The Brink of Continuity (on Ashbery)

September 30, 2020 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 27, Number 2, January 2017

Charles Bernstein (bio)
University of Pennsylvania

On September 5, 2017, a few days after John Ashbery died, Le Monde published an obituary for him by Olivier Brossard: “Pour le poète américain, l’écriture était ouverture, fuite ou fugue, le refus d’une identité ou d’un poème qui soient clos ou définis à jamais”: For this American poet, writing was an opening, flight or fugue, the refusal of an identity for a poem that is closed or defined forever.

I appreciate that Brossard addresses the identity of the poem in this opening paragraph, something sometimes lost in America, where there is so much attention given to the identity of the poet that the identity of the poem is eclipsed.

Not that a poem can ever be separated from the person who wrote it.

It’s just that with a poem you start with the flight and fugue of the words, not with what the poem represents.

The day Ashbery died, the New York Times posted an obituary by its official obituary writer, the talented Dinitia Smith (with “Maggie Astor and David Orr contributed reporting” appended at the end). The oddest thing about Smith’s obit (O-1) was a paragraph on Ashbery’s relation to his parents:

When I was about 3 or 4 years old, [my father] said to me one day, ‘Who do you love more, me or your mother?’ and I said, ‘My mother.’”

No doubt the bored masses of Times readers could find at least this something they could relate to. I might have said the same to my father when I was three, but I hope it doesn’t land in any obituaries.

Smith had the historical sense to mention Barbara Guest as one of the company of poets most closely associated with Ashbery, even if she called “Frank O’Hara” John, which I am sure Ashbery and O’Hara would have found amusing:

Mr. Ashbery was originally associated with the New York school of poetry of the 1950s and ’60s, joining Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, John O’Hara and others as they swam in the currents of modernism, surrealism and Abstract Expressionism then coursing through the city, drawing from and befriending artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Jane Freilicher.

When David Orr’s byline was added to Smith’s the next morning (O-2), “Frank” was back and the poets were no longer “swimming in the currents of modernism” but, less aptly, reveling. And alas! Guest was out and the New York School was just guys:

Mr. Ashbery was originally associated with the New York school of poetry of the 1950s and ’60s, joining Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara and others as they reveled in the currents of modernism.

The anecdote about the poet’s mother was also excised, making way for a bit more ideological clean-up.

David Orr is most notable for his April 2, 2006, front-page Times Book Review rave for a favorite of Ashbery’s, Elizabeth Bishop. The piece begins:

You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911–79).

This claim is so wacky that it can only be understood as a fetish for Bishop and her patron Robert Lowell, two of the central ideological icons of Cold War Official Verse Culture. And like all such fetishes, it reduces the poetry to propaganda.

Ashbery and his New American Poetry comrades were the proponents of an alternative to the “cooked” (a.k.a. half-baked) poetry of Official Verse Culture – sometimes called “raw,” meaning grounded in process. (Lowell makes the deceptive distinction between open-form “raw” poems and closed-form “cooked” poems in his 1960 National Book Award acceptance speech.) So Brossard’s elegant Ashberian phrase, “clos ou définis à jamais,” is quite specific and delightfully so.

O-1 mentions a key issue of Cold War aesthetic ideology –

But [Ashbery’s] most significant artistic relationships were with other poets, including James Schuyler, who were rebelling against the formalism of Allen Tate and Robert Lowell.

O-2 deletes this statement and with it any sense that this poet, now beloved of all, was “rebelling” against anything. In the Orr-revised version, Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” – long can(n)on fodder for those conservative critics who dismissed much of Ashbery’s earlier work along with that of his more radical contemporaries – is juxtaposed with Harold Bloom’s triumphalist claims for Ashbery. Yet also cut from O-2 is this tender morsel about “Self-Portrait,” which found its way into Smith’s first version:

Though it became the signature piece in the collection that won Mr. Ashbery the Pulitzer and other prizes, Mr. Ashbery had reservations about the poem. “It’s not one of my favorite poems, despite all the attention,” he said. “I was always very unsure of the quality.”

Ashbery’s comment is a marvel of wit and self-consciousness. Ashbery also distanced himself from the book many of us on the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E side of the street especially liked, The Tennis Court Oath. At one point, Ashbery said it was the only poem of his we liked, which certainly wasn’t true for me, but this, again, was Ashbery’s way of deconstructing (there I’ve said it) false boundaries. He said somewhere he didn’t want his work to become a political football. There was no American poet more adept at eliding polemic and refusing mantles.

Ashbery resisted becoming a polarizing figure because of the exquisite demands of his aesthetic. His greatness is connected to his poetics of aversion, deftness, deflection, humor, and, above all, privacy. For Ashbery privacy is a kind of politics, as is not wanting to be pinned down. This is one of many qualities in his work that is fundamental for me.

Both versions of the Times obit included a British authority’s put down of Ashbery as “boring.” Both have a quote from a Times review that calls Ashbery “incomprehensible,” but in a possibly OK way; still, an offhand slap at poetic difficulty that traffics in anti-intellectuality and anti-aestheticism. O-2 both resists the aesthetic and claims its mantle. The shibboleth of “human experience” is meant to anoint with a humanist piety that is explicitly anti-political and nondenominational:

But if his poetry is rarely argumentative or polemical, this does not mean it avoids the more difficult areas of human experience.

O-2’s revisions gut the polemical force of Ashbery’s argument for poetic freedom, drift, and the imagination, uncontrolled by the forces of rationalization and accessibility:

But while other eminent poets of his generation became widely known for social activism (Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder, for example) or forays into fiction (James Dickey) or the details of their own harrowing lives (Sylvia Plath), Mr. Ashbery was known primarily for one thing: writing poetry.

Orr and collaborators erase the key New American Poets of Ashbery’s generation outside the New York School – Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, Jackson Mac Low, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Hannah Weiner (the list could go on) – in favor of apparently more mainstream poets, only to make the claim that they are less significant as artists than as icons, something each of these poets worked fiercely against. Ashbery no more resists becoming iconic than any of these poets; he is just iconic in his own way.

Here is Orr & Co.’s coup de grace (a passage not in O-1):

Charles McGrath, the editor of The New York Times Book Review from 1995 to 2004, recalled that a large portion of new poetry titles during his tenure could be (and often were) tossed into a pile labeled “Ashbery impersonations.” And Mr. Ashbery remains far and away the most imitated American poet.

The authority of McGrath and Orr is based on their mutual pledges of allegiance to Lowell and Bishop –– not as poets, but as Cold War icons, forged in McGrath’s case by his long apprenticeship to New Yorker editor William Shawn. In a June 2003 piece, McGrath is worshipful of Lowell while condescending to Ginsberg as a “self-caricature” and dismissive of contemporary poets unable to be as serious as his “master”:

Unlike so many contemporary poets, Lowell never wrote poetry about poetry, or worried about the insufficiency of words to stand for what they signify. Lowell may have belonged to the last generation to believe seriously in the poetic vocation.

I suppose the swipe about poets who write about poetry is a reference to Ashbery; if not, it might as well have been. But McGrath’s remark about the “insufficiency of words to stand for what they signify” is the give-away; what Ashbery shows, as Brossard notes, is the sufficiency of words to say more than “what they signify.” To say otherwise is not just to dismiss Ashbery or the rest of us, but to dismiss the possibility of poetry and, indeed, of language.

It is to consign us to the tawdry world of poets as icons.

While there are many imitators of Ashbery, though no more than imitators of other poets, the McGrath quote in O-2 suggests that those who depart from the straight and narrow of convention, who follow Ashbery’s example of freedom, will be put in the discard pile. The burden of this obituary is to make Ashbery the exception, not the rule. It buries Ashbery in praising him.

But we know from Ashbery, hero of the pataquerical: once discarded, twice derided, thrice’s the trick:

So many of these things have been discarded, and they now tower on the brink of the continuity, hemming it in like dark crags above a valley stream. ––“The System,” Three Poems

Works Cited