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John Ashbery's Poetry in the Context of the Twentieth-Century Visual Arts
There are disquieting coincidences between John Ashbery’s poetry and the twentieth-century visual arts – coincidences, which have remained unverbalized in spite of the fast growing volume of Ashbery criticism. It seems deplorably inadequate to say that Ashbery is another “poet among painters,” who – like his great contemporary, Frank O’Hara – has been inspired by visual artists and infected by the structural methods typical of visual arts. Ahbery’s career proves something almost opposite: firstly, aesthetic solutions found in visual arts were used by the poet as provisional tools to cope with some of the greatest technical problems of the mid-twentieth century literature, namely representation of space and time. Secondly, different solutions were applied to problematize postmodern fragmentary experience and its lack of political perspective. These inspirations – if calling them that name is not far-fetched because Ashbery’s poetry has always remained idiosyncratic – did not affect so much the surface of the poem, but the very mechanism of composition.
In western visual arts and literature before Modernism, the viewer’s or reader’s perception of space had been governed principles of centralization and unification of seeing, whose aim was mimetic representation. The early twentieth-century avant-guard movements distorted the impersonal fixity of post-Renaissance perspective, which was no longer a crucial part of artistic vision. Cubism and Surrealism exemplify two contrasting attitudes towards the treatment of space: cubism uses reason to perpetuate the object, which exists in a real space, while Surrealism abandons reason and places the object in an imaginary space. Thus, in Cubist vision, thought dominates over image; in Surrealist vision, thought and image are unified and cannot be separated. It seems that the two strategies for rendering space in visual arts have their analogues in literature, and they are common for most twentieth-century poets. In verse, however, reason-based or/and irrational presentations of space are not necessarily mutually exclusive. John Ashbery’s prolific oeuvre proves that their use can be limited to individual poems that successfully coexist within the book unit.
The Cubist vision influences those of Ashbery’s early poems in which he uses a variety of strict procedural forms, and relies on the seriality of verse patterns, borrowed from numerous sources. According to Joseph M. Conte, for postmodern poets, “procedural form presents itself as an alternative to the well-made metaphorical lyric” (5). Both procedural forms and seriality help to respond to the cognitive challenges of contemporaneity – discontinuity of experience and skepticism of imposed hierarchical orders. A good example of Ashberian space generated by a procedural pattern is “The Painter,” a sestina originally published in the poet’s debut book, Some Trees.
The limitations of the sestina – the permutated order of seemingly accidental end words – create a box-like space of an artificial environment. However, the mind bouncing in such an environment often explores the unknown senses that, paradoxically, lurk within the known angles. Such new senses are revealed by the different collocations of the end words, for example “buildings” opening the first stanza:
Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas (Collected Poems 27).
In the course of the poem “buildings” undergo a sequence of transformations, from dwellings inhabited by the people into ruins, the conflagrations sites, some other artists’ homes and, finally, into the site of the protagonist’s death, which blurs the obviousness of their meaning. In the first stanza, the “portrait” is first the portrait of the sea, then the artist’s self-portrait, and eventually, the artist himself. Although the set of angles is strictly limited, the final effect is that of a new territory or a newly charted landscape, where physicality loses its shapes and evolves into the ever-new dimensions of strangeness. It would be tempting to find an analogue of Ashbery’s meticulously structured spaces from Some Trees in visual arts, in the paintings of Edward Hopper from the same period. Many of the Hopper’s late oils, programmatically incomplex, such as “Rooms by the Sea” or “Sun in an Empty Room,” focus on the contrast between the natural and the artificial, following a predetermined tripartite scheme. According to Ivo Krasnzfelder, the illumination in the first painting disregards the actual, physical configuration of the room, with perspective gone askew, which leads to a sense of insecurity, negating – quite similarly to Ashbery’s poems – naive representational realism (188).
The box-like contrived space of Ashbery’s early pattern-poem reveals a proximity to another visual artist – the American surrealist Joseph Cornell, whose assemblages (framed wooden boxes with dime-store trinkets, like metal rings, pipes, glass balls, but also photographs, etc.) create inscrutably meditative landscapes, where “the thing is in its thingness” (Ashbery, Reported Sightseeings 16). In his Central Park Carrousel, in Memoriam (1950), we can see a broken net wiring covering a moon-like bluish shape, with a black-and-white lithograph of a lady or an angel, soaring in the air. At the very bottom of the box, behind the moon, and on the left vertical part of its frame, there are two stripes of a mirror. The title of the assemblage created in 1950 ironically refers to the fire, in which the famous Central Park carousel had been destroyed in the same year. Central Park Carrousel produces meanings by a complex juxtaposition of images and concrete objects: the moon (dreams, wishes, aspirations), the angelic lady in the air (love, passion), and net wiring (power, control) enable the reader to construe a number of interpretations. The space generated by such imagery seems to be based everyday experience, yet it indicates unforeseen connections. In an interview with Peter Stitt, Ashbery admits that he found inspiration in Cornell’s art, and he thought of his own poems as assemblages – autonomous sets of objects woven of the familiar scraps of reality (45).
Quite a different space, resembling the Surrealist vision, emerges in Ashbery’s free verse poems from the same period, which avoid artificial principles of order. Semantic indeterminacy, which takes the shape of colliding chunked phrases, no longer forming sentences, constitutes the bulk of The Tennis Court Oath (1962). If the reader feels disoriented in the space of the poems like “Leaving the Atocha Station,” it is primarily because of the poem’s veered deictics:
The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness
And pulling us out of there experiencing it
he meanwhile ... And the fried bats they sell there
dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds....
Other people ... flash
the garden are you boning
and defunct covering ... Blind dog expressed
royalties ...
comfort of your perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip
Favorable to near the night pin
loading formaldehyde. the table torn from you
Suddenly and we are close
Mouthing the root when you think
generator homes enjoy leered (Collected Poems 63)
“We,” “us,” “your,” “you,” and “I” give the poem a conversational character; however, it is impossible to recognize the speakers involved in it. As John Emil Vincent claims, “often, as many poets do with image, Ashbery seeks to create density with pronouns ... in order to provide an effect of richness or innovative polyvalence” (52). Obscure personae, metamorphosing from line to line, and their stylistically wide vocal range force sudden changes on the level of the poem’s interiority: the here and now of writing borders on a terrain of meditation (“the menace of your prayer folds”), quotidian close-ups (“Leaving the Atocha Station/steel/ infected bumps the screws”), or semi-confessional riffs (“for that we turn around/experiencing it is not to go into/the epileptic prank”). Characters change, as well as narrative modes and verb tense; however, the poem’s shifts are not random swervings: the seemingly stable locale – a train car, which offers a view of a station, with realistic details (“Other people ... flash,” “blazing pigeons from the roof,” or “Air pollution terminal”), help the reader to get oriented in the text, and they do provide connectives between the opening gesture, which is the beginning of the journey (“pulling us out of there experiencing it”), and the closing gesture, which is leaving the Atocha station behind (“next time around”). There is no epiphanic overtone in the poem to reduce the impurity of images or sounds entering its space.
In visual arts, we could find an analogue to Ashbery’s disjunctive free verse poems in dislocated spaces of abstract expressionists, such as Arshile Gorky or Robert Rauschenberg. According to Barbara Rose, a common feature of the above painters was automatism of artistic creation achieved with such techniques as “drip” and “all-over,” or by usage of unconventional tools, such as rollers (87). Abstract expressionists generated semi-figurative forms, and they developed surrealistic poetic spaces – exalting pristine energies of nature – dominated by “hybrid biomorfism” (in André Breton’s parlance), which used graphic allusions to human or animal anatomical details, vegetative ornaments or landscapes (Rose 72). A good example is de Kooning’s oil Excavation (1950), which shows a tangle of intriguing flat shapes – parts of human body, like teeth, an arm or an eye – cut in quick, black lines. The picture’s colors are smudged shades of gray and brown, resembling flesh, illuminated by red, yellow and blue spots and splashes. The shapes’ contours overlap, giving a feeling of chaotic movement in diverging perspectives. The title of the picture evokes an image of destruction: the viewer examines a site of a natural disaster or a landscape after a war. The shapes clash, generating a discontinuous unstable space, lacking any specific center, yet recognizable and homogeneous. This resembles very much the multi-vocal space of the poems like “Leaving the Atocha Station.”
Interestingly, Ashbery did not reprint the poem, or in fact any of his more radical poems, in his 1985 Selected Poems. His search for poetic space ran in the direction of the free flux of thoughts introduced by his next book of verse, Rivers and Mountains (1966). Two poems from this collection are particularly important – “Clepsydra” and the “Skaters.” Their sheer extensiveness challenges our reading habits: they are not so much traditional poems as linguistic games, played until a certain size or heft is achieved. This strategy is even clearer in Ashbery’s next collections, The Double Dream of Spring (1970), with its virtuoso “Fragment,” and Three Poems (1972), with its vast prose poem “The System.” In 1970s, Ashbery’s lyrical space becomes comprehensive, yet malleable to the reader’s interpretational efforts. According to James McCorkle, the poet’s porous narratives are “fluid mnemonic structures that move from the personal to include the polyphonic social” (103). Their constant inner oscillations between the singular and plural, the surface and depth of images, representation and voice – cause a deferral or dispersal of meaning. The poem’s shifting tonalities suggest a transmission, and its language inscribes “excess or the possibility of overflowing and invokes a libidinal energy no longer centered upon the self” (Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy 106). “Clepsydra” is probably one of the most accessible of Ashbery’s indeterminate landscapes.
