What Ashbery questioned

The one-year anniversary of JA’s passing emboldens TiR to pull out of mothballs an inquiry of ours from a year ago. 

We sometimes wonder:  What makes Ashbery’s poetry work? What tricks or devices does he employ to push or coax the reader onward, especially to get through the long, weird or difficult pieces?   Why don’t we just give up, when we don’t?  What keeps us reading?

One in-depth experiment that TiR posted in an attempt to take apart one of his long poems, look at its inner workings and wonder aloud about them, was from almost 13 years ago.

This time, TiR went through the entirety of JA’s Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror and isolated every question asked during the course of this Pulitzer-prize winning poetry collection. We began by looking for all the question marks, but soon realized that our method would have to go beyond that.

We counted seventy questions.

Here they all are:

 A look of glass stops you

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

Did they notice me, this time, as I am,

Or is it postponed again?

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?

       Besides, what else is there?

The annual games?

Why must it always end this way?

was any of this present*

               Does the first mettle

Make any difference as what grows

Becomes a skit?  Three sides are enclosed,

The fourth open to a wash of the weather,

Exits and entrances, gestures theatrically meant

To punctuate like doubled-over weeks as

The garden fills up with snow?

          And what would they be

Without an audience to restrict the innumerable

Passes and swipes, restored to good humor as it issues

Into the impervious evening air?

Only waiting, the waiting: what fills up the time between?

What time of day is it?

Does anything matter?

            Why be in a hurry

To speed away in the opposite direction, toward the other end of infinity?

           What precisely is it

About the time of day it is, the weather, that causes people to note it painstakingly in the diaries

For them to read who shall come after?

Still, that poetry does sometimes occur

If only in creases of forgotten letters

Packed away in trunks in the attic -- things you forgot you had

And what would it matter anyway,*

That recompense so precisely dosed

As to seem the falling true of a perverse judgment.

Nameless shrubs running across a field

That didn’t drain last year and

Isn’t draining this year to fall short

Like waves at the end of a lake,

Each with a little sigh,

Are you sure this is what the pure day

With its standing light intends?

Where is it to end? What is this? Who are these people?

Am I myself, or a talking tree?

               But what of

Houses, standing ruined, desolate just now:

Is this not also beautiful and wonderful?

What is it, Undine?

Was it for this you led you sisters back from sleep

And now he of the blue beard has outmaneuvered you?

Skeeter collecting info: “Did you know

About the Mugwump of the Final Hour?”

Can knowledge ever be harmful?

How about a mandate?

How to explain to these girls, if indeed thats what they are,

The Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas,

About the vast change that’s taken place

In the fabric of our society, altering the texture,

Of all things in it?

What are your hobbies, girls?

                  But this talk of

The garment center?

Is anything central?

Orchards flung out on the land,

Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?

Are place names central?

Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?

This morning as I walked out of your room

After breakfast crosshatched with

Backward and forward glances, backward into light,

Forward into unfamiliar light,

Was it our doing, and was it

The material, the lumber of life, or of lives,

We were measuring, counting?

A mood soon to be forgotten

In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow

In this morning that has seized us again?

Where then are the private turns of event

Destined to boom later like golden chimes

Released over a city from a highest tower?

The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,

And you instantly know what I mean?

What remote orchard reached by winding roads

Hides them?  Where are these roots?

              When people speak of it

As happens increasingly, are they always

Referring to the kind where sexual organs are brought in -- 

Diffident, vague, hard to imagine as they are to a blind person?

What is it now with me

And is it as I have become?

Is there no state free from the boundary lines

Of before and after?

                  What is writing?

                   And am I receiving

This vision?  Is it mine, or do I already owe it

For other visions, unnoticed and unrecorded

On the great, relaxed curve of time,

All the forgotten springs, dropped pebbles,

Songs once heard that then passed out of light

Into everyday oblivion?

And a nice place to live at least I think so do you*

                                 Why

are there developments?

And then?  Colors and names of colors,

The knowledge of you a certain color had?

The whole song bag, the eternal oom-pah refrain?

Street scenes?  A blur of pavement

After the cyclists passed, calling to each other,

Calling each other strange, funny-sounding names?

                 Why must you go?  Why can’t you

Spend the night, here in my bed, with my arms wrapped tightly around you?

Surely that would solve everything by supplying

A theory of knowledge on a scale with the gigantic

Bits and pieces of knowledge we have retained:

An LP record of all your favorite friendships,

Of letters from the front?  Too

Fantastic to make sense?

How do I know?

How shall I put it?

As I was turning to say something to her she sped by me

Which meant all is over in a few years: twenty-six, twenty-seven,

Who were those people,

Who came down to the boat and met us that time?

       How many 

Helpless wails have slid out orchestras

Across skittery dance floors until even

The dancers were there, waltzing lamely at first

But now static and buzzing like plaid?

Do you remember now we used to gather

The woodruff, the woodruff?

