Affirmation that Doesn’t Affirm Anything
by Luke Dunne
It's particularly strange that this should have happened to a poet like Ashbery, one for whom Robert Lowell’s adage — ‘one life, one writing!’ — could have been written. That Self-Portait delighted the same critics who panned The Tennis Court Oath and ignored Rivers and Mountains offers further proof that acclaim and, ultimately, canonicity are at least as much a matter of survival — publishing in spite of ambivalence or outright dislike — as one of ability; and that critical judgments, no matter how forcefully they are presented, are only ever provisional, tentative translations of unstable aesthetic experiences. ‘Tedious’ is never far from ‘meditative’, ‘obtuse’ from ‘intriguing’, ‘confusing’ from ‘dazzling’, and so on.
If pressed to find an explanation for Ashbery’s sudden popularity in the poems themselves, perhaps we could say that Self-Portrait finds him in a particularly reflective, or reflexive, mood. A character in Ben Lerner’s first novel says that the best Ashbery poems describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem — ‘his poems refer to how their reference evanesces’ — and whilst that fits certain poems in Self-Portrait, more often these poems seem like a collage (or montage) of other Ashbery poems — showcasing his signature moves, stressing them, slowing them down, as if patiently teaching us how to read him.
The opening poem, ‘As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat’, is a kind of dumb-show for the collection to come, forecasting its distinctive scalar distortions, shifts of place, person and register:
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight
Filters down, a little at a time,
Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,
As the sun yellows the green of the maple tree…
The first line puzzles. Can one ever have tried each thing? Would any of them be immortal and free? If some were, albeit only some, would that be such a disappointment? The poem’s image, meanwhile, is hardly more than a schematic of poetic imagery: sun, tree, leaves, colour, colour. We are in the world, or a world, but can hardly take it in. And those harsh words – are we in company, bickering, or are we alone, silently remonstrating with ourselves or absent others? As the ellipses suggest, Ashbery will not answer any of those questions; this brief, unfinished scene agitates, just as it is supposed to.
If the collection’s title promises poetry of self-reflection (literal and otherwise), then it is at least fitting that it should begin with an ‘I’. But look what happens to the ‘I’ as the poem progresses.
A look of glass stops you
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am?
Or is it postponed again
The ‘I’ becomes a ‘you’, then turns back into an ‘I’ again, raising more questions. What’s just happened? Has anything changed? Is the first ‘I’ Ashbery, us, or someone else? Is the second ‘I’ the same as the first? As the poem moves back and forth between the I and the you, things become, if not exactly clearer, then easier to accept. This is the consolation of conversation, the tolerable delirium of merging voices.
The prevalence of those grey flakes falling?
Those are sun motes. You have slept in the sun
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door
But it was only her come to ask once more
If I was coming in.
In Self-Portrait, introspection will often shade into conversation, interior monologue becoming dialogue, then forcing itself out into the world (hence the need for a third person pronoun, the ‘her’ to go along with our ‘I’ and ‘you’). But by the end of this poem this process has been reversed, the conversation winnowing to a single voice, lucid and limpid, purporting to simply describe things as they are.
The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
Even when the voices concretise somewhat, they’re rarely full-blown characters, let alone believable ones. Either they’re lurid, cutouts, literally cartoonish (‘My first literary experience was comic strips. In a way, it may have been my strongest one’), or else they’re unnerving bit part characters, walking on stage or into frame, saying something baffling before they depart the scene. ‘Poem in Three Parts’ (the three parts being ‘LOVE’, ‘COURAGE’ and ‘I LOVE THE SEA’) begins like this:
Once I let a guy blow me.
I kind of backed away from the experience.
Now, years later, I think of it
Without emotion.
Before long the speaker disappears, and the poem which follows seems, on the first few readings, to have little to do with him or his concerns (sex, memory, repressed desire). On closer inspection, there are echoes of him and his predicament (if that’s the word) —just a line or two gesturing towards the original speaker, or a version of him (‘When I woke up this morning I noticed first / That you weren’t there.’)
Most poets like completion, whether the formal completion of metre or rhyme, or the more prosaic recurrence of a theme in a new, though satisfactorily recognisable guise. Most poets revel in such moments, or use them to propel their poems onwards. Not so with Ashbery. Though things have a habit of joining up eventually, they do so without accumulating force or drive (‘more keeps getting included / without adding to the sum’). Motifs of travel — roads, railway cars, caravans — crop up frequently, but serve mostly as a reminder of how closely the experience of movement can resemble that of stasis (as when, for instance, sitting in a train car), and that weirdness is compounded when we never seem to arrive somewhere recognisably different.
This restless movement from placeless place to placeless place induces a kind of blur as the collection wears on, the blur not of abstractions but of unspecified details, the generic specific. When food appears in a poem, it often serves as a way of convincing the reader that the poet’s authority to speak — to them or for them — is grounded in a store of shared experiences. But when food appears in an Ashbery poem, he often seems intent on convincing us of this opposite.
Today’s lunch is: Spanish omelet,
lettuce and tomato salad,
Jello, milk and cookies.
Tomorrow’s: sloppy joe on bun,
Scalloped corn, stewed tomatoes, rice pudding and milk.
This is food with no sensuous experiences attached, meals one does not really believe the poet has eaten (whether or not he has). It’s easy to get caught up in the banality of all this, to decide that Ashbery is just trying to advance the venerable project, now into its third century, of developing a poetry of everyday life in an industrialised society, the confluence of a specifically American poetics in the Whitmanian tradition and literary modernism at large. Helen Vendler, for instance, argued that Ashbery’s line lengthened to suggest ‘the nutrients in this contemporary paratactic language are so thinned out that we need a lot of words to get anywhere at all’.
Although Ashbery’s line in Self-Portrait frequently hits the right margin, he isn’t interested in being a seismograph of the actual. In fact, what’s so unheimlich about Ashbery’s use of detail is that their relationship to reality is unstable, and whilst poetry’s relationship to reality may be intrinsically unstable — poetry is not, usually, strictly fictional or non-fictional — rarely is that instability felt so keenly as a poetic effect.
In an interview with the Paris Review, Ashbery was asked if he liked to ‘tease’ or ‘play games’ with the reader. Ashbery was willing to accept that he might, occasionally, though only ever to ‘please’ the reader. But, he went on, ‘To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you're not going to alienate and hurt him, and I'm firmly against that . . . ‘hey, you can't be part of my strangeness” sort of thing’.
Many of Ashbery’s signature techniques are a way of allowing us to participate in his strangeness: the forging of sudden intimacies with direct address; the use of logical connectives (thus, therefore, so, but, as) to bind disparate or incoherent subjects; open scepticism about the meaning of the particular poem we are reading; a concurrent scepticism about the purpose of poetry in general; his use of dialogue and, separately, a kind of laid-back colloquialism, a ‘talkiness’, such that these poems often threaten to become prose at the level of voice or tone rather than form (as with free verse generally).
To go a step further — what allows us to participate in Ashbery’s strangeness is precisely the same thing that makes his work strange in the first place – the non-identity between the poet and his work, the poet’s insistence on standing apart from the poem. Although Ashbery’s main foreign influences were French rather than German, this is a collection riven with what Brecht called Verfremdungseffekte, these moments where an artist, catching himself in the act of creation, lets on that he knows he’s being watched. Even when we don’t agree that things are just as Ashbery claims, there’s something compelling about the force of his attention when it’s trained on us, the sustained impression that he is looking at us, addressing us directly and inviting our response.
Only in the title poem, the last of the collection, does the quality of Ashbery’s attention change. It begins with an ekphrasis of its namesake, a portrait by Parmigianino:
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose.
A convex mirror is one in which the surface bulges outwards, distorting distances such that, as the reminder on wingmirrors has it, ‘objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear’. This is an effect that becomes more pronounced the further away an object is, so that that hand, which appears to be distorted, engorged, is actually being represented more ‘realistically’, as closer to its real size, than Parmigianino’s face and the rest of his body. The hand advertises itself in two senses – the painting literally advertises the hand which drew it by placing it in the foreground, and the distortion of the hand advertises its master’s control of perspective. By the time Parmigianino produces his mature work, full-blown Mannerist, serpentine figures with preternaturally elongated limbs and necks, no external device will be required to distort reality — the artist’s style will suffice.
In the digital recording of the poem, Ashbery reads it like prose, but it is a particularly intimate, almost confiding form of prose reading, one in which the emotional register habitually shifts to the end of a line, eliciting a pause as if Ashbery were reading the enjambments. Though Ashbery may be intimating, he is not our intimate. His manner is more appropriate to a well-liked professor, giving an informal lecture to a group of students. This is not a disparagement of Ashbery — who hasn’t, secretly or otherwise, enshrined certain moments with a favoured teacher, polished the memory of them carefully? And who hasn’t discovered that that same favoured teacher, looked at objectively, is a far less impressive, even slightly pitiful figure?
As the poem goes on, Ashbery allows such failings to come to the forefront — not just failures of intellect, but failures of sentiment. Harold Bloom once said that the ‘secret’ of Ashbery’s work is his depiction of the ‘the palpable absence that is the poet’s soul’. If it is a secret, then it’s one Ashbery isn’t taking great pains to keep:
I go on consulting
This mirror that is no longer mine
For as much brisk vacancy is to be
My portion this time.
Ashbery’s frankness about his own inadequacy has tended to divide readers. Seamus Heaney, arch Ashbery sceptic (how could it have been otherwise?) was barely able to contain his scorn for it: ‘Mediocrity is the mass characteristic. I think that John Ashbery, the poet who is somehow tapping the current . . . [his] poetry is a centrally heated daydream. And it's also sorrowful, it knows that it's inadequate’.
In this last poem, the daydream becomes sorrowful; the longer it goes on, the less it jars with the collection that preceded it, striking the reader more and more as its cost or culmination. The strategies of involvement that had impressed, entertained and engaged us now strike us as a kind of restlessness of mind, the poet’s frailty. All those nameless characters, those unreal, momentary scenes. What were they? What did they really tell us?
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs experiences,
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything
At times, Ashbery seems to be writing a negative review of his own work. Have the critics gotten to him? Is he trying to pre-empt them, to protect his art from their incomprehension? I think Ashbery’s negativity runs deeper than that. From roughly a third of the way into the poem, the ekphrastic lecture transforms into a kind of hymn to disappointment, confusion, artistic failure, ambivalence.
So the room contains this flow like an hourglass
Without varying in climate or quality.
Ashbery’s pessimism couldn’t be clearer, yet it’s hard to give up any hope of finding, beyond all these provisional disavowals, the real, unobstructed truth about poetry, or at least Ashbery’s poetry. Though Ashbery is not an erotic poet, he often adopts erotic discourse as a model for his own. There’s a sense here that the reader is being refused or rebuffed — the critic Rebecca Ariel Porte calls ‘the unrequited’ ‘the fabulist truth of poetry . . . [the] matter of how a stopped mouth says anything to the equivocal claims of a world that demands responses on its own terms’.
Ashbery’s unwillingness to offer us any kind of uplift, that reassurance we crave, jars terribly. Poetry, particularly poetry in English, so often seems to demand a culmination and apotheosis at the end of the poem. Many poets spend their lives searching for that final, closing iamb by which to revoke the uncertainties and weaknesses that went before it. But Ashbery is never certain. He has, if anything, too much of what Keats called ‘negative capability’. He is too ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’.
Certain critics — Bloom, one of Ashbery’s earliest and loudest cheerleaders, among them — simply refused to accept this. Bloom’s particular credulity towards metanarratives has him tie Ashbery up in all sorts of redemptive structures of meaning, from the faintly ominous-sounding ‘supermimesis’ that ‘will not abandon the self to language’, to a projection of Bloom’s own fixation on history and the tradition (‘What but the force of the past, the strength of his own poetic tradition, could drive Ashbery on. . . .?’)
Aside from the fact that Ashbery invokes the tradition sparingly, and when he does makes it sound utterly weightless (‘It is we who make this / Jungle and call it space, naming each root. / Each serpent, for the sound of the name’), Ashbery is making the point that poetry is, if not quite self-causing, then somehow capable of standing back from its own, insufficiently reasonable existence, and making that its subject.
Ashbery’s refusal to claim that poetry’s involution somehow permits it to say something about the world as such, is frankly hard to bear. In this sense Heaney was, perhaps unwittingly, correct to say that Ashbery’s poetry knows it’s inadequate. Ashbery knows it offers, at best,
A sample of the truth only.
But one never has enough
The truth doesn’t satisfy.
Self-Portrait is full, perhaps too full, of dissatisfying truths. But so too, of course, are mirrors.