capture “some flavor of an actual peculiarity,” “the strange phosphorous of the life,8” a gesture very similar to Ashbery’s who seeks, in his poetry, to grasp a vision of America which is transient as though undergoing a chemical reaction, or as reflected in a convex mirror. The poet refers to the national narrative in oblique lines and non-sequiturs, the effect of which is to evoke the ghost of the the triumphalist American story and subtly demystify it, through clichés and emptied metaphors, contrasting it with a series of nondescript, average, suburban landscapes.

8The world of the poem is therefore at the same time recognizable and imaginary, of its time and outside of history. We see middle America, places where names are interchangeable ( “Elmgrove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm” l, v. 5, p. 44), private spaces that could be anywhere and nowhere. It is indeed the interior world of private experience that the poems seek to capture. Most of the poems end indeed on the image of domesticity and a life indoor: “Forties Flick” ends on the merging of the outside and the inside:

The indoors with the outside becoming part of you
As you find you had never left off laughing at death,
The background, dark vine at the edge of the porch
SPCM, l, v. 19-21, p. 5

9Yet the dream is the dominating mood of these scenes which are visible but remain unattainable. “[T] he whole scene / Is walled behind glass” (SPCM, l, v. 12-13, p. 41): the poems invite us to see the world they inhabit, but there is an invisible barrier between this world and the readers, as if it was “walled behind glass”, both close and ever distant. The image of a world “walled behind glass” is also evocative of Ashbery’s love for Joseph Cornell’s boxes, miniature worlds made of everyday banal objects turned into dreamlike evocations of the world as an elsewhere despite its recognizable features. As Ellen Levy has shown, Cornell is an essential reference to understand Ashbery’s relationship to reality and dreams: in the same way as Cornell, Ashbery picks up images from everyday life, both mundane and artstic, and rearranges them into a miniature world which is both recognizable and transformed into a dreamlike universe.

  • 9  Susan Sontag, “The New Sensibility”, in Against Interpretation, New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux (...)

10All these notations about the contemporary experience reflect the poet’s passion for the ordinary—ordinary visual images, ordinary everyday language, the ordinary as opposed to grandiose culture. This overwhelming presence of the ordinary is to be construed as an ideological gesture: opening the poem to the everyday, in a line inaugurated with Whitman and followed by poets such as Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams and, much closer to Ashbery, his friend O’Hara. Opening poetry to the banal and the everyday at the time of SPCM meant continuing the line of democratic poetry of his poetic forefathers but also refusing recent oppositions between high and low culture. The mood of the Ashberian poem belongs to what Susan Sontag defined in 1965 as “the new sensibility” which she applies to the new art of the time, in its openness to high and low, and which functions as “an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility”9. In lieu of any certainty as to the poems’ meanings, the poet seeks to establish a mood, to capture the zeitgeist, inviting us to witness the developments of contemporary American life and culture. “The One Thing That Can Save America” (p. 44-45) illustrates this well since our reading experience moves from the title and the anticipation of some political meaning to the realization that it was a mirage and that the only “thing” we will know will be the experience of a mood. Fleeting and impalpable, the mood the poems seek to capture is inflected with a vernacular of suburban life, with oral everyday speech, as well as with references to American popular culture. We are given to hear the United States as a series of different frequencies, almost as if switching through radio channels, something which evokes the music of John Cage whom Ashbery admired. Cage’s 1951 piece Imaginary Landscape IV, was made for 24 performers at 12 radios, creating an aural experience of familiar radio tones juxtaposed into a static of sounds much in the vein of Ashbery’s own “imaginary landscapes” which read as though we were tuning through small radio segments one after another.

