“For John Clare” follows the
essay.
No one, I have been told, before the
twentieth century complained that poetry was incomprehensible [1], yet, in
spite of the miniature renaissance in America of community-based readings and
the laureateship of Bob Dylan, the art is commonly dismissed as obscure and for
most not worth the trouble, even among otherwise educated individuals. Poetry’s prestige, once immense and
universally acknowledged, has diminished not through attacks, but through
neglect.
In ancient times, of course (and among
unlettered people yet) poetry was consumed by everyone and, if well done, found
to be digestible by all. Song lyrics remain
beloved by mass audiences everywhere, and advertising copy is filled with the
devices of poetry. Yet since the
Romantics, poets and artists have been associated with eccentricity, political
radicalism, and counter-cultural values and have increasingly eschewed a mass
audience. In the twenty-first century
poetry has been abandoned largely to the university mandarins and a tiny handful
of lay aficionados.
Many common readers think of poetry as a
sort of puzzle. The considerable overvaluation
of theme, especially in pedagogical situations, is in part to blame. “What,” a teacher will ask, “is the poet
trying to say?” In a good many poems, I
would consider theme, the implications of a text about the reader’s lived
experience, to be among the less interesting of the avenues of approach. A poem’s center is as likely to be in its
sound or the formal play of its images as in its “meaning.” If a paraphrase will adequately embody its
significance, the poem itself is then superfluous.
Yet still, readers persist in objecting to
the unintelligibility of modern poetry, and the foremost example for many is
John Ashbery. Whether in praise or
blame, such comments have become a commonplace, almost a required, initial
observation of his work since Ashbery’s career was launched by his selection for
the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. The
judge, W. H. Auden, had initially failed
to find a worthy manuscript among those short-listed and specifically requested
Ashbery’s manuscript which had been previously rejected by the in-house editors.
[2] Having crowned Ashbery with laurel,
Auden in his introduction seemed oddly ambivalent about his own choice,
lamenting the loss of a shared culture and the substitution of idiosyncratic
individual vision like that of his selection.
Today the Yale Press’s own publicity cheerfully notes that soon after
the book appeared “selecting judge W. H. Auden famously confessed that he
didn’t understand a word of it.”
The characterization of Ashbery’s work as
obscurantist, echoed by Donald Hall and other early reviewers, has become a
cliché. Even Richard Kostelanetz, whose
own works have elicited some puzzled reactions, declared, “John Ashbery's poetry
is extremely difficult, if not often impenetrable.” [3] While theme is often subordinated in Ashbery’s
work to other elements, just as in the case of Ashbery’s influence, Wallace Stevens, the texts quite
often make perfectly good sense in spite of all the critics. [4] My intention here is simple, to follow Ashbery
through a single poem, taking him at his word, though indirections may fall on
every side. That bare paraphrase may
seem flat-footed is no disadvantage since the whole point is to show a poem’s
thought process as coherent when read as direct utterance.
An explication of “To John Clare” is particularly
useful as that prose poem defines Ashbery’s poetic process almost
explicitly. Though it lacks the sensual
pleasure of the density of palpable images with which he commonly strews his
lines, the thematic point is all the more effective for its abstractness.
The dedication to John Clare marks the
piece as a poem about poetry, specifically recalling the earlier poet’s
concrete detail illuminated with a visionary glow. Ashbery imitates not specific phrases of the
“Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” but rather his angle of approach. For each a carefully delineated refraction of
reality, a very particular slant, can make any sight an entry point to
sublimity. In addition, Ashbery reminds
the reader with this dedication that he, though identified as a “New York
poet,” has a distinctly pastoral strain running through the body of his work.
[5] Toward the end of his life, Ashbery affirmed
Clare’s significance for him, writing that “the effect of Clare’s poetry, on me
at least, is always the same—that of re-inserting me in my present, of
re-establishing ‘now’.” [6]
What it means exactly to speak of
re-establishing “now” is the subject of “For John Clare.” The poem is a narrative of consciousness,
the story how of a thought, any thought, arises from the data of
perception. For Ashbery the information
delivered by the senses must be linked, though the mediation might tortuous and
elusive, with the phenomenal world. The
entire poem might be considered a response to the provocative hyper-skeptical propositions
of Gorgias, who argued that nothing can be shown to exist; second, that if
anything did exist, it could not be known by people; and third, that if
anything were known to a person, it could not be communicated to anyone
else. Ashbery struggles through artful
dancing and weaving to escape this nihilistic pit.
