Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

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John Ashbery is a frustratingly difficult poet, which perhaps explains his purgatorial existence-typically administered in small harmless doses administered in college poetry classes. Over the course of his career, however, he has forged a unique and fascinating aesthetic. His new volume of poetry, Wakefulness, continues work on the idiosyncratic poetic ideas of his earlier material. In his first volume, Some Trees, Ashbery wrote that "All beauty, resonance, integrity / Exist by deprivation or logic/ of strange position." The baffling elements of "deprivation" of meaning and "logic of strange position" perfectly realize their potential in Wakefulness. Here, all elements of Ashbery's life and thought are juxtaposed and joined with an almost unfailing poetic skill.

In a particularly revealing moment for this enigmatic poet, Ashbery once said that he was trying to achieve in poetry what music does when it shows us the structure of arguments without showing a subject or specific content. This ideal is an abstract one, for Ashbery's writing is not at all musical in a poetic sense. Within his jarringly flat verse, however, Ashbery shows a remarkable skill at making the kind of connections and forms that he might consider musical. This places him in the oddly mechanical position of piecing together poetry from existing phrases and ideas. The process illustrates his idea, originally expressed in Some Trees, that poetry exists in the world without the poet.

In Wakefulness, Ashbery's increased reliance on typical speech patterns has also removed the philosophical tone of his earlier verse and replaced it with a more flat style of commonalities, as shown for instance in "Proximity":

... My enchiladas were delicious,
And I hope that yours were too.
I wanted to fulfill your dream of me
in some suitable way.

The other major factor of Ashbery's aesthetic is the radical impersonality of his work. He has claimed that he tries to make his poems universally impersonal, comparing them to one-size-fits-all socks. In "Going Away Any Time Soon," what he calls "my auto-autobiography" is his attempt to achieve a detached form of solipsism. Elements are not personal in the usual lyrical sense, but often seem to be one level removed-an attempt to define how he defines himself. This attempt creates a deliberately impenetrable distance between the reader and the poet, giving his work an air of profound abstraction even as it deals with mundane details. To get a sense of what auto-autobiography means for Ashbery, consider these lines:

The body's discomfiture, bodies of
           moonlit beggars,
sex in all its strangeness: Everything
           conspires
to hide the mess of inner living, raze
the skyscraper of inching desire.

The juxtaposition of the first three images in this passage (his body, beggars' bodies, sex) is an example of the logic of strange position, a poetic device that is central to all of Ashbery's work. Each element comments on the others, and, together, these pieces show an awareness of the process of self-revelation-yet they also serve to "hide the mess of inner living." The lines are auto-autobiographical in that they describe Ashbery's process for describing his own life, but do not directly concern his life.

In his earlier works, Ashbery was trying for the same personal impersonality, but one often felt a distinct author coming through the verse. In Wakefulness, he has more fully realized his ambitions of universality. This universality results from exactly the type of deprivation of self that he called for in Some Trees.

As we adjust ourselves to Ashbery's peculiarities, we can see that Wakefulness is indeed well characterized by its title. Intellectual and poetic Wakefulness define this work, as Ashbery's poetics make us aware of the structure behind the ways in which we speak and think. Despite the emotionless style he employs, this process achieves a certain melancholy, which results from the loss of the illusion of control. One gets a sense that the better he is able to express himself within his controlled poetics, the more he realizes just how much his grip on time and life is shaken by the things his art reveals. In the last lines of the title poem Ashbery notes:

... Here it
Seems to grow lighter with each
           passing century.
No matter how you twist it,
life stays frozen in the headlights.
Funny, none of us heard the roar.

This form of realization repeats itself a number of times in this volume with a poignancy perceivable even through the difficulty of the verse. Ashbery sees that his awareness of the forms of his life makes him unable to come to terms with the very pieces of living that compose these forms. He ends "Like America" with the line, "But how much longer could I go on not missing the point?"

Before being carried away by Ashbery's accomplishments, we must consider the costs of his gifts. Critics routinely dismiss Ashbery for his obscurity. His abstract goal in imitating music, combined with his strangely emotionless and colloquial verse, make his poetry particularly disheartening to those who want to understand his work. If this opacity is deliberate, we can certainly appreciate the gesture, but that doesn't stop us from hating him for it. Ashbery's frustrating style often makes us wonder why he can't leave intentional meaninglessness to those without comparable poetic talent.

This volume is not going to change the minds of those who see difficulty as Ashbery's failing. The feelings of futility that come from reading his work will only be heightened by looking at Wakefulness. Poetic accomplishment, though, does not always come in the form we want it, and Ashbery's strengths and moments of brilliance are simply too good to overlook. What Ashbery asks is to be hated rather than ignored, as indicated in his poem "Homecoming." The final stanza, which closes the book, is surely addressed to his readers:

Later I'm posting this to you.
I just thought of you, you see, as
           indeed I do
several million times a day. I need
           your disapproval,
can't live without your churlish
           ways.