11Most of the collection’s poems follow a similar movement driving towards domesticity as in “Grand Galop”: “Before going home to the decency of one’s private life / Shut up behind doors, which is nobody’s business” (l, v. 52-53, p. 15). The house, the room, is the ultimate goal of the poems and Ashbery seems to be responding to the monumental notion of mobility as a form of grace in America from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” to the Beats, registering a certain fatigue, a sense that the whole notion of American mobility and destiny had led to a landscape and soundscape cluttered with signs and incoherence, and a domestic scene pervaded with fatigue and routine. The poems are in line with the Greek nostos, they are songs of homecoming, moving from the public to the private and thus seem far from the sense of the collective on which politics rests. Yet Ashbery seems to call for a reappraisal of the political in its relationship to the private, to situate the political on the side of individual and personal experience, of the study of how the world affects the individual:

[…] I know all this
But can’t seem to keep it from affectng me
Every day, all day. I’ve tried recreation,
Reading until late at night, train rides
And romance
SPCM, l, v. 18-22, p. 3

12The tension between the particular and the general is at the heart of the poems which seem to try to capture a sense of reality while at the same time insisting on the ways in which private experience changes our perception of the world. Ashbery situates the political at the level of feelings ( “Feelings are important”, SPCM, l, v. 9, p. 22) as the foundational reality of any type of relationship and therefore as the central basis for any reflection on the community and politics.

13Ashbery’s poems bear the trace of Whitmanian poetry which tied together the modern poet to democratic culture and seem to exist in discussion with the bard’s lofty political pronouncements, except that they are to be heard as low-key notes on the everyday and the personal. The reader whose idea of political poetry stems from Neruda, or Yeats, or even Williams, will have a hard time understanding the politics of Ashbery’s poems—yet that very difficulty is a political gesture, a demystifying of the moral position of the poet who sets himself (it is mostly a him) as the moral arbiter of a nation’s “destiny”. Ashbery captured the mood of an era in which “[t] he possibilities are limited” (SPCM, l, v. 56, p. 10): the grand gestures and ideals of old are here deflated into the small stories of “minor characters” (SPCM, l, v. 62, p. 10).

“The One Thing that Can Save America”: Debunking the Prophetic Voice10

  • 10  My reading of Ashbery here is very different from the one offered by Douglas Crase in “The Prophet (...)
  • 11  “They Dream Only of America” (The Tennis-Court Oath, 1962, p. 13) opens with a reference to Whitma (...)

14The poems present the lingering presence of ideals, yet those are presented as “large / Unfinished concepts” (SPCM, l, v. 78-79, p. 16) to which the poet prefers small-scale anecdotes of everyday life. “America”, the politcal motf par excellence of American political poetry is part of Ashbery’s vernacular but it is stripped bare of any ideal definition and remains unclear and unspecific. The tradition inaugurated by Whitman of democratic poetry is here present only as a trace,11 as a background against which the poems call for a new definition of the political, on a smaller, private scale.

15The center of SPCM is occupied by “The One Thing that Can Save America” (p. 44-45) which plays with the notion of centrality and meaning. The very tone of the title is at a pitch opposite to Ashbery’s assertive unassertiveness, sounding like a political billboard on the side of the road. In invisible quotes, the title is both distant from the tone of the rest of the poem, in which salvation is tempered by everyday fatigues and pleasures, and a way of giving the poem a focus. The theme of salvation (that of the Puritan and foundational project of the “city upon a hill”) is relinquished behind the ever-elusive “thing”. The poem brings together the grandiose, the universal, the lyrical with the small, the particular and the matter-of-fact.

  • 12  M. Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, p. 262.

16The poems play with the recurring motif of revelation, but our advance towards it is always a stumble through the chance-like organization of the poems, their ellipses and seemingly private connotations. As Marjorie Perloff shows, Ashbery’s language is “always on the point of revealing its secret—this pattern of opening and closing, of revelation and re-veiling, of simultaneous disclosure and concealment is the structural principle of the Ashbery poem”.12 This is at work for instance in “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat” where we are made to expect to “watch the thing that is prepared to happen” (SPCM, l, v. 14, p. 1) or to anticipate “the great, formal affair” (SPCM, l, v. 24, p. 1), but these expectations are never fulfilled. Similarly, “As You Came from the Holy Land” evokes “that thing of monstrous interest” (SPCM, l, v. 35, p. 7) which is immediately deflated by becoming invisible:

it is finally as though that thing of monstrous interest
were happening in the sky
but the sun is setting and prevents you from seeing it
SPCM, l, v. 35-37, p. 7

17It remains forever unexplained, eternally “the thing that is prepared to happen” (SPCM, l, v. 14, p. 1).

