John Ashbery: The Effort to Make Sense · David Fite It has been customary to approach the perilous matter of meaning with a tidy dichotomy: words have their referents and they have their senses. Ordinary discourse proposes a happy marriage ofthe two, if only because most people are anxious to make themselves understood, and quickly. Thus, we have another felicitous betrothal: linguists note the reality principle—the speaker intends to make both sense and reference for us and the cooperative principle—the speaker has no desire to irritate us with untoward entropie meanderings. Poetry is, of course, another matter. The poet, fancying himself a seer, or at least a quester after keener demarcations, is pleased to render his syntax, his meanings, the very sound and sight of his language problematic, and this all for our greater good; truth, we are meant to see, is not easy, and we had better learnto accept the charity of whatever hard moments are given us. Poets have never been cooperative, but it has usually been a comfort in the twentieth century to know that, with sustained application, we could at least invoke the spirit of Western cause-and-effect rationality to explicate the poetic vagaries away, deliver them unto a comprehensible network of sense and reference. Symbolist poets may have a hot line to the deep, but it is a deep with a most fetching similitude to the architecture ofthe latest issue ofPMLA . The New Critics termed all this the irony of texture. The poetry of John Ashbery cannot properly be said to participate in such an irony. It is a poetry so fundamentally serious about the keener demarcations of consciousness as that consciousness encounters the protean objects of itself and of the world that its readers are finally left shorn of most of the crutches of modern critical convention. This is the intent of the poet. An Ashbery prose piece from 1966 reveals an absence of sympathy for the bewildered: the poet speaks of a "mania for over-interpretation" known as "objective correlativitis"; he is almost certain that the elm trees of New England are the carriers.1 Instead of complex networks of symbols, we will get in Ashbery's poetry what he calls, in a laudatory 1962 review of the poetry of Pierre Reverdy, a world of images "transparente, sans 'signification philosophique,' " a world fresh with perception of "phénomènes vivants," a world that we see as iffor the first time— "un paysage naturel."2 There is nothing easy about such a world; Ashbery does not mean by natural landscape what Hugh Kenner means whenhe speaks of quiddity in the poetry of Williams or Pound. Ashbery does not just provide a celebration of things as the visual eye tells itself they are: the streaks on a tulip, the cat climbing into the flowerpot. If anything, his aesthetic is closer to theperiplum advanced by Pound in the Pisan Cantos, a flux of experiential consciousness as seen by no map, but the difference is that Pound, after all, still had his eye on the map. Unlike the The Missouri Review · 123 frustrated pedagogue Pound, Ashbery is almost continuously successful in his attempts to avoid giving us a guided tour of anything, mind or world. The actuating faith behind Ashbery's poetry is succinctly expressed in a "Poem in Three Parts," from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: "One must bear in mind one thing./It isn't necessary to know what that thing is./All things are palpable, none are known." It is no accident that this observation is couched in the "Love" section of the poem; Ashbery is enamored of the epistemology rife with all the ambiguities here presented. In the title poem of the same volume, a masterful extended rumination in the romantic tradition on the meaning of the ordering imagination of the artist, Ashbery makes explicit this connection between love and meaning: we know of love: ...that its windings Lead nowhere except to further tributaries And that these empty themselves into a vague Sense of something that can never be known Even though it seems likely that each of us Knows what it is and is capable of Communicating it to...
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Apr 1, 1982
Mark A Massie + 1
Open Access