Thoughts About AshberyAshbery re-describes reality through the ever-changing vivacity of his ideas. His poems are chronicles of what happens when one of the most fertile imaginations of our time creates on the page landscapes of ideas. In order to understand Ashbery, we need to pay attention to the originality of his ideas, the way in which one idea magically and manically (maniacally?) replaces the next, in this every-shifting quicksand dance of cognition, perception, thought, imagination, memory. What he is doing is creating rooms, gardens, cities, fields of imaginative thought. When we enter these rooms, we need to stay alert, even as the enormity of the poet’s imaginative garden/city does everything within its power to distract us (almost?) into new forms of attention. (“A poem resists the intelligence / Almost successfully,” wrote Stevens.) Reading Ashbery is therefore a dangerous ecstasy, for it propels us into a terrifyingly shifting world of “snapped off” perceptions, and the poem itself is constantly equilibrating itself, even as its chaos turns (in his best works) into something uncanny, lyrical, somehow ordered and somehow new. It is this freshness, this newness of Ashbery’s imagination, which functions as a means of moving us as close as possible to revelation, as Ashbery has said somewhere in regards to a hoped-for aim of his poems. This aim – the adventure of imagination that places us, trembling and astonished, on the cusp of revelation – is the greatest gift his poetry affords. That it does so somewhat consistently in his earlier works (I’m still not as enthusiastic about his works following “A Wave,” although I need to read more) is arguably nothing short of a poetic miracle.
Lots of gems in here. Love the circularity--"They have so much trouble remembering, when your forgetting/ rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night" ("The Other Tradition"). And beautiful, dense imagery, coupled with audacious syntax: "'Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster / On luster, transparency floated onto the top most layer / Until the whosel thing overflows like a silver / Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears'" ("Variant"). "Pyrography" is a poem for the American Bicentennial--probably the only commemorative piece worth saving out of that commercialized year of cheese. "What Is Poetry" is a remarkably transparent definition by a notoriously abstract poet. If "The Thief of Poetry" is perhaps a tribute to the enjambment of William Carlos Williams' lines, then "The Ice Cream Wars" may be a nod to Wallace Stevens. It feels like here, the first book after the peak of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, that Ashbery is starting the long, slow slide of imitating himself, exaggerating his tics. But why shouldn't he? Virtually every other poet at the end of the twentieth century imitated him too.
