Chekhov's Mistress
Burt on Ashbery
Reading John Ashbery’s poetry is like floating on air. It makes you giddy, but your feet dangle, you don’t quite know what to do with them and after a while you start treading for solid ground. Of course you always go back for more, you know, for the giddy part.
Writing about his work must be no easy task either. Helen Vendler does it well. I read the Ashbery chapter in Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery with great hope, but she left me thinking I was still missing something.
Stephen Burt, writing in the “Times Literary Supplement” does a great job. Here’s just a bit:
For each poem that sticks to one clear topic, though, there are three that, on first reading, have none: some include language that sounds computer-generated (“Avuncular and teeming, the kind luggage / hosed down the original site”), though few remain in that frustrating mode for long. Ashbery’s non sequiturs throw us back on the reasons we have tried to follow them, on why we take, or try to take, an interest in any topic at all – on our desire for conversation, for companionship, for evidence that we are not entirely alone. He seeks such evidence in our artistic inheritance, and in the flimsiest components of daily speech, stitching into his shimmery fabric a host of phrases we might, without him, think incompatible with serious verse:
Surely, passing through the town,
we contributed a little to the regional economy,
received credit for showing our faces.
So what if the only theater in town
had been turned into a funeral parlor?
There are few things more theatrical than
death,
one supposes, though one doesn’t know.
No modern poetry half so original incorporates half so many clichés. I count at least five in those seven lines, each a reminder that our language – ugly or beautiful – is never ours alone. Rather, a language, a sociolect, a culture, is something that we inherit, something we then (after “passing through” and dying) bequeath.
Sorry to jump to the ending because you should read the entire article, but his conclusion is too good not to quote:
When you interpret Ashbery at all, you risk having sceptics tell you that you made it all up: that the poems demonstrate ingenuity not from the poet but from his interpreters, who find music in static, meaning in randomness, synthetic silk in a succession of sow’s ears. The same objections used to be (and occasionally still are) levelled at people who spent time rereading Eliot, or rereading Gertrude Stein (whom Ashbery admires). No one can prove that Ashbery’s poems mean anything. But no one can prove that your life means anything, either: on a good day, you feel able to keep on living it, as John Ashbery has kept on writing, following a plan where a plan seems to fit, but otherwise making it up as you go.
comments
Hi!
I came across your blog while looking for good articles on Golijov’s Ainadamar, and I read a lot more of your blog because I’m a poet as well (and just paid $5 for Fence!).
I was wondering if you’ve happened to come across any recordings of performances of Ainadamar. I’ve seen the one on cd, but I’ve been scouring the internet for other performances. Do you know of any available for download?
Thanks, and thanks also for the blog!
Erin
(froufroufoxes@yahoo.com)
– (03/29 at 07:04 PM)
Hi Erin, and thanks. I haven’t seen any other recordings. Have you checked his site? I think those guys - in the classical world - are a lot more skeptical or closed about having recordings floating out there, so you’d probably be hard pressed to find something that wasn’t listed on his site.
– bud Parr (03/31 at 03:07 PM)
I’ll pass the link on to Steve, my beloved spouse, who will undoubtedly bust his buttons with pride. Very kind words.
– Jessie Bennett (04/04 at 02:08 PM)
My buttons are all gone now. Thanks!
If you want to read more good writing about Ashbery, at greater length, definitely check out Andrew DuBois’ recent book from the Univ of Alabama. It’s clear, smart, and short too (you can read it in less than two hours). I would have told readers to check it out in my piece, except that the last time I cited an academic book in an essay of this kind, the editors simply felt they had to take it out.
And now I’m going to keep reading Chekhov’s Mistress!
– (04/04 at 03:05 PM)
Thanks Jessie and Steve - it is a small world after all.
– Bud Parr (04/04 at 04:53 PM)
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