Ashes Ashes All Fall Down [by Angela Ball]

John Ashbery has a double life: as “John,” the person; and “Ashbery” the poet.  His poetry, too, has such a life.  In J.D. McClatchy’s formulation, derived from “Trefoil,” a poem that describes “trees / of two minds,  half caught in their buzz and luster,” it is ”buzz” (the voice of the quotidian, the silly, the shop-worn phrase) and “luster” (the voice of beauty that arises from memory and is expressed in language, but is somehow independent of both—in short, art).  It is both dimensional, riverine and mountainous, and a “planosphere” unfolded on a table.

 “Memories of Imperialism,” from his twentieth book, Your Name Here,  is based on a silly, deliberate mistake—the conflation of two Deweys: the admiral and the librarian. But according to the logic we follow every day, the mistake makes sense: we are our names—we inhabit the blank provided.  Ashbery’s poem simply takes the system at its word, creating a beautifully comic, bewildered character who embodies the absurdity and sentimentality of history as we mostly experience it: “Dewey took Manila / and soon after invented the Dewey decimal system / that keeps libraries from collapsing / even unto this day.”  The poem brilliantly juxtaposes the “flatness” of a numerical system with the “roundness” of experience—the collapse described at the poem’s start seems both a matter of weight and a matter of abstract order.  (Another poem in the volume, “Full Tilt,” mentions “a terrible syllabus accident.”) And, poignantly, the poem evokes the predicament of outliving one’s moment.  The young take it in stride that old heroes are supplanted by new.  It’s another thing entirely to know oneself redundant: one may be called “Admiral” still, but no longer admired:

 

To this day schoolchildren wonder about his latter career

as a happy pedant, always nice with children, thoughtful

toward their parents.  He wore a gray ceramic suit

walking his dog, a “bouledogue,” he would point out.

People would peer at him from behind shutters, watchfully,

hoping no new calamities would break out, or indeed

that nothing more would happen, ever, that history had ended.

Yet it hadn’t, as the admiral himself

would have been the first to acknowledge.

 

Your Name Here is dedicated to Ashbery’s partner of many years, “Pierre Martory, 1920-1998.” It ends with the title poem.  Isolated, this phrase reveals its strangeness.  A signature is both personal and impersonal—the space, which could be filled by anyone, implies a comic togetherness rather than a tragic uniqueness--but it is you, in two-dimensional form.  It indicates the round of a life: volition, commitment.  I think that “commitment” (to fixed ideas of truth, for example) is a quality that Ashbery runs from, while many poets pursue it as prize.  Also, there is the weirdness (fatality) of a phrase that functions both as command and description, as if the filled space is already a fait accompli.  As if the name already occupies its line, so like the one that connects two dates.  The declaration is also an indisputable fact: each of us occupies a “here.”  But its evocation also implies an opposite: the culmination, for Ashbery, of a lifetime of leaving out of his poems the very things we expect to see—his non-contractual contract with the reader.

For our class in The New York School of Poets, the students have read the thick collection of Ashbery’s early work, The Mooring of Starting Out, and the Harvard lectures collected as Other Traditions, which they have found revelatory of Ashbery’s own poetic method.  Jennifer Brown, graduate fiction writer, says this in her reading journal:

 For the most part, I really enjoyed Other Traditions. For poets whose work I haven’t read, Clare, Beddoes, and co. were surprisingly interesting to read about. Some of them sounded like characters from a Tim Burton film. 

Ashbery’s description of Wheelwright had me imagining something like Ashbery’s own ellipses-filled “hair banana” variety of poems, but the example at the end reminded me much more of Ashbery’s relatively traditional work such as “The Painter.” Wheelwright’s influence on Ashbery is apparent in the way that his poems are difficult to understand in any straightforward sense, but they are full of imagery that unfolds itself effortlessly in the reader’s mind and words that generate a sort of grip over the reader’s attention. You may not understand them, but you feel them anyway. My initial thought was that Wheelwright was more successful at this than Ashbery, until I took into account that I had only read two or three carefully selected examples of Wheelwright where I’d read a large range of Ashbery over two or three hundred pages.   – Jennifer Brown

In his own journal, graduate fiction writer Nicholas Benca speaks of the frustrations and rewards of reading Ashbery:

I did attempt to “water-ski” over these poems when they were not narrative, but the desire to understand, to follow line-by-line what the poem is attempting to communicate was a more dominant force than just letting it wash over me. As stated earlier, there were definitely pleasurable moments, but it took a lot of work to find them when the poems were more abstract/lyric (even a line like “Sand the bowl did not let fall” was mysterious and tough to decipher at first glance). There were poems like “The Boy,” which fall into that category for me and were still pretty stunning experiences—this poem in particular seemed to capture an experience of being a child (male) in a world of grown –ups/parents—the fear and lack of control of  “seeming to have fallen/ From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.” Another element of Ashbery’s poems that I seemed to consistently enjoy is the final lines. Although it is tough to disagree with Ashbery’s own assertion that he seems to retreat farther from the object of the poem (and Lehman’s agreement that Ashbery seems to step back/never arrive at the destination), it seemed to me like the way Ashbery ended a lot of his poems was the closest I got to a key to what I should be getting from the writing. Yeah, maybe it never arrived, but it at least informed me of the direction I was heading, and yeah, the poems seemed to shift at the end, take a turn in an unanticipated direction, and when that occurred, it seemed to be a revelation—they place where meaning might take off from, a secret that announces it presence but isn’t wholly revealed. For example, I thought that the end to the “Pied Piper” was well done and an interesting turn from what I had expected as well as the ending to “America.” Poems that walked the line between narrative and abstract were generally my favorites in this collection—“Illustration” “The Painter” and “Night” were all compelling and tapped into an emotion as well as an idea  - Nicholas Benca

 

To end what I sign today, I’ll quote the close of “Your Name Here.”  The novel referred to is a digressive ten-volume life story, by Romain Rolland, of a brilliant musician’s trials and final triumph.  Almost a library in itself, its strict-looking plan—its “syllabus”--belies its somewhat anarchic content.  Rolland named it a roman-flueve—a river novel—that meanders into other, unexpected lives before at last arriving at its hero’s final success:

 

Things got real quiet in the oubliette.

I was still reading Jean-Christophe. I’ll never finish the darn thing.

Now is the time for you to go out into the light

and congratulate whoever is left in our city.  People who survived

the eclipse.  But I was totally taken with you, always have been.

Light a candle in my wreath, I’ll be yours forever and will kiss you.

Comments

[Charles Coe]

Nicely done. A beautiful meditation on one of our poetic treasures.

[DL]

Another fine post, Angela. Very good to have the student reactions. "Memories of Imperialism" was a great crowd-pleaser when JA read it aloud at public readings. The way my kind works. . .I thought of three other Deweys: Thomas (the governor of NY who lost the presidency to FDR in 44 and to Truman in 48), John (the progressive educator), and dewy-eyed Dewey, brother of Huey and Louie, son of Donald.

[Marvin]

I concur.... Well written. Thanx.

[Jesse James]

I read this post three times and now I can honestly say I got it!