But how far can it swim out through the eyes

And still return safely to its nest?

             Whose curved hand controls,

Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts

That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds

Like the last stubborn leaves ripped

From wet branches?

                 Can you stand it,

Francesco? Are you strong enough for it?

But what is this universe the porch of

As it veers in and out, back and forth,

Refusing to surround us and still the only

Thing we can see?

Yet the “poetic,” straw-colored space

Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting,

Its darkening opposite -- is this

Some figment of “art,” not to be imagined

As real, let alone special?

Is there any point even in acknowledging

The existence of all that?  Does it

Exist?

           Is there anything

To be serious about beyond this otherness

That gets included in the most ordinary

Forms of daily activity, changing everything

Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter

Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation

Out of our hands, to install it on some monstrous, near

Peak, too close to ignore, too far

For one to intervene?

The asterisks (“*”) above represent “phantom” questions, which to our eyeballs read like questions but don’t end with any actual question marks.

So what did TiR learn from the above exercise?

The main thing that struck us is how random Ashbery’s poetry is not.  We found more structure there than we thought we would, of a weird kind, or at least connective tissue.

A question can hijack or rupture a discussion, but it can also serve to conjure up information that connects or links seemingly scattered pieces together.  For example, sometimes, we can eavesdrop on the questions asked by a speaker on one end of a phone conversation, and our imaginations will automatically fill in the answers, or counter-questions, spoken at the other end of the line, enabling us to believe that we can follow a continuous thread of argument.  A lot of Ashbery's questions seem to have the latter, connective effect. They can add little sutures to what then ends up reading more like a potentially on-going conversation, with coquettish wisps of overall coherence, riveting into place sections of a word stream that would otherwise feel more like a jumbled grab-bag of linguistic spare parts.

The sight of a question mark can function like a cue, automatically to trigger our brains to expect a logically entailed response, as if for every Q there must follow an A.   The expectation carries over to whatever JA writes next, like the sustain of a freshly rung bell.

Moments like these feel characteristically Ashberian, as if he's plucking in our brain stem some cords that connect with a deeper, generative grammar, or with the habits of how we think (or don't, for example when we zone out, glide along or are lulled into a hypnotic trance) when we're reading or listening.  TiR is tempted to picture JA as a mechanic, who tinkers in poetic format with the development of devices to tap into and feed off a substrate, the subterranean flows of how we absorb, remember, recall and use language (and are used by it), new devices that could bypass or swap in for the more traditional, maybe outmoded devices of rhyme, beat, meter, stanza.

Or we think of JA as magic trick enthusiast: Hence his poems' common, magician / mind reader trick effect of sounding as if the poet knows the cadence and torsion of our own, jumbled, interior, quotidian monologues better than we ourselves do. We theorize, then, that the tossing in of a well timed, well turned question or two (or three) might be one of JA's tricks that make his poems feel like they hang together or partake of some strange species of overall coherence, to the extent that they do.  The result helps make the poems feel more cognitively stimulating, aesthetically satisfying, tantalizingly informative about a fugacious Something that absconds when we try to pin it down, and fun.

[TiR doesn't mean to suggest that this is the only potential trick in Ashbery's magician's bag -- merely that it's the trick that we chose briefly to obsess over, approximately a year ago, in our possibly pointless and pedantic way.] 

When the tone of Ashbery's questions is mysterious or ominous, they can even leave hanging an air of suspense or tension:  "What might the answer be?  Will we find out, if we read on?"  And so we read on, curious as to whether we'll he'll tell us.

We also noticed how sometimes his “?”s seem to arrive in clusters, as if one attracts others.

Yet another observation is how sneakily Ashbery sometimes seemed to use question marks, and all punctuation marks unsurprisingly, not as “punctuation,” that is, as markers of meaning or grammatical relation, or to clarify structural units, but as punctuation: for percussion, to emphasize, accentuate, or generally mess with time: dividing it, to mark out a rhythm or break it, or to shift gears or tempo.

This last notion connects up back with moments when JA's poems seem to use the interrogative mood to switch things up, keep the pace fresh, to bring the flow of the poem closer to the variety of ordinary speech or to steer the twistings of his poetic language towards the meandering musings of internal thought.

Only one of the poems in Convex Mirror contains no punctuation marks whatsoever:  “Lithuanian Dance Band.”  It nonetheless contains, we believe, a question! 

What his book does not contain is a poem with only punctuation and no words.  An example of one of these would be “Tipp-Ex Sonate” by the South African writer and musician Andre Letoit, aka “Koos Kombuis.”

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TiR put aside the above post for a year, forgot about it, then found it and decided whether to post it.

How different would the world be if every human communication involved a one-year lag time between its utterance and its reception?  Could a planet exist somewhere in the universe where such a communicative delay is the default set-up? If we lived on that planet, how would it affect what we choose to say, how we say it, what we don’t say?  How different would Twitter be, if every tweet were embargoed for a year before posting?