English Studies Forum

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"Exuberance Departed": John Ashbery from Flow Chart to Where Shall I Wander

By Mark Tursi

Writing about John Ashbery has always been synonymous with a certain kind of contentiousness. This means contending with those who champion his poetry and those who admonish it.  It means confronting his admirers, as well as his detractors.  But, perhaps, most of all, it means contending with the work itself. Some critics have even called Asbhery the most controversial poet in America, as David Lehman wrote in his introduction to Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery twenty-five years ago (16). This may not be true today as this dubious distinction was passed on, legitimately or erroneously, to the Language Poets in the 1970’s and 80’s, and has now become part of the critical rhetoric for a whole new cadre of avant-garde writers. But, the label for Ashbery, so many years ago, is telling.  Ashbery has always been and still remains a controversial figure, even today.

            The book that seems to garner the most scathing attacks, Flow Chart is perhaps the most important text of Ashbery’s to explicate. And, as I argue here, his latest book, Where Shall I Wander provides a new opportunity to reconsider this earlier book length poem and discover where, in fact, this poet has wandered so far. Some writers, like Mark Jarman for instance, contend that Flow Chart is “unrereadable” (sic), and not only boring and simply bad, but “devoid of any subject except its own composition" (198).  Interestingly, this second aspect of Jarman’s indictment is not entirely erroneous, though his evaluation and assessment is misguided and sophomoric. Ashbery’s discursiveness, his interest in the erosive capacity of language, and, ultimately, his challenge to the way consciousness constructs meaning, is in a way, very interested in its own composition, perhaps even obsessed with the erasure or disappearance of subjectivity and objectivity. But is this a negative quality for poetic language? Should consciousness be made transparent and obvious? Like many critics of Ashbery, Jarmin finds Ashbery’s complexity and difficulty unfathomable, and the challenges he proposes to consciousness and ways of thinking about reality simply untenable. Ironically, many literary critics seem to shy away from language that expands meaning and foregrounds it’s own processes, and, therefore, a poet like Ashbery sends them reeling. Instead of difficult linguistic turns and gestures that reveal the very artifice at work, these critics want profundity and they want it now! Unfortunately (or fortunately), expanding consciousness comes at a price; i.e. stepping outside one’s intellectual and linguistic comfort zone and using the mind in surprising and challenging ways: something Ashbery asks us to do again and again.

A former professor of mine in grad school had another name for Flow Chart: Blow Job.  Again, not an entirely erroneous indictment.  More witty and humorous than Jarmin by a long-shot, but perhaps equally as problematic, this book-length poem is imbued with male sexuality/homosexuality, and the lens from which reality is viewed and consciousness constructed is a very male-centered, phallocentric one.  It is also self-obsessed in some ways since it deals largely with “thinking about thinking” and with the mind’s own operations. It also explores how consciousness manifests itself in language: 

we wrote down a long time ago, thinking it of no importance and laying it in a shallow box or drawer.  But when you do really need to know the essential nature of a thing, recognize it by its texture only, the cup by the handle, the gas from its sudden volatility, you’ll be glad you wasted so much time in youth jotting down seemingly unrelated random characteristics of things, rested on your elbows at the windowsill looking out over everything that was going to be night, as dismay took two steps backward into curiosity and brought momentary relief in form of an incorrect solution that might be read  later on as a stain. (95)

Ashbery seems to ask: does there exist thought without digression? Perhaps, but there is no consciousness without digression.  The very nature of consciousness, Ashbery puts forth again and again, is made up of the ebb and flow of thought, emotion, and imagination, judgment and logic, rationality and irrationality; that is, consciousness necessarily includes some digression, some loss of meaning, and some uncertainty. This seems to be, at least in part, the crux of Ashbery’s project.

            Contrary to Jarmin’s assertions, Ashbery’s work is very re-readable and far from boring, even to honest readers without multiple degrees in English. A poem like Flow Chart demands multiple readings. I first read Ashbery in high school, initially because we are both from the same hometown—Rochester, NY—and I was hoping for some kind of link or key into what seemed the hermetic magic of poetry at that time.  I didn’t understand all of what I was reading, but I was immediately engaged with and, perhaps, irrevocably drawn into the way the words seem to pull apart meaning and ask my imagination to do calisthenics to keep up. This puzzlement forced me to turn inward, toward my own perplexity and curiosity, and then back, outward toward the world. In other words, this is the process of the imagination putting pressure on, as Wallace Stevens would say, reality, and, further, on consciousness itself. The attempt to understand the work of John Ashbery can be a way of exploring the significance of human perplexity and wonder, and this is something I understood immediately, even then.

            In considering Flow Chart and Where Shall I Wander together, readers of Ashbery—and potential new readers of this supposedly enigmatic poet—can see a connection that might provide a new insight and understanding to Ashbery’s poetic universe.  In addition to some of Ashbery’s signature impulses—discontinuous fragments; meaning that seems to build and build but never arrive; memory that merges with shards of present experience; dreamlike descriptions imbued with syntactical weirdness; the feeling of a pervasive and ineffable miscommunication—these two books present an additional parallel that speaks to a kind of exuberance coupled with restlessness and metaphysical meditations linked to heuristic humor. Both books are comedies of fragmentation that wander through the multiple mosaics of consciousness and tumble headlong into the colloquial language of day-to-day life and pop culture. The noise and chaos of the streets and the ubiquitous presence of television with all the hyperbolic messages it embodies enter from everywhere and become part of his idiom: “Our TV brains sit around us all brave and friendly, like docile pets” (78), he writes in the title poem from Where Shall I Wander. And, a few sentences later:

What we have here are certain individuals intent on disarraying the public gravitas of things. Others, threadbare acolytes in the slow-moving sift of moulting opinions it degrades to a screen behind which a Nordic lake escapes upwards into ecstatic pastures, demur. (79)

            The images in these lines reveal a subtext that critiques the increasingly lazy minds of a society obsessed with the easy thinking required of viewing television, and minds that are complicit in the unending flux of images and “white noise” from every imaginable direction.  In both books, Ashbery draws the reader in with the suggestion of a narrative, a story underlying his leaps in logic. But, he quickly veers off course or allows the narrative to dissolve or disintegrate completely.  The language he uses in a single paragraph or stanza seems to weave a tapestry of several different discourses and numerous “registers” of speech and writing.  He wanders from very the philosophical and literary to the bawdy and vulgar; from clear and concise diction to obtuse and convoluted phrases; from imagistic descriptions to reflective meditations; from the surreal to the mimetic. In Flow Chart, he writes, 

Yet there are other times as in a quarry where no breeze stirs; nothing indicates it; poetry scarcely drips from vines, the weather is hugely oppressive, yet you do know something is at work in you, something else: take death away and still a vast alteration remains to be made.  We know this decade doesn’t fit, that we can do nothing about it except swear, yet it will do, it will have to.  A fly dies, and then? Who are we to speculate on the delicious paradoxes that will outlive us, embroiled in street things, squeezing a pimple until some richly satisfying pus comes out? Were we needed then? (146)

In this passage, imagistic and metaphoric language calls attention to the poetic (“poetry scarcely drips from vines”) and is mixed with, or embroiled with, pus and pimples.  The disparity is great, yet seems commonplace in Ashbery’s universe.  His deadpan candor and simple presentation convinces us that there is meaning to be made here, though it may, in fact, be out of our reach.  The meaning or “mis-meaning” somehow always comes back to the body, the material and objective world, which has been put into question and made unstable throughout the poem.  This creates an interesting and frustratingly ineffable universe – it is circular reasoning made manifest and tangible one moment, and abstract and unfathomable the next.

            Similarly, in a poem from Where Shall I Wander, Ashbery taps into our collective psyches via a common idiomatic expression. He questions whether we can see the “forests from the trees,” and if, really, that’s the point.  The confusion seems to rest with our very expression of ideas, not our perception of them outside of our minds, or is it the opposite? Again, a kind of circularity is pervasive.  In this particular poem, “Idea of the Forest,” irony and sincerity seem an extension of the same mould:

I enjoy all this emerging, holding of hands—

what isn’t better than holding hands? For we get to see

into the distance, far from ways others carved,

even a little reality, darker intake

though there was a shadow brain in their regular nipples

as the auto thought to stop.  I’ll bring the devilled egss.

Sincere messages are my form of expression.

Follow the giant home but don’t let him see you.  Remember

the grass will always let you out. Just don’t steal out. (55)

Both books are flow charts—a kind of diagram of events—for consciousness, and, according to Ashbery’s reckoning, this necessarily means a degree of wandering.  Perception, which wanders from the very objects it perceives and the imagination, which is equally contingent upon a subject and predicate, never actually settle – everything flows and/or wanders as it passes through the processes of the mind.  “Chart,” here is also very ironic and imbued with a comic resonance.  To understand Asbhery’s lines means to laugh aloud at the folly of our own minds thinking through thought; in other words, charting something of this nature is ultimately impossible, an absurd folly. In “Involuntary Description,” he writes

The comic and the bathetic were our interior.

They kept integers at bay, and, when it was over,

toasted a little cheese to prove it never happened—

 

[. . . ]

 

Sometimes I think it’s all one big affectation. (Where 16)

          Affectation is Ashbery’s modus operandi.  But, he isn’t just out to impress his readers (although this seems part of it, especially via notions of playfulness within language), so much as force them to question the very validity of the poetic project. He exposes how the surface tensions of language pull apart any pretensions toward stable meaning or towards a stable and static identity.  Although Ashbery’s poetry does invite a “misprision” or creative misreading as Harold Bloom asserted some years ago, it doesn’t mean “anything goes.”  Both of these works—Flow Chart and Where Shall I Wander—insist that we see the failure to communicate and understand clearly our false assumptions regarding identity.  That is, the self for Ashbery is not only influx, but part of a constant crisis of erasure, of negation.  Connected to this, is the literal notion of erasure of self in the form of elegy.  The elegy is a recognition of mortality and a way of coping with that—a common theme throughout literary history—but from the pen of Asbhery it takes on a quality of playfulness coupled with obsession: odd bedfellows indeed. 

            A friend and fellow writer once commented on Ashbery’s recent books by stating that “even Ashbery’s worst books are better than a lot of the poetry being published today.”  One might consider this a rather dismal assessment of contemporary poetry, but I don’t think that is how he meant it, and it is certainly not how I intend it here.  What I think he meant is that Ashbery is a poet to reckon with; he is a poet whose work never fails to challenge and to unsettle; his work is consistently brilliant. Ashbery’s poetry always offers something to stretch the imagination and question the prickings of our consciousness, and this, to me, is a kind of exuberance, however fleeting it may seem. It is a necessary, albeit difficult and frustrating endeavor; and, it should be. In Ashbery’s words, after “the initial exuberance departed . . . a quintessential weariness.”