18The word “thing” is the linguistic epitome of Ashbery’s anti-prophetic stance. The poet’s declarations are only declarations of his inability to declare outside of the generic and undefined “thing” on which many poems rest: “One must bear in mind one thing. / It isn’t necessary to know what that thing is” (SPCM, l, v. 23-24, p. 22). The undefined is the ruling motif of “Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point / Of being […]” (SPCM, l, v. 79-80, p. 16) and which keep the poem on the verge of meaning, but never allow them to be fully meaningful. If the “thing” is the linguistic image of this inability to reveal, letters are its symbol: seldom opened, and sometimes as in “The One Thing that Can Save America”, they are ripped apart before being read. Derrida has written about how the letter is always vulnerable to destruction and non-delivery:

  • 13  Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, Paris, Flammarion, 1980, p. 517.

[…] une lettre n’arrive pas toujours à destination et, dès lors que cela appartient à sa structure, on peut dire qu’elle n’y arrive jamais vraiment, que quand elle arrive, son pouvoir-ne-pas-arriver la tourmente d’une dérive interne.13

  • 14  William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”, first published in The Dial, November 1920.

19The letters, and more generally the communication of meaning is always on the brink of silence. As we learn in “River”; “[…] the center / Keeps collapsing and re-forming” (SPCM, l, v. 5-6, p. 41), as an echo to Yeats’ line “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”.14 Yeats’ modernist apocalyptic vision is here questioned, since Yeats’ assumption is that centrality is a virtue that holds things together, rather than a force that erases the peripheral and the marginal, the expression of an order that has no space for vulnerability. The final image of the letter is conclusively inconclusive, it stands as a metaphor of some final common politcal meaning yet its message cannot be known. Ashbery’s poetry always stops before any type of epiphany: the lines are suspended, brutally stopped, and even enjambments which might suggest meaning to come always prevent the possibility of full meaning, as though full meaning belonged to an authoritarian gesture.

20Illustrative of Ashbery’s refusal of the prophetic as a poetic mode is the poems’ tendency to be organized around repetitions with variations, rephrasings, reappraisals of the same idea, a form of stammering. This stammering is what gives the poems their oral quality—according to the definition Roland Barthes gives of it in Le Bruissement de la langue. He explains that the essential difference between the act of speaking and the act of writing is that in speaking, we cannot erase. To correct in speaking we have to add, and not silently subtract:

  • 15  Roland Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue, Essais critiques IV, Paris, Le Seuil, 1984, p. 99.

La parole est irréversible, telle est sa fatalité. Ce qui a été dit ne peut se reprendre, sauf à s’augmenter: corriger, c’est ici, bizarrement, ajouter. En parlant je ne puis jamais gommer, effacer, annuler; tout ce que je puis faire c’est de dire « j’annule, j’efface, je rectfie », bref de parler encore. Cette très singulière annulation par ajout, je l’appellerai bredouillement. Le bredouillement est un message deux fois manqué: d’une part on le comprend mal, mais d’autre part, avec effort, on le comprend tout de même.15

21This definition of stammering reads as a striking evocation of Ashbery’s poems which seem indeed to be “in” and “outside of” language, resting right on the threshold of meaning and its absence, on formulations and additions. In SPCM, the adverb “as” and the conjunction “but” represent this double movement of addition and subtraction: the poems’ centers are blurred by the many added elements as well as by the many instances in which the poet “annuls by addition”. The poems are difficult to understand, but like Barthes’ definition of “stammering”, “with an effort they can be understood all the same”, they require our full attention and resist a linear delivery of meaning as well as a linear experience for the reader. It is also important to remember the many echoes and repetitions one finds throughout the collection which show that the poems themselves are rewritngs, they “erase, annul, correct” what came in previous ones and in so doing maintain a sense that SPCM is a very fragile construction. Its fragility illustrates Ashbery’s ethos of modesty, his fear of generalizations and a humility in the manipulation of judgments.

  • 16  Moira Roth, “The Aesthetic of Indifference”, in Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, (...)

22Stammering is to be understood as a form of resistance, a reluctance, Ashbery’s “I would prefer not to”: “Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted, / Desolate, reluctant as any landscape” (SPCM, l, v. 151-156, p. 72). His poems seem to refuse the possibility of a revelation or the meaningful tones of political poetry because they cannot fully adhere to reality. Moira Roth defined the art of avant-garde artists of the time such as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns or Merce Cunningham as an art of “indifference”, underlining the force of “neutrality, passivity, irony and often negation”16 in their aesthetic practices. Ashbery’s poems seem to follow a similar trajectory, responding to the contemporary with a mood of indifference. His poetry seeks to inhabit a minor mode, that of the “[…] lower / Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night” (SPCM, l, v. 39-40, p. 2). Ashbery’s refusal of the bardic romantic prophetic mode is ultimately an ethical position: that of a poet who does not believe in the grandiose and in ideology but who rather locates his role at the level of everyday individual experience.

23The poems oppose the possibility of a common “we” and the individual experience of the speaker, interrogating the poet’s ability to make his private experience “boom like golden chimes” for all and to become a representative voice. If revelation is impossible in the poems, it seems to be because the poet explains his inability to make himself into a spokesperson:

[…] Each person
Has one big theory to explain the universe
But it doesn’t tell the whole story
SPCM, l, v. 499-501, p. 81

24The poet’s reluctance and stammerings stand for an acute sense of the epistemological crisis of the time, of the fact that grand narratives have crumbled and can only be replaced with the fleeting and changing perceptions of the individual poet. The readers are invited to rethink their conception of the “great” American poet: the radicality of a utopian politcs is deliberately sabotaged in a poetry which rejects the dangers of speaking for others, of grandiosity, of over-estimating the poet’s moral position.

Ashbery’s Politics of Linguistic Resistance

25Ashbery’s poetics of modesty calls for a scaling down of the political: from universal ideals to the emancipatory strategies of everyday experience, from the political in relation to government and ideology to the particulars of individual experience. His poems quote, play with and interrogate the language of politics and demystify the rhetoric of the prophetic strain in American poetry. Yet the poems in SPCM practce a reflection on how language can be shared in order to create a community and thus institute a hesitant political relationship between the poet, who is always on the verge of retreating to his private language, and the reader.

26If “The One Thing that Can Save America” might seem at first glance to be the collection’s political center, it is more accurate to situate it in “No Way of Knowing” (p. 55). The title’s riddle-like polysemic meaning brings forward the poet’s desire to throw aside absolute ideals and the language of assertion, and replace them with a continuous, vulnerable quest for meaning— for the poems risk the danger of not being understood at all by being too private, too hermetic. The title’s emphasis on the lack of a way of knowledge suggests there is not a linear path to follow, but a flux of impressions, images and re-discoveries. The analytical vein one would normally associate with knowledge (and behind that, with political discourse) is here replaced by the pragmatic experience of everyday life, as it takes on “a certain color” (SPCM, l, v. 2, p. 55). Politics, for Ashbery, seems to be the continuous construction of a community, not as a given or as an abstract entity, but rather as something which must be continually reassessed and redefined between individuals.

  • 17  William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1946), New York, New Directons, 1995, p. 6.

27Ashbery’s anti-prophetic tone testifies to his belief that poetry becomes false as it edges towards generalizations and grand ideas. In this, he is the inheritor of Williams’ formula “no ideas but in things”17 which he seems to be responding to in his Ode to Bill:

[…] What is writng?
Well, in my case, it’s geting down on paper
Not thoughts, exactly, but ideas, maybe:
Ideas about thoughts. Thoughts is too grand a word.
Ideas is better, though not precisely what I mean.
SPCM, l, v. 7-11, p. 50

28The confusion between ideas and thoughts which are conflated and then undermined in their inability to express “precisely what [the poet] mean [s]” testifies to Ashbery’s paradoxical relationship to discourse. The poet is indeed skeptical of intellectualized discourse to which he prefers the world of experience as it is represented in the poems’ anecdotal dimension: “to sense this clearly is not to know it, alas” (SPCM, l, v. 50, p. 65). Felt experience, the pragmatics of lived experience, is to be understood as the poet’s shield against the slippery quality of words and language. The poet acknowledges:

That is the tune but there are no words.
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.
SPCM, l, v. 47-50, p. 69

29He recognizes the difficulty to find words able to describe felt experience and suggests the slippery and someitmes convex meaning of words. Language, despite the poet’s attempts at fixing it as in the above quotation, remains unreliable in expressing a shared meaning for poet and readers. In the same way that the images of the poems are both recognizable and not, the poet’s language is made unfamiliar, extra-ordinary, through a number of strategies which are particularly well illustrated in “No Way of Knowing”. Composed with apparently very usual and simple words, the poem operates slight tonal changes which decontextualize their ordinariness: from the very beginning, syntax is modified so as to create a sense of surprise “The knowledge of you a certain color had?” (SPCM, l, v. 2, p. 55). The poem seems on the edge of English grammar: “no one never saw the point of any” (SPCM, l, v. 35, p. 56), refuses traditional rules, so does the use of “And” at the beginning of the poem which goes against conventional rules of composition, or lines to which it is hard to assign a grammatical functon with any certainty such as line 20: “Consume their substance, orphan, disinherit”. Defamiliarization reaches its apex in the lines “but the head is / Necessary, and what is in doubt here. This / morning it was off taking French lessons” (SPCM, l, v. 25-27, p. 55): the text speaks a language that is made to sound slightly foreign, like an idiom that is understandable and yet whose meaning we cannot be quite sure of.

  • 18  Charles Alteri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, New York, Cambridge Universi (...)
  • 19  Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

30Ashbery’s language is often self-reflexive ( “but kept to the domain of metaphor”, l. v. 43, p. 56 or “Doesn’t mean that a style was inaugurated”, l, v. 48, p. 56). The poet insists on poetry’s inability to signify: “no point of view / Like the “I” in a novel” (SPCM, l, v. 34, p. 56) and expresses “A general anxiety to get everything all added up” (SPCM, l, v. 51, p. 56). As Charles Altieri suggests, Ashbery’s language is one of loss, but it is also an opening onto a continuous discovery of the communicative situation made by the reader.18 Ashbery’s words both show the world and participate in making it strange. “As a book on Sweden only contains the pages of that book” (SPCM, l, v. 12, p. 55): the poem questions the possibility for the written word to capture reality, to go beyond the mere words on the page. Ashbery plays with ordinary language so that his readers are made to rediscover their place in it, to look at it and listen to it from a slightly slanted perspective. Meaning is forever elusive and subject to interpretation, in a way which evokes Stanley Cavell’s philosophical exploration of ordinary language in Must We Mean What We Say?19 where he calls for a reevaluation of the language of philosophy, to ground it not in a meta-language that explains language rationally, but in an everyday language that sees it for what it is, as a performance and a practice.

31The title “No Way of Knowing”, or the phrase “unknowing knowledge” (l, v. 10, p. 41) and the many references to knowledge and the truth, give the poems a philosophical dimension, one that suggests poetry’s proximity to philosophy in the line of deconstruction, as Altieri argues in the same essay. But ultimately, Ashbery shares his philosophical position with Emerson who inaugurated American philosophy by calling on the necessity for us to, whatever the frustrations, keep fighting against our “oblique and casual” “relations to each other”:

  • 20  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” (1844), in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, Joel Porte and Saundra Mo (...)

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.20

32Ashbery’s poetry illustrates this “unhandsome part of our condition” through a foray into the partculars of everyday individual life and in so doing creates a community with its readers which rests precisely on its difficulty and resistance to easy understandings. His poems refuse the grand scale of politcs, to speak to the community as a whole, in order to focus on the ethical dimension of individual encounters. Much has been said about Ashbery’s use of pronouns and the poems’ fluctuations from one to another, creating poems that are to be read, essentially, as relations, encounters, in other words as ethical encounters with the Other. Reading and trying to decipher an Ashbery poem means looking into a closely-knit fabric of echoes, poetic and cultural references to other poems, and also sometimes as Marjorie Perloff has shown, mere impressions of references. We are taken on the path of linguistic riddles which can sometimes be solved but which can also remain forever elusive; meaning is constructed by each reader according to their cultural background and moods so that meaning erupts, in bursts, in this foundational relationship the poem establishes with every reader. The toned-down lyrical address of Ashbery’s poems seeks not to impose meaning or to teach us anything other than the necessity to discover a language common enough to build a community on “the threshold / Of speech. The story worn out from telling” (SPCM, l, v. 21-22, p. 8).

  • 21  Carol Hanish, “The Personal is Politcal”, in Shulamith Firesone ed. Notes from the Second Year, Ne (...)

33Ashbery’s politcal program is to jetson the language of programs, and to reduce the authoritarian rhetoric of politcs to a human scale, where the lyric and the transcendent are fleetng, and the “music” of life is allowed its play. His focus on the self is to be understood as a politcal gesture: one that refuses the messages of politcal poetry and seeks rather to make poetry into a politcs of relationships. One of the common slogans of the early 1970s was the feminist moto “the personal is politcal”21 and one might argue that Ashbery made it into the cardinal rule of his poetry, turning his self-portrait into a reflection on the politcs of language.

Anmerkungen

1  Ashbery received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critcs Circle Award and the National Book Award.

2  Melena Ryzik, “An 80 Year Old Poet for the MTV Generation,” The New York Times, August 27, 2007: ht tps://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/books/27laur.html (last retrieved September 30th, 2020)

3  J. Longebach, “Ashbery and the Individual Talent”, p. 103.

4  The poetic voice can be situated as such in its language, images and references which all seem to suggest a middle-class, perhaps male perspectve on early 1970s America. This grounding in a specific reality does not prevent the poet however from speaking a language which transcends the specific to become universal.

5  Tom Wolfe, “The ’Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, New York Magazine, August 23rd, 1976.

6  Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York, Norton, 1979.

7  The recurrent landscapes of the collection seem to belong to an area roughly corresponding to Ashbery’s natve New York State, a geography which evokes the first school of American landscape painters, when the Hudson River School painters explored the state to celebrate the natural wonders of the country, a central moment in the ideological construction of the country to which Ashbery seems to offer and ironic answer in his poems.

8  Williams, William Carlos, In the American Grain, New York, New Directions, 1925, paragraph 1.

9  Susan Sontag, “The New Sensibility”, in Against Interpretation, New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966, p. 296.

10  My reading of Ashbery here is very different from the one offered by Douglas Crase in “The Prophetic Ashbery” where he argues that Ashbery’s poetry is rooted in the public, while I want to argue that the poems predominantly seek to leave the public in order to discover the personal. Crase explains his thesis in the following words: “The difficulty with Ashbery is that his poetry is so public, so accurately a picture of the world we live in, that it scarcely resembles anything we have ever known. Just so, the present is indeed a world none of us has ever known, because the words to describe it can be put together only after the fact. When the poet does put them together the combination comes as a shock. Understandably, one may first regard that combination as hermetically private. Only gradually do we realize that it describes the public world we were living in just a moment ago—that some prophet has arrived with news of the common wealth,” p. 30.

11  “They Dream Only of America” (The Tennis-Court Oath, 1962, p. 13) opens with a reference to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “They dream only of America / To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass”.

12  M. Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, p. 262.

13  Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, Paris, Flammarion, 1980, p. 517.

14  William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”, first published in The Dial, November 1920.

15  Roland Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue, Essais critiques IV, Paris, Le Seuil, 1984, p. 99.

16  Moira Roth, “The Aesthetic of Indifference”, in Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Amsterdam, Routledge, 1999, p. 35.

17  William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1946), New York, New Directons, 1995, p. 6.

18  Charles Alteri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 137-145: “Ashbery’s purpose is probably not simply to present indeterminate discourse or even to show the inherent duplicites of language. What matters is how forms of indeterminacy intensify our engagement in complex reflection on precise relations among loss, belatedness, the desire to know, and the play of transition and transference”, p. 141.

19  Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

20  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” (1844), in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, Joel Porte and Saundra Morris eds., New York, Norton, 2001, p. 200.

21  Carol Hanish, “The Personal is Politcal”, in Shulamith Firesone ed. Notes from the Second Year, New York, Radical Feminism, 1970.

Autor

Maître de conférences en études américaines à l’université Sorbonne Nouvelle et actuellement en délégation CNRS auprès du LARCA, UMR 8225. Ses recherches portent sur la littérature et l’art états-uniens aux xxe et xxie siècles. Elle a publié un ouvrage sur la poésie de John Cage (John Cage. Théoricien de l’utopie, L’Harmattan, 2006) ainsi que plusieurs articles sur l’avant-garde américaine. Ses recherches actuelles portent sur les croisements entre radicalité formelle et radicalité politique dans l’art et la culture des États-Unis du xxe siècle à nos jours.

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