John Ashbery’s Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

John Ashbery's poetry is conversational. While his pronouns are notoriously slippery, readers learn to expect you to be addressed even in most unexpected places, so it is safe when reading an Ashbery poem to anticipate some response from an interlocutor, whether explicitly quoted or only implied by speaker's counterresponse. The proposing and disposing of ideas, images, feelings, and attitudes that constitute shape of many Ashbery poems relies on sense of an auditor who must be courted, cajoled, defended against, second-guessed, and so on. Lyric address and dialogue are conventions of genre, but what distinguishes an Ashberyan lyric from shaped by first-person reflection is its capacity to be interrupted from outside: lyric condition in which Ashbery's speakers characteristically find themselves is often volatile terrain of psychic conflict where unnamed and usually unheard interlocutors apparently call speaker to account for something said or not said, done or not done. His speakers are repeatedly provoked to moral justification or judgment, strategies of moral accounting that border on special pleading, ranging from defensiveness and justification to appeals for forgiveness. The basic poses are those of Christian sinner before his or her Lord, and at times Ashbery's speakers seem like tragicomic exaggerations of George Herbert's; speakers who might claim mastery of their meditation in lyric posture are open to parody or other comic devices. Yet failure of moral justification also entails for Ashbery's speakers vulnerability that occasions some of most intimate moments in his work. This again is like Herbert, though in Ashbery's case distinction between humility and humiliation is blurry at best. The momentary crises that emerge from these situations are never resolved through lyric or narrative means; speaker never achieves higher level of self-knowledge or anticipation of redemption. While his conscience may ease up on him briefly, speaker is usually aware that although the formulas that have come to us so many times / in past ... have an end, it is always a potentially hazardous one (Flow 216).The intimacy of these moments is not simply of lyric self-disclosure, however; it is rather that lyric speaker discloses his proximity to an other self, to an intimate presence who is not necessarily lover, who may not even be addressed, but in whom speaker finds attachment in shared wound or loss. (1) While such an other in Ashbery s work never has proper name--even though his poems are riddled with citations and voices of others--the occasions of such intimacy often evoke work of Elizabeth Bishop. Perhaps no other poet, except Holderlin or John Clare, so persistently appears in Ashbery's work in such way that could ask, to inflect line from Bishop's Poem, Which is which? (CP 177). Indeed, Bishop's presence in certain poems of Ashbery's, particularly in Ode to Bill from Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror (1975), long poem Flow Chart (1991), and several poems in Your Name Here (2000), not only provides some sense of how Ashbery reads her but also suggests form of identification in his work with affective contours of hers, particularly its concern not only with solitude, abandonment, and loss, but also with debilitating shame, which provokes moral self-persecution. (2) These moments in Ashbery's work suggest that in spite of critical consensus that Ashbery's pronominal others can never have fixed identity, there are occasions when particularity or singularity of other matters: intimate presence evoked by poems is implicitly named Bishop, which, especially in Flow Chart, is name of presence both sheltering and in need of sheltering. (3) The recurrence of echoes of Bishop over 25-year span of poems I will discuss argues for unique relationship between her work and Ashbery's. …