Riddles of Form/ Nine

What Is Poetry

(John Ashbery)

*
What Is Poetry

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?

Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we

Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they

Will have to believe it

As we believe it. In school
All the thought got combed out:
What was left was like a field.

Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.

It might give us - what? - some flowers soon?

(John Ashbery)

*
In many ways this has to be a figurehead poem for Riddles of Form. A poem that addresses the fundamental question – what is poetry? – ends on a question, defines what for me is one of the fundamental problems in the teaching of poetry (“In school/All the thought got combed out”), and simultaneously sabotages ‘commons sense’ reading while embodying (rather than defining) what – for Ashbery – poetry is.

“The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya?”

It is a provocative opening. The reader is trained for this: clearly a series of metaphors. “Medieval” connotes antiquity, “frieze” must relate to decoration – however, by the time we get to “boy scouts” and “Nagoya” (Nagoya? Quick! The atlas!) there’s the feeling that our reading has hit a brick wall. Confusion. Frustration. And we thought we knew how to read poetry.
Another attempt.

“The snow
That came when we wanted it to snow?”

Is this an image or a statement and/or related to the previous sentence? We’re already beginning to lose our bearings. The tautological flavour of the sentence is unnerving. as is the suggestion of rhyme and yet subsequent lines do not continue this pattern and – in any case – what a clunkingly obvious rhyme! Further confusion. More frustration.

Another attempt:

“Beautiful images?”

Snow is beautiful – lots of poems have told us that – but John Ashbery seems incapable of stirring his reader with evocative descriptions of snowy landscapes (bring back Robert Frost!) and that medieval town with its frieze of boy scouts isn’t exactly painted on the backs of our retinas. Disappointment added to the confusion and frustration.

“Trying to avoid
Ideas, as in this poem?”

So, let’s get this right – a poem that calls itself ‘What Is Poetry’ and which has the affrontery to declare that it is trying to avoid ideas! The copy of ‘The Selected Poems of John Ashbery’ is snapped shut. The reader throws it down in disgust and reaches for his copy of Ruth Padel’s ‘52 Ways of Looking at a Poem’:

“... Did readers really want to see such an unsexy thing as a poem undergoing that even unsexier thing : in-depth analysis? ...” (2)

So let’s show how ‘sexy’ reading John Ashbery can be – photo, please ...



Wow.

Back to the poem.

I am exaggerating, of course. However, it is clear that Ashbery is inviting and playing off the kind of referential interpretative strategies we use in traditional reading.

“In school
All the thought got combed out”

Was this Ashbery’s own experience? Why he started to explore ways of writing poems which investigated the possibilities of language when the intellectual head lice were removed? (Vision of the process of education as a queue stretching to the door before the Infestation Officer).

Let’s take the title – ‘What Is Poetry’ – and the way it is positioned between a statement and a question. This, in turn, leads to the poem’s opening lines which are a succession of questions. These can – despite my reading above – be squeezed for ‘sense’.

“The snow/ That came when we wanted it to snow?” might be interpreted as reading for narcissitic wish fulfilment – the reader projects his/her own ideas and feelings at a poem.

“Beautiful images?” Interrogates whether a poem has to deliver evocative descriptions of landscape – the kind of writing highly prized by student creative writing classes.

“The medieval town, with frieze/ Of boy scouts from Nagoya?” may even be ‘domesticated’ by being read as a surrealistic gesture, poem ‘diagnosed’ as typical of a wacky, dream-like, escapist way of writing.

However, it seems to me that with Ashbery it is as important to consider the rhetorical dimension of the poem. Not what the questions say, so much as that there are statements being made as a succession of questions. Ashbery simultaneously seems to be attempting definitions in the very act of undermining any faith in these statements. Each question possesses little evident connection to the previous one. How the last – “Trying to avoid/Ideas, as in this poem?” – turns the poem 360 degrees back upon itself.

This device of self-referentiality – much favoured by modern critical theory – is given a delightful New York Poet spin. There’s a cheeky knowingness with which Ashbery foregrounds the very poem itself (and I see a similar wit in Lee Harwood’s poetry).

The cheekiness continues with the mock serious:

But we

Go back to them as to a wife, leaving
The mistress we desire?

It’s unlikely, of course, that Ashbery sees himself in the marrying role and this adds a further weight of irony to the lines. But who is this “we”? As we might well ask of the subsequent “they” (“Now they
/ Will have to believe it” ) and the “you” ( “Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.” ) It’s the not the place here to expand at length on Ashbery’s subtle use of ‘you’ in his poetry as a whole (the way, for instance, it seems to operate both in terms of the speaker of the poem and the assumed reader). For this poem, I want to stress how it is another aspect of the unsettling effect of the writing. Conventionally we – the reader – are pulled into a text by such pronouns (a typical strategy of advertising and political campaigning). In Ashbery’s poem the pronouns seem unanchored – we glimpse how language operates, how meaning is allowed to come into being: He’s talking to me... This refers to me ... That sentence relates to him ... etc. We sense, too, the difference between this kind of poem and the more self-declared ‘confessional’ poem where the speaking voice is anchored by its pronoun.
So is this some kind of ‘anti-poem’? A deliberate attempt to destroy poetic meaning?

I don’t think so for the poem is embodying Ashbery’s sense of what a poem – what poetry is – in the very act of seemingly dismantling the rules.

Going back to the opening verses:

“The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?

Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem?”

let’s not worry about referential sense – of why medieval towns and boy scouts.* Instead, let’s listen to the language. Does the sound make sense?

It quickly becomes apparent how Ashbery is creating a sonic logic to his poem. How the long ‘e’ sound is threaded through the words “frieze” and “we” and “ideas” and later on into “believe” and “field”. In a way it works like a structural backbone to the poem – as ‘meaningful’ as any conceptual scheme or agument to an essay.

As a kind of counterpoint, Ashbery sets in motion the ‘oy’ sound with “boy” which is echoed in “Nagoya” and then “avoid”. What occurs is a wonderful marrying of sense and sound. In Ashbery’s poem there is a sensuality – ideas are sensual – as seemingly ‘incoherent’ ideas are made compositionally meaningful through sound and the other devices we have been exploring. One might even go so far as to argue such writing is sexy! The reader experiences the physical pleasures offered by language – pleasures missed by the analytical comb intent on untangling the knots.

What, then, of the closing lines? I think we would be unwise to expect any definite statement – and why it seems appropriate that Ashbery finishes on a question: “It might give us - what? - some flowers soon?”

I’ll admit to feeling uncertain about the last lines. Do we take it that it is the “thin vertical path” which might blossom? When, working with the ‘sense’ of the field metaphorics, flowers would be more at home there. And what of these flowers? Is Ashbery drawing upon a well-established poetic device – the ‘flowers’ of rhetoric and poesy? And should we see the poem – printed upon a page – as a “thin vertical path”? So what then is the field?

It’s not a cop-out to say the confusion is deliberate. I think Ashbery has established throughout the poem an expectation of determined meaning which is – in its very act of being articulated – undermined.

For me, it’s the sensual logic which carries the poem: I ‘feel’ the relation of “like a field” with “shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around”. It’s an ear logic. And I’m thinking of poetic fields – Robert Duncan’s ‘Opening of the Field’ foremost. Of how Ashbery would be aware of Olson’s poetics of ‘Open Field’ composition (which is not to say this poem operates accordingly) as well as the wider possibilities of ‘fields’ which informed Olson and Duncan’s poetic aesthetics. Magnetic fields, force fields – the agricultural-pastoral model is by no means exclusive.

And it is this sense of the poem as a ‘field’ – an interplay of forces and energies (sound, rhythm, grammar, tone, semantic and other logics) – that I believe Ashbery wishes to rescue from a reductive reading. The kind of reading which prefers the “thin vertical path”.

And it’s not so much the path ‘not taken’ – it’s not one or the other. Rather that opening to the possibilities of the field which include of course flowers and frolics ... Ashbery’s poetic pastoral Arcadia?
__

* Somewhere I have the interview Ashbery gave on this poem with Teacher & Writers in which he explains the reference to boy scouts – as I recall he quite literally encountered such a group. By all accounts this is typical of many Ashbery poems – using overheard remarks, chance events, the very things we all experience. I wouldn’t go so far then as to say this ‘solves’ the first two lines.

Somewhere else, too, I remember reading Ashbery talking about the influence upon his poetry of his Paris years. Rather than any key author or poetic movement, Ashbery specified seeing the water running around the blocked drains in the street. I’ve often wondered what he meant by this – is it, perhaps, to do with the divergent logics of his poetry? The refusal – again – of the direct path?