John Ashbery's whole oeuvre is of a piece. From the beginning, his work was a totally synthetic surface, sleek, seamless, without emotion or sentiment--a completely fabricated exterior concealing a chameleon-like, remote, disengaged consciousness--a tapestry of Camp playfulness and surreal misdirection, designed to resist the impression of conviction or sentiment. From Turandot and Other Poems [1953] thru this latest collection, Planisphere: New Poems [2009], Ashbery has never permitted himself to be "caught out" in a position which might allow his character to be outlined, estimated, or gauged. He's the quintessential invisible poet, without a history or a future, adrift in a void, without human connections or needs, a disembodied mind, contextless, inert, an empty identity.
This is the persona of his work.
Camp is defined as frivolous artifice designed as an ironic excess, contrasted against "good taste"--frequently associated with Gay or "drag culture"--and the humorous burlesque of deadpan parody, especially of popular sentiment and imagery. Associated with New Left and Multicultural politics, it's frequently seen as a strategic weapon against Square, Straight or traditional modes of behavior or identity.
Ashbery has frequently been associated with Gay culture, and his work as an expression of the spirit of Camp, containing elements of Dada, Surrealism, Pop, