Three Poems By John Ashbery

A triplet of offerings:

Knocking Around

I really thought that drinking here would
Start a new chain, that the soft storms
Would abate, and the horror stories, the
Noises men make to frighten themselves,
rest secure on the lip as a canyon as day
Died away, and they would still be there the next morning.

Nothing is very simple.
You must remember that certain things die out for awhile
So that they can be remembered with affection
Later on and become holy. Look at Art Deco
For instance or the "tulip mania" of Holland:
Both things we know about and recall
With a certain finesse as though they were responsible
For part of life. And we congratulate them.

Each day as the sun wends its way
Into your small living room and stays
You remember the accident of night as though it were a friend.
All that is forgotten now. There are no
Hard feelings, and it doesn't matter that it will soon
Come again. You know what I mean. We are wrapped in
What seems like a positive, conscious choice, like a bird
In air. It doesn't matter that the peonies are tipped in soot
Or that a man will come to station himself each night
Outside your house, and leave shortly before dawn,
That nobody answers when you pick up the phone.
You have all lived through lots of these things before
And know that life is like an ocean: somethimes the tide is out
And sometimes it's in, but it's always the same body of water
Even though it looks different, and
It makes the things on the shore look different.
They depend on each other like the snow and the snowplow.

It's only after realizing this for a long time
That you can make a chain of events like days
That more and more rapidly come to punch their own number
Out of the calendar, draining it. By that time
Space will be a jar with no lid, and you can live
Any way you like out on those vague terraces,
Verandas, walkways-- the forms of space combined with itme
We are allowed, and we live them passionately,
Fortunately, though we can never be described
And would make lousy characters in a novel.

--- 1979

Parts of that poem are quite good, others quite weak (particularly the latter stages of the third stanza), and the poem ends on a closing note that sounds as if it were too desperately trying to imitate Robert Lowell. Then there's this poem, partially clever, but a little too typical of contemporary poetry, a little do endeared with its own cleverness:

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it missed you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and canoot.
What's a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeped outside thing, a dream role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the stream and the chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

--1981

Once again, the poem struggles a great deal, and leans on some rather banal language and imagery, such that the poem engenders a few bits of eye-rolling badness ("The poem is sad"; "You miss it, it misses you" seems to me especially presumptuous). But then, except for that awful intrusion of "Open-ended" in the third stanza, things pick up, and imagery imrpoves, as does the language. But, as with the previous poem, it goes a step too far in the final line, and spoils itself: the closing for the poem would have been stronger with a slightly stronger of the development of the poem being set "softly down beside you." No, though; Ashbery can't leave well enough alone, and he goes too far by saying "The poem is you." Oy. Corn. Is Ashbery intimidated by final lines? How about another example?

Hard Times

Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring.
They have no time to return the calls in hell
And pay dearly for those wasted minutes. Somewhere
In the future it will filter down through all the proceedings

But by then it will be too late, the festive ambience
Will linger on but it won't matter. More or less
Succinctly they will tell you what we've all known for years:
That the power of this climate is only to conserve itself.

Whatever twists around it is decoration and can never
Be looked at as something isolated, apart. Get it? And
He flashed a mouthful of aluminum teeth there in the darkness
To tell however it gets down, that it does, at last.

Once they made the great trip to California
And came out of it flushed. And now every day
Will have to dispel the notion of being like all the others.
In time, its gets to stand with the wind, but by then the night is closed off.

--- 1981

Whoa, that last line, not so bad in its imagery, at least in principle, is a metrical mess, a Whitmanesque onanism. While the first three lines of the poem set up an effective tone of cynical whimsy, the poem just falls apart in its middle-section, again as if the poet fell in love with his own cheekiness. Ashbery seems to feel he has to belabour points in his poetry, and the effect, at least to this reader, is one of boredom. Indeed, as I read him, much of Ashbery's verse seems to teeter toward the truly amateurish, as if an idea gets the better of him and he doesn't know what to with it; so he struggles, he labours, he moves toward a way to get out of his own poem, and so his final lines often seem like pallid imitations of other poets (Lowell in the first, the young Strand in the second, and a Strandian Whitmanism in the third, complete with a Lowell-esque tonal finish).

      Oddly, Ashbery is often considered one of the best of the late 20th century American poets, and even high-critics like Harold Bloom are prone to suggest that he's an heir to Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. I just don't see it. The tones are too irregular, the meters too awkward, the imagery often forced, the language often banal. Does anyone see what I obviously do not see? Does anyone see virtues herein that I am overlooking? I do like the line "Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring." Problem is, it seems to me, Ashbery's poems seem to run on a shoestring, too, a string pulled too much at both ends and wearing at the center. He's certainly not the worst poet I've ever read, but I just don't see greatness here. Thoughts, anyone?