"Avoid the pattern that has been avoided, the avoidance pattern"

John Ashbery's latest succeeds despite our attempts to say otherwise

By Will Hubbard

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Illustration by Ben Yaster
John Ashbery Drawing

Where Shall I Wander
John Ashbery
HarperCollins
$22.95

John Ashbery is staring at us all, wide-eyed and awkward with age, from the back cover of his newest collection of verse, Where Shall I Wander. In the black field, framed only by an Oxford collar disguising his old-guy neck, Ashbery's head floats like a Romanesque bust absurdly monitoring the comings and goings of a formal hallway. And this metaphor, unlike many of Ashbery's own, is exact and unmysterious-he is a "living legend" in the realm of contemporary poetry, a man still nominally present in our world but locked, as in death, within our memory of his greatest work.

In 1975, Ashbery published Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, his seventh book, for which he won all three major awards for new verse-the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize-a feat which had never been done, as has not been done since. The title poem of Self-Portrait is one of the greatest long poems of the twentieth century, safely in the company of Loius Zukofsky's "A," H.D.'s "Helen," Williams' "Paterson," Hart Crane's "The Bridge," and Derek Walcott's "The Arkansas Testament." And it is on the basis of such newfound company that, in the 1970s and '80s, Ashbery emerged in a role of leadership that only Eliot, Auden, Charles Olson, and Robert Lowell had held before him-innovator, captain, absurd male at the helm of a ship that everyone, himself included, had reservations about occupying.

What Ashbery escaped was the nagging classification of "New York Poet"-a member of the social-intellectual group that revolutionized, from their downtown Manhattan lofts, the practice of verse around the mid-twentieth century. Though Ashbery has told interviewers repeatedly that he does not consider himself part of any "school" of New York poets, the fact remains that Ashbery's closest friends-Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler-were some of the defining writers of what we might (out of semantic necessity) call the pre-postmodern era of American poetry, the work that both argued against and set the stage for the confessional and, later, language-oriented poetry that has characterized the American poetic landscape ever since.

Ashbery's insistence upon his own autonomy holds up-indeed, he sounds like no one else. The only approximation of Ashbery's voice with which I can agree fully is that of critic John Koethe, who observes that the reader of Ashbery's work becomes aware of "an undeniable 'feeling of an existence without the least concept of it' (to use Kant's characterization of the transcendental subject), together with the impression that it is from the vantage point of this ineffable existence that his poetry monitors the details of the world, among which are his own personality." The ineffable existence that Koethe speaks of is immediately evident in the indefinite perspective of early poems like "Soonest Mended":

And you see, both of us were right, though nothing

Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars

Of our conforming to the rules and living

Around the home have made-well, in a sense, "good citizens" of us,

Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept

The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless

Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,

Making ready to forget, and always coming back

To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

Yet Ashbery often describes his own poetics more simply by making reference to Borges, who once said that "music, states of happiness, mythology, faces molded by time, certain twilights in certain places-all these are trying to tell us something, or have told us something we should not have missed or about to tell us something. The imminence of the revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic reality." Borges' ideal is both precise and ambiguous-"the imminence of the revelation" is an idea both sublime and evasive-and Ashbery's use of the quote has, in most cases, only added to critical suspicions of obscurantism, if not flagrant meaninglessness, in his verse. By the time of Self-Portrait, Ashbery was fully aware of the communicative dilemma that surrounded his verse, and in "The Tomb of Stuart Merrill," he offered an answer, albeit in parody:

"I really would like to know what it is you do to 'magnetize' your

poetry, where the curious reader, always a bit puzzled, comes

back for a clearer insight."

Such a response to his critics is pure Ashbery-meant ambiguously both to apologize for and compound the problem of "understanding."

To make matters worse, Ashbery is reticent to grant interviews, a medium in which poets are generally made accountable for the content of their poems. Since early in his career, Ashbery has insisted that his "intention is to communicate" with his readers, though at the same time feeling that "to communicate something that's already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect."

As readers of Ashbery's work, we cannot help thinking that such a response to accusations of needless obfuscation-a response that hasn't changed in 30 years-might be a bit facile or, at worst, an awkward blanket to shroud poems that have, in fact, little identifiable meaning. Auden-at the time of Ashbery's debut considered the authority in modern verse by practicing poets-very much respected Ashbery's early work, awarding him the Yale Younger Poets Award for Some Trees. Later, he said he never understood a line of it.