What do we see when we gaze upon the
world? The first verse paragraph opens
with the paradoxically qualified adjective “kind of empty” but immediately
clarifies that the description is of appearances and not essences: “in the way
it sees everything.” Yet there is no
subject or rather the entire event occurs in the subjective, enacted only
within the imagination of the persona and thus on the page, and then reflected
in the reader’s mind. For the persona,
and thus for the poem, it is the earth itself, the entire planet that is seeing
things (as it had already got to its feet and saluted the sky). The lines are dizzying, even outlandish,
perhaps, some might say surreal, but susceptible nonetheless to understanding.
To say “the earth gets to its feet and
salutes the sky” suggests some grand synthesis, the sense of a cosmic order not
always discernable, a resolution of high and low, of all dualities, marked by
the esprit of a salute. Such insights
are not always accessible; thus, with slightly awkward syntax recalling Gertrude
Stein, insight is modest: “more of a success at it this time than most others
it is.”
The speaker is caught inside subjectivity;
in fact, the sky is always only “in the back of someone's mind.” And it differs in each, so “there is no
telling how many there are.” Yet these
various visions, these multiple versions of reality, can be so pleasing, they
“grace” everything sufficiently to distract the individual from the routine
life pleasures, “to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling.” “Like a smooth switch back” the mind returns to
earlier glimpses of the coherence of things, “to what was aired in their
previous conniption fit.” It seems a
thoroughly post-Modern decentered experience, presented not as an alarming
chaos but as something one might enjoy like a carnival ride the ticket-holder
does not expect to go anywhere in the end.
The remainder of this first section of the
poem details how elusive reality is, how it vanishes off into several obscure
directions. To begin with, no one can
take it all in: “there is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not
getting used to it.” The immensity of
detail is overwhelming and defies analysis: “it never feels new, never any
different.” What impressions the
observer may form will decay in time: “certain details are already hazy and the
mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to
remember?” Then there is the
complication of the relation of one’s own perception with all those other
consciousnesses such as “that couple is stopping to look in that window over
there.” Any mental construct, any
individual take on the scene, even a photograph, is misleading. The inadequacy of words closes this section
with a confession of language’s shortcoming: “very little gets said.”
The second verse paragraph asks with
poignant awkwardness for a more stable connection between the ego and the
things perceived, one with “room for more things,” and a broader application, a
“spreading out, like.” The speaker
reveals the inadequacy of his present partial vision, yearning for spontaneous
revelation, if only things “came to you at once,” or at least with some
reciprocal desire, “then meeting them halfway would be so much easier.” Lacking a universalizing vision, the separate
concrete details of existence are either unnoticed (“we perceive them if at
all”) or irrelevant (“meant to be put aside”).
Thus the clues they offer are ignored (“you can do nothing with them”)
no matter your own eagerness (“not even offer to pay”).
The dialectic between vision and blindness,
knowing and not-knowing, continues with the third section. Having stated the epistemological problem of
what to make of the apparent spectacle of the world and having fully detailed
both the problems inherent in any answer and the promise of the rewards of an
enlightened mind, Ashbery succeeds in providing, if no resolution, at least a
means of keeping the potential of such a vision alive. Perhaps, he suggests, we are wiser than we
think: “It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely
perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction.” The yearning persists for “the whole scene,”
“the music all present,” producing a kind of synaesthetic transport, “as though
you could see each note as well as hear it.”
But this is unrealized at present. Its harbinger is nothing more than “an
uneasiness in things just now.” This impression,
however, is strong: “it's keen, it makes you fall over.” All the dramatic action of changing weather
and rushing seasons without apparent meaning inspires a further pathetic
fallacy: “After all it's their time too -- nothing says they aren't to make
something of it.” He lapses again into
the vernacular that in this poem signifies excitement in Jenny Wren’s
frustrated attempts at communication. [7]
The small bird with its senseless twittering parodies attempts toward
articulation and suggests that meaningful discourse may indeed be
impossible. Though the bird strives
fruitlessly to be understood, “others” do not even try, since even an attempt
would surely prove “the first step of the terrible journey,” ending in “utter
confusion and hopelessness,” “east of the sun and west of the moon.” [8]
The phrase points to another of the poem’s
ambiguities. In the Norwegian fairy tale
of this title the wicked stepmother’s castle is located “east of the Sun and
west of the Moon.” There the prince is
confined, having been enchanted in the form of a beast, a fitting analogue for
the person confined in inexpressible subjectivity. The folk story’s happy ending in which the
prince is rescued by his beloved surely signifies the possibility of gaining
that blissful wholeness that remains just out of grasp throughout Ashbery’s
poem, but for the poet and reader liberation is rarely as complete as for the
prince. The individual must be satisfied
to gain purchase on at least one small corner of the truth allowing a
fingerhold on the grand holistic spectacle (“the whole history of
probabilities”) that signifies nothing less than everything at once.
