The Audacity to Win

John Ashbery, Planisphere (Carcanet, 2009). ISBN: 9781847770899. £12.95

At the left end of my desk – a desk that I constructed, with scars and blisters on my fingers that prove it – sits a recent edition of John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, originally published 1975. To the right end is a copy of Planisphere, his latest collection of poetry. Seeping up through the cracks in the wood is a thirty year history, during the course of which Ashbery became the greatest poet in America – the indicators being that he has had the audacity to win every award worth getting and has been featured in every literary journal and publication worth subscribing to.

These statements won’t surprise the enthusiasts, since critics habitually narrate this history whenever there is a new Ashbery collection to review. The critics will also cautiously nod to the anxiety concerning the obscurity and incomprehensibility of his poetry and the debate as to whether or not the Ashbery’s reputation is even justified. It’s worth noting that this isn’t just the standard form of critical bombardment that occurs to most major writers’ work; it is a debate that reflects a broader shift in our relationship with poetry. 

A useful and incisive illustration of the above comes in Megan O’Rouke’s 2005 article for Slate, where she effectively tries to finish the debate by offering flummoxed readers a John Ashbery instruction manual. The piece, or manual rather, begins by examining the ‘difficult’ idea and the claims that he is actually just a crafty old “literary hoaxer”, who presumably has conned his way to the top. (But aren’t all writers hoaxers?) O’Rouke tells the reader not to worry about understanding John Ashbery’s words, “but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music” because for most readers, the meaning will flow out when they’re not looking for it. To support her statements she pinpoints all the central aesthetic attributes of his poetry: musicality, experimentation, surprise, humour, and his sense of play.

But why did O’Rouke feel the impulse to write an article like this some thirty years after the publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror? Are the consumer children of the neo-liberal age so incapable of feeling? And are they so immodest to accept that things can have values which they don’t and may never understand? As though those of us who find pleasure in the mysterious and weird are in a roundabout way saying, “I’m sorry, but this actually provides us with pleasure”. And why are people still having the same crippling argument about meaning? As though behind every John Ashbery poem lies a single intention or reason, one which a reader could find if only they had phoned the right friend to get the answer. It’s like an intellectual groundhog day, and until everybody learns to become comfortable with ambiguity, they will continue to miss the point.

John Ashbery is 82 and, unless you are working for the BBC, age is an irrelevance. It is, however, a source of inspiration that he continues to possess the mental fortitude and strength of imagination to conjure and record his dazzling wordplay and music. Planisphere is a substantial collection of his recent compositions and amounts to an A-to-Z of Ashbery’s thoughts, insights, and recollections as an octogenarian. These lines from ‘Just how cloudy everything gets’ hint at what might be playing on his mind:

Refusing to admit
something is the matter with you is like taking
a life. There are no witnesses.
The wind rolls free. My summer Pontiac
expired high up on the slope, death found desirable
between your two stalwart legs.

Ashbery sticks broadly to his familiar flowing freeform style, implemented with his use of enjambment and pauses, which are enough to guide the music on behalf of their absent conductor. Most of the poems are short, with only ‘The Winemakers’, perhaps the most accomplished piece in the collection, running over three pages. But there is nothing structurally radical in Planisphere, or anything that would suggest a paradigm shift in Ashbery’s poetic raison d’etre. It shouldn’t worry anybody that he’s using essentially the same bag of tricks as before: voices and pronouns collapsing over the top of each other, dialogue springing out of one thing and leading you in one direction, before turning and dancing off to somewhere you did not expect to go:

Sporting with Amaryllis in the shade is all fine and good,
but when your sparring partner gets there first
you wonder if it was all worth it. “Yes, why do it?”
I’m on hold. It will take quite a lot for this music
to grow on me.
(‘Leave the Hand In’)
And he will make you laugh for reasons you can’t explain at the time, before departing with a sequence of words that strains the rational faculty, a bit like an irritatingly catchy pop-song that spins on repeat in your head:

I told them I was leaving and they were all thrilled.
(A phenomenon I have often observed.) Sound more
interesting enough? “Sterling and buoyed” was the reply.
(‘Poem Title’?)
Ashbery is a Big Theme writer and these themes continue to be explored in the collection. Time, memory, nostalgia, and death are the largest and most obvious elephants in the room, ‘Tessera’ being a pithy and clear example of his reflections:

We had fallen asleep in the palace.
It was ungraceful, but only a kitten
could have taught us that, far out on a ledge.

The way some people come and go is instructive.
Why brood over shadows that pile up
inevitably inside the shutter? If there was
one thing he had learned in his life, it was this:
One discovery leads the way to another,
and then all are swept out with the morning’s trash.

But Ashbery’s poetry is also interested in the act of writing and of poetry itself, and there are examples in Planisphere. There is a reflection on how this has been affected by old age, drawing parallels with the passing of time, such as in the lines “Just as the day could use another hour / I need another idea” (from ‘Breathlike’). The poem ‘FX’ has a frantic, if vaguely tongue-in-cheek tone, of a search for spiritual insight, with lines like “O in this bedsit I crave / expanded knowledge of the first click”, “If this were all, the Creator / must have left his notes in the car” and, “To smash the nexus, underemploy / the conjoining verb.” A clearer reflection comes in the poem ‘Uptick’, where poetry is apparently compared with painting, from which Ashbery has taken artistic inspiration:

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,
but it has to pay attention
to what’s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.

The use of the stock market phrase ‘Uptick’ as a title provides all the necessary financial symbolism. There is the idea of the painting being involved in a sort of transaction, a financial one, whereas poetry evades commodification and in fact has the capacity to critically analyse the reader. Keeping that in mind while reading Planisphere might be a way of accessing the material, if on first glance the music does not play.  

John Ashbery’s poetry “is seriously out of joint” to steal his line from ‘Variation in C Minor’, often lacking any specific internal temporal logic and socio-historical coordinates. A poem built entirely from movie titles is perhaps the most blatant example of this, if also the weakest poem in the collection. As such, it is an overwhelming task to try to read his poetry with the ultimate aim of teleological understanding, or for any specific social and political insight; the poem is irreducible: it is the insight.

Ashbery has never wanted to repel a reader and has always striven to provide; he has said this himself on numerous occasions throughout his career. In my view, the pleasure in his poetry is derived absolutely from its mystique, requiring an element of comfort in obscurity. This is essentially negative capability, as Keats called it, or to use Heidegger’s phrase, ‘Gelassenheit’: “the spirit of disponibilité [availability] before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery.” If readers in the contemporary world have less of a capacity to derive pleasure from Ashbery’s poetry, or any art for that matter, it is because they are imprisoned by the reductive paradigms that attempt to explain the world in its entirety; in other words, they no longer have faith.

Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “the supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think”. Ashbery’s output functions as the poetics of this paradox. In creating a poetry that seeks to transcend thought, to become that which is effectively unthinkable, he stimulates the capacity of the human mind to have faith and to allow something to simply be (ontologically speaking). Reading an Ashbery poem and not quite knowing where you are, but going along anyway, while taking pleasure from the arrangement, the turns and surprises, irrespective of understanding is structurally similar to the way humans experience real life, from day to day. Kenneth Koch sums it up when describing a line of Ashbery’s poem from ‘Europe’, “Night hunger / of berry . . . stick”:

Well, if you are following the poem and if you come to a place where you don’t know if you’re a man or a berry and you keep going along anyway, then you’re having a mystical experience. Lines like these enable the reader to escape from his ordinary consciousness of himself.

Reading John Ashbery’s Planisphere, like many of his previous collections, is a bit like building a DIY desk. The instructions are helpful, but only if you have a degree in engineering; discard them immediately. Besides, they were probably written by somebody who does not perceive the world in the same way as you. Take all of the pieces out of the box and scatter them across the floor until you are happy that everything is there. Perhaps leave the room and go outside for a walk, a run, or a swim. Return to the pieces a few hours later and you may notice that they look different. If not, move on to another project and come back to it; consider building it on public transport. If you do, you will start to see how one panel slots into another and how one piece is now a completely different shape to what it was before. Don’t be upset when the next day the desk has fallen apart, or at best turned into a lampshade. There is no grand narrative payoff for reading Planisphere; it may provide pleasure, it may even provide the sensation of a mystical experience; at worst, it will leave you with a few blisters, and a paper cut.