In the opening fragment of the poem, as in its full 253-line text, a dense array of autobiographical elements lurks beneath the opaque images. Perhaps the greatest riddle in the poem is the very opening sentence, “Hasn’t the sky?”, whose rift cannot be sealed without a recourse to some extratextual interpretative structure, and, therefore, proves that Ashbery’s poetry, in its decentering drive, is not a passive register of the world, but it also recognizes the role of the reader. The opening movements of the poem are those of consciousness waking up from the incomprehensible tongue-twisters of dream-talk (Bartczak 27). The lines that follow organize the dream-like vision into a landscape, which combines the speaker’s farsightedness with his myopia: steamy “clouds” and “hills” suddenly dissolve to show “the half-meant, half-perceived/Motions of fronds” or “ nets drying in the sun.” The poem develops temporally like a movie played frame by frame, each line being a mini-clip, made of an image, and an introspection purged of personal details, with some general emotional traits left. Glimpses of the apparently real world enter the poem with metaphors or similes as their tenors (or vehicles): “The reply wakens easily, darting from/Untruth to willed moment, scarcely called into being/Before it swells, the way a waterfall/Drums at different levels.” Thus, the “waterfall” is a part of the landscape, but only as a fragment of a trope – a reference to the ambiguous “reply,” belonging to the main course of the poem’s narration. The further into the poem, the more profound the disparity between the landscape of the self and the physical world becomes. The only way for the self to ascertain its surroundings is the mnemonic movement of language, in which reality is not represented by language, but simply becomes this language. Our experience lacks centers, and memory’s debris, linguistic in form, is constantly redistributed, enabling us to adapt to the selves’ new moments.
An interesting gloss on space in Ashbery’s mature poems is Angus Fletcher’s theory of the environment-poem (which is not a poem about environment, but a poem intended to surround us in the way an actual environment surrounds us). According to Fletcher, in the most general sense, the function of space in literature is to provide a limited cosmology: the literary and artistic cosmos is a constellation of images and actions we usually call “allegory” (237). However, allegory is an ideological fiction, which derives poetic elements from fundamental axioms according to the law of logical derivation. In the Coleridgean vision of poetry, ideas correspond to images on a one for one basis, like “a simple lever in a machine matching a simple rotor in the same machine” (226). Post-romantic poetry dealt with various aspects of art, which negotiated between the real and the fictive, seeking causal consequence. The environment-poem does not recognize the above dialectics, trying to reconstruct the world as an immense informational network.
Furthermore, the environment-poem is the opposite of allegory: it discovers a manifold in nature that has no isolating wall around it. It also lacks any superimposed hierarchic system of images and is always self-organizing and non-linear. The environment-poem seeks symbolic control over the drifting experience of being environed, and it introduces an experience of an outside that is developed for the reader inside the experience of the work: “While this outside/inside game closely resembles a stream of consciousness technique intended to reveal elusive states of mind, the environment-poem converts natural surroundings and their common surrogates, like the furnishing of a house, for example, into a surrounding that actually has more presence than any state of mind. It is as if the dream had become real” (227). Thus, the environment-poem is a double of nature herself, which questions all unexamined versions of causal dramatic structure. It expresses a complete order, as that of an ecosystem, with no wish to achieve a cohesiveness of poetic action. It seems that in the 1970s, Ashbery’s poetry discovered a new way of presenting space, beyond the modernist reason-based or/and irrational dialectic of Cubist or/and Surrealist vistas.
