The American Century: Literature since 1945 621himself. “The carnivorous / way of these lines is to devour their own nature,” he
confides in “Grand Galop,” “leaving / Nothing but a bitter impression of absence,
which as we know involves presence.” “Nevertheless,” he adds, “these are fundamental
absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves.” There are various influences at
work here, to which O’Hara was more or less immune: among them Poe, with his
belief in a poetry that disappears as it is read, and Stevens, with his interest in
epistemology, the mind’s baffling encounter with the objects it contemplates. Also,
the example of Gertrude Stein is not to be discounted, since what Stein called
“counting one by one” to create “a continually moving picture” – with “no memory,”
no “assembling” or “relating,” no increasing density of significance – is what Ashbery
does. His poetry deflates our expectation of sense, or presence, by offering us always
the playful, fluid zone of deferred sense, suspended meaning. “Someday I’ll explain”
he promises jokily in “Ode to Bill,” “Not today though.” The “I” that shadows his
writing consequently resembles Sartre’s existential man in whom, as Sartre puts it,
“acts, emotions, and ideas suddenly settle ... and then disappear.” “You cannot say
he submits to them,” Sartre points out. “He experiences them. There seems to be no
law governing their appearance.”
Ashbery’s earliest published poems, such as “Some Trees,” are mainly concerned
with the operations of the sleeping consciousness, and are activated by the belief
that the function of the poet is, as he puts it, to “give fullness / To the dream.” These
were followed by his experimenting, at roughly the same time as O’Hara, in “straight
surrealism.” In poems like “Europe” and “They Dream Only of America,” fractured
images, jumbles of nonsequiturs, and techniques of verbal collage are used to
dramatize the humiliating and reifying aspects of modern life. But it was from the
later 1960s on that Ashbery hit his real stride, with poems such as “The Skaters,”
“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” “A Wave,” and the 216-page poem that constitutes
A Flow Chart, as well as prose pieces like “The System.” No one work is entirely
characteristic of his mature writing, since each new one tends to constitute an act of
renewal. What is common to them all, however, as Ashbery tries to realize what he
calls “the quirky things that happen to me,” are certain stylistic features. An irresolute
syntax, the casual use of slang, cliché and apparent redundancies, false starts, and
back-tracking, free associations, occasional opacity of phrasing and the equally
occasional hard, focused image – all these are the verbal weapons of a mind in
process – or, rather, a mind that is process, a medium in which disparate objects
meet and merge. The long, serpentine verse paragraphs Ashbery favors hold the
different elements in close physical contiguity, as if the writer were trying to create a
multidimensional space, a “seamless web” in which everything could be folded into
everything else. This is a poetry which insists that structures are always virtual,
always to-be-known or more exactly always to-be-inferred. And this is a poet who
insists on the disjunctive nature of history and personality. Historical experience,
evidently, is a “tangle of impossible resolutions and irresolutions,” which happen
outside the neat demarcations of sages and storytellers. “The sagas purposely ignore
how better it was the next day,” Ashbery observes, “ / the feeling in between the
chapters,” and it is clear he does not want to imitate them. Personality, in turn, isGGray_c05.indd 621ray_c 05 .indd 621 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM