Finding what will Suffice: John Ashbery's a Wave

Abstract

A Wave is Ashbery's most startling chronicle of what it is like to think thought through and thereby write a poem that remembers itself.' To enter into this poem is to consider three transits that form a fertile ground for interpretation: Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence (1802), Rimbaud's Memoire (1872), and Whitman's As Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life (1859). In these summation poems each poet repudiates a past self, or perhaps poem, and questions his poetic vocation. Confrontation with the having-lived (or already said) and the decline of vision issues in images of water (whether ocean, pool, or river), detritus (leeches, ashes, fragments) and a wanderer (body ... double; dragueur, dans sa barque immobile; bent to the very earth; I have turned back/Into that dream of rubble). These are scenes of recollection, and since any labor of recall invokes shades of last things, these scenes are also ends. To present this landscape of ending, to make an end of what you remember, demands a kind of inverse alchemy. Put simply, the poet commemorates a possible defeat: Wordsworth's traveler meets himself in the leech-gatherer who labors wearily, down-looking into muddy waters; Whitman's self seeking types finds the eerie mocker of his earlier songs of self; and Rimbaud's ecstatic solitary in Le Bateau ivre realizes himself in the old dredger in an unmoving boat. Ashbery's memorialist recovers these emblems in a supreme,