A visual analogue of the last type of space discussed here would be a space of a multi-channel installation, using a variety of media, like painting, film, text and sound. Among many contemporary artists, who have won international acclaim, there is a Belgian, David Claerbout, who operates on the borders of photography and video. In his 2005 Shadow Piece, which was recently exhibited in the Pompidou Center in Paris, in MUMOK in Vienna, or in the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, the artist presents a black-and-white projection, with studio sound, of a spacious staircase in an entrance hall of an office building from 1950s. The viewer can see people approaching the entrance door to the building and can hear their footsteps, together with the buzz of the nearby street. It is an evening of a sunny day when the setting sun casts long shadows of the people, far onto the office floor. The visitors come to the door, try to open it, check time, sometimes peep into the hall, and, as the door is closed, they walk off. The projected image fills the entire wall, and the viewer has a feeling of being inside the building, standing on a landing overlooking the entrance. Moreover, all the viewers entering the semi-dark room cast shadows on the floor of the imaginary landing. The dramatic tension of the installation comes from the play of the two sets of shadows: the fixed shadow pattern played in the movie by its characters, and the unpredictable pattern created by the viewers, who are an integral part of the work. Among other artists, whose work is based on a similar rationale, we should mention Carole Benzaken, or Shinji Ogawa.
Shadow Piece discovers a random environment, which does not simply reveal art/nature equivalence, but also works like a natural order, surrounding the viewer in such a way that the world “within” and the world “out there” become one. The same principle had propelled John Ashbery's poetic spaces, from the foundation of his poetics, Rivers and Mountains, to A Wave. The poet’s following collection, April Galleons, reveals a new approach to spatial organization, where poems lose their “homotextual” bias and become increasingly dependent on their being in the world. A late Ashbery poem keeps the reader in mind by putting to test all possible applications of the pronoun “you,” which makes the poem’s scope available, and serves as the gateway to its imagery. According to John Emil Vincent, in his recent volumes, the Ashbery speaker is no longer “on the outside looking out” – as John Shoptaw imagines the poet’s role – but he is “inside” his poems, a space he occupies in order to communicate with the reader in a more direct and subtle ways, both on the level of the poem, and on the level of the book (21).
Such an involvement with the reader evades explicitness of the allegorical presentation, yet it exhibits an ethical bias, which often results from the Ashberian historiography we know from Some Trees (“The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”) or The Tennis Court Oath (“A Last World”). This particular historical perspective addresses moral and political issues. April Galleons was haunted by the modes of visibility and survival afforded gay men during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Where Shall I Wander and A Worldly Country focus more often on aging and exhaustion as confronted by consumerist cult of youth and novelty.
Ashbery’s latest volume, Planisphere, aims at a redefinition of “America” and “American life” on a Whitmanic scale: ninety-nine poems, alphabetically ordered by titles, take us to dozens of locations scattered across the continent, resonating with present and past voices. This is not the first time Ashbery has used this technique to order the poems in a book. Can You Hear, Bird (1995) contained a hundred and three lyrics, with titles ranging from “A” to “Y.” Like in the case of the previous volume, Planisphere’s structure gives a feeling of a progress, or a precise movement, from the beginning of the book to the end. The key-words echoed in a number of poems, giving the volume a sense of narrative continuity, are “old days” and “happiness,” or different variations of them, such as “the same old [America]” (“Default Mode” 18), “the happiest place in the world” (“Not My Favorite Shirt”), or even “the hippest place in the world” (“Magnetic Flowers” 66).
“Default Mode” is a poem which perhaps most directly instills into the reader Planishere’s political angst:
They were living in America at another time.
They were living in America for the FBI.
They were living in America shit wins.
They were living in America on the border with Canada.
Anaphora, which is its focal stylistic device, gives the poem a regular graphic form, with the repeated message striking the reader like an advertising slogan. Ashbery has written similar anaphoric poems before, like his early “He” from Some Trees, where each line started with the pronoun, but here the repeated phrase stretches out to more than half of the line, which reinforces its semantic clangor. “They were living in America” most obviously refers to the past and implies that they no longer live there. The first stanza presents a broad register, which is preserved throughout the poem, with the particulars resembling scraps of what Marjorie Perloff labeled as a “detective poem”(Shoptaw 63): protagonists’ sinister affiliations with the FBI (“shit wins”) and their secluded place of residence (“on the border with Canada”) intimate a coherent narration. However, the incongruity of the following stanzas shatters those frail initial impressions:
They were living in America further gone into teats.
They were living in America that was the only good one.
They were living in America that was the only good one.
They were living in America who answers the phone and.
Overwhelming surreality wins, with a totally dislocating misrepresentation of the first line, “America further gone into teats” (the crypt word here is the histrionic “tears,” and the meaning mocks obsessive masculine hypersexuality of American mass culture). The second line has a blunt directness of a political spiel and, accordingly, is repeated in the third line. The stanza’s closural gesture puts an end to all narratological guesswork, with its personification silenced by the ultimate “and” which denies the reader any purchase on meaning.
The following stanzas take on different stylistic disguises, playing with solemn elevated diction of the Beats, interwoven with unambiguous social criticism (“They were living in America deliriously./ They were living in America sadly./ They were living in America fictitiously.”), or naturalistic close-ups of New Realists (“They were living in America pandemically./They were living in America across from the Ritz hotel.//They were living in America getting their chops.// They were living in America as one grows passionately/out of love affair they were living there every day.”). This strategy culminates in yet another aporia as the penultimate stanza starts with a question, which grammatically breaks the poem’s structure:
Does this doughnut remind you of a life preserver?
They were living in America to remind you of me.
They were living in America and a storm blew up suddenly.
They were living in America extended terms of credit.
The “doughnut” preserves life in the sense that it limits its scope. The two following lines problematize this burgeoning social symbolism, the first slipping into directness of confessional poetry (it is the only fragment of the poem where the speaker reveals his presence), the second opening up a gloomy vista of a metaphoric cataclysm. The ultimate line, helps the reader connect the cataclysm with the most recent economic crises.
The final stanza first abruptly silences any narrations about America latent in the poem (since “it’s all over.”), and then it radically defamiliarizes Americanness in a series of ambivalent idiomatic permutations (“They were living in America as tissue paper is to a comb./ They were living in America at five and sixes.”). However, the poem’s finale sentimentally resets a mythical image of “the same old America” of the American Dream:
They were living in America but it’s all over.
They were living in America as tissue paper is to a comb.
They were living in America at five and sixes.
They were living in America the same old the same old (Planisphere 17-18).
Thus, the eponymous “default mode” is an ambiguous axiology of Americanness, expressed in diverging jargons, which privileges cultural clichés, and sweeps aside voices of social criticism or political dissidence. Opening the space of his poems to these voices, and testing the tension between the polyphonic brickbats and the mainstream conservative culture, is exactly what is new in the most recent poems by John Ashbery. This new vein is occasionally highlighted by the poet’s curt remarks. For example, in 2006, during his reading at the Ashfest organized by the New School University in New York, Ashbery said, commenting one of his poems, “Until very recently the United States has cherished the ideals of freedom,” which was an unusual observation if we keep in mind his disbelief in poetry as a form of activism.
In visual arts, there has recently been a similar propensity to produce meanings that could be politically interpretable. Not only does it characterize artists for whom Rauschenbergian pop-art was a foothold, but also those who were faithful to Kandinsky’s legacy of abstraction governed by aesthetic necessity, or those who pursued purely expressionist formal indulgence. The first group includes artists, such as, for example, the Dutch painter Pat Andréa, the Catalonian multimedia artist Frances Torres, or the Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal. The second group consists of the French painter Geneviéve Asse, the American painter Dee Adams, and the Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. The last group is represented by the French painter Jean-Charles Blais, the Italian painter and sculptor Enzo Cucchi, or the American painter Cy Twombly. The division between the above three modes of expression are not definitive and serve merely as guidelines.
The Polish artist, Wilhelm Sasnal, uses a pop-art filmic perspective, which he mixes with a refined sensitivity to colors and facture to present bleak Polish reality. The themes of his works are baffling, and his methods range from a reductive two-dimensional illustration style to painterly feasts, with plentiful brushwork. Sasnal’s painting “Poland and Israel” falls into the first category: on a fleshy background, the painting shows geographic contours of Poland and Israel, knitted together as if the actual border between the two countries was presented. The painting shows a physical proximity of Poland and Israel, stressing cultural differences between the two countries with its blurred, contrasting colors. Israel, significantly, replaces Germany as Poland’s western neighbor: not only a paragon in many spheres of life, but also its most important economic partner. The ironic meaning refers to a cultural paradox: Poland is considered the most anti-Semitic country in the European Union, yet Jews have always been a vital part of Polish culture.
Perhaps all the different types of spatial relations depicted in this paper have always existed in John Ashbery’s poetry in different proportions at different stages of his abundant career. Nonetheless, the formal and imaginative richness of Ashbery’s poetry owes a great deal to spatial concepts mapped out by the twentieth-century visual arts. The poet has not simply tried to recreate the models offered by different artists or schools. Rather, his poetic development reveals some general tendencies of the twentieth-century avant-garde, common to literature and visual arts in several aspects. Firstly, Ashbery’s poetry and contemporary visual arts show similar strategies of artistic origination in relation to their subjects and the ambivalent representation of their objects. Secondly, both are critical of the mass culture distinction between the public and the private spheres of life, and the function of the artist in politically controlled exchange of meanings.