It would be difficult to say that Where Shall I Wander is not the product of a poet distinctly more sure of himself and his well-being, a poet who can afford to be both supremely unintelligible-"Cathexis arrives early in a golden coach"-and lethargically, one might even say domestically, transparent-"These apartments we live in are nicer / than where we lived before, near the beginning." And above all, Ashbery is happy in his new book. The poems seem more like comfortable armchairs-the place where most of Ashbery's readers now presumably reside-than the rollicking attacks on Cartesian objectivity that characterize his earlier work.

Perhaps it is because Ashbery has been so successful over the years in putting voice, stance, and subject matter in question that some lines in Wander seem like old hat. The glorious "Attention shoppers. From within the inverted/ commas of a strambotto, seditious whispering / watermarks this time of day" strikes the reader as the intellectual musings of a comfortable man that has nothing else to do. Yet, we must admit that such seeming obsolescence is the fate of all great innovators advanced in age, making us think twice before condemning a writer whose peculiar syntax now falls so naturally on our ears as to be almost imperceptible, and thus to not a few critics, uninteresting.

Accordingly, perhaps the great success of Where Shall I Wander lies in the fact that Ashbery seems to have little interest in reflecting upon the effect of age on his body and work. For the first time in his career, Ashbery has written a book that is distinctly not self-referential. Yet, paradoxically, this is not to say that he never talks about himself in the book-on the contrary, he does so in perhaps every poem. But his concept of self has clearly shifted from 'poet as poet' to 'poet as person;' that is, we no longer get the metapoetics of books like Houseboat Days:

Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,

Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,

Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of

Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.

And no matter how all this disappeared,

Or got where it was going, it is no longer

Material for a poem.

Instead Wander offers what might even be termed human nostalgia from a poet for whom such common sentiment was never before possible. In "Interesting People of Newfoundland," an unmistakable reference to Ashbery's own childhood, he writes:

Worship of the chthonic powers may well happen there

but is seldom in evidence. We loved that too,

as we were a part of all that happened there, the evil and the good

and all the shades in between, happy to pipe up at roll call

or compete in the spelling bees.

In contrast to earlier poems of 'place'-most notably "The Instruction Manual," in which Ashbery takes an occasion of occupational boredom to chronicle the workings of a mind testing the limits of the 'present'-such poems in Ashbery's new collection show a remarkable interest in the passage of time beyond the scope of the poet's own perception. Characteristically, the poems in Wander either begin or end with a memory of how things "used to" be:

We used to call it the boob tube,

but I guess they don't use tubes anymore.

And just when Ashbery's memories begin to resemble a grandfather's nostalgia for times past, he is sure to ground them, as unromantically as possible, in the present-

Whatever, it serves a small purpose after waking

and before falling asleep. Today's news-

but is there such a thing as news,

or even oral history? Yes, when you want to go back

after a while and appraise the accumulation

of leaves, say in a sandbox.

and then, unceremoniously, in the future-

The rest is rented depression,

available only in season

and the season is always next month,

a pure but troubled time.

Such temporal movements indicate a distinct interest in time's intricacies, but do not fall into the trap that has addled the late poetry of many of Ashbery's contemporaries-W.S. Merwin or Stanley Kunitz, for example-whose poems treat age and imminent death as appropriate subject matter in and of themselves. Mr. Ashbery, on the other hand, seems willing to go further, gaining in his old age a fuller understanding of the processes of memory, consciousness, and desire that moderate our actual perception of time's passing. We might, after all, read the collection's title, or lines from "Novelty Love Trot" as seeming indications of Ashbery's growing acceptance of life's end: "Darlings, we'll all be known for some detail, / some nick in the chiseled brow, but it won't weigh much / in the scale's careening pan." But such fatalism would miss the point, for elsewhere in the poem Ashbery is more concerned with the religious and political framings of death in ultra-contemporary America:

I read that 30 percent of Americans believe in hell,

though only one percent thinks they'll end up there,

which says a lot about us, and about the other religions.

One thinks immediately of current international affairs, and it's clear that hermeticism is no option for Ashbery, a poet still very much alive and thinking, nowhere near giving himself over to other-wordly concerns.

For those who have never read Ashbery, Wander is a good place to start-all the old tricks, albeit in somewhat impuissant forms. It is, by all accounts, a collection of high-quality work, no major failings or digressions-a fact that, by Ashbery's own reckoning, speaks directly to its potential for success. In a rare interview, he once said that "recklessness is what makes experimental art so beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing.I feel this in the art of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.I think that part of the strength of their art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether it may be there at all." At no point in Where Shall I Wander are we unsure of Ashbery's artistic powers-we always, in fact, know that the poems are founded upon the solid reputation of 40 years of inspired work-and this, unfortunately, is the collection's primary failing.

Will Hubbard B'05 is founded on nothing, which is what makes him so beautiful

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