The concluding image lovely: “the whole
history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand
corner, like a sail.” By evoking a
shapely and slender canvas gently bellying out with breeze, Ashbery suggests
again the enigmatic grace of things as they are and the sense that one’s life
experience is revelatory and beautiful, though always a matter of
“probabilities” and manifested only on the constantly mutating cinema screen of
time.
If “For John Clare” implies that truth is
inaccessible, that language is inadequate, and that communication is
foredoomed, the poem maintains that making a poem nonetheless, writer and
reader alike may glimpse sparks of the scintillating, almost numinous, light
cast by the will-of-the-wisp of the possibility of seeing everything at
once. More cool and oblique even than
Wallace Stevens, Ashbery was still pursuing the “supreme fiction” that Stevens had
sought in song. If his poem seems to
resist its readers, it is because the poem enacts with the fragmented and
idiosyncratic imagery of the twentieth century a story in many ways similar to
that of the Ox-Herding pictures of Zen in which the bull of reality, while
elusive, may be captured, though he vanishes ultimately for the enlightened
mind. [8] Readers frustrated by
Ashbery’s poems would be likely to have little patience for koans as well.
Many of the poet’s works might
be clarified when viewed as attempts to burst beyond the limits of the
individual consciousness. Others seem
like the roisterer’s caroling or the Jenny Wren’s song, a melody to pass the
time in the anteroom of vision, playing the game of perception as an
entertainment. Were the final
enlightenment to arrive, a blank page would suffice. Short of such a thought-ending revelation,
what remains is the record of the incomplete struggle to know, pushing always
against the mind’s limits, unbowed, feeling the way in all-but-complete darkness.
1.
This is a considerable exaggeration.
Self-consciously hermetic styles had been cultivated by the
practitioners of trobar clus and by Gongora and his followers as well as
by the Symbolists, Italian Hermeticists, and a variety of other Modernist and
post-Modernist schools. Some writers
such as Ted Kooser and Billy Collins have found great success bucking the
trend.
2.
Ashbery had written his senior thesis at Harvard on Auden. According to Jesse Zuba, Yale’s in-house
editors reacted with “confusion” and “outrage.”
See "’Everything Has a Schedule’: John Ashbery's ‘Some Trees’ and
the Notion of Career,” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 59, No. 2
(summer 2013), pp. 260-282.
3.
Richard Kostelanetz, “How to Be a Difficult Poet,” New York Times,
May 23, 1976.
4.
Ashbery's commented that his poems are "accessible if anybody cares
to access them." 2005 NPR interview https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4542617. On another site a critic maintains with
statistical evidence that Ashbery’s poems are, in fact, syntactically “simpler”
than Ted Kooser’s! See http://mikechasar.blogspot.com/2010/10/this-just-in-john-ashbery-more.html.
5.
Apart from his youth on a farm (at least when he was not away at prep
school), Ashbery’s pastoral interest is evident in titles such as “Eclogue” and
“A Pastoral” in Some Trees and “Farm I” and “Farm II” in Self-Portrait
in a Convex Mirror. Of course,
Classical and Renaissance pastoralism were always urban phenomena.
6.
Ashbery, Other Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
7.
Some readers find a reference here to the character in Our Mutual
Friend. The well-known energetic
song and rapid movement of the small bird seem to me sufficient basis for the
figure. A bird is, of course, one of the
most common metaphors for a poet.
8.
First recorded in the Mahā Gopālaka Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya
33) dating from perhaps two thousand years ago.
Perhaps best-known is the twelfth century Chinese version by Kuòān
Shīyuǎn.
For John Clare
Kind of empty in the way it sees
everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success
at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in
the back of someone's
mind. Then here is no telling how
many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's
mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their
previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like
not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any
different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all
in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be
like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards
in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is
stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have
to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone
far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it
and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is
so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little
gets said.
could see each note as well as hear it. I say
this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something
to be over before wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered
sky.
Seasons
that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too--nothing says they aren't
to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren,
she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us
somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to--dumb bird.
But the others--and they in some way
must
know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the
first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that
ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.
So their comment is: "No comment."
Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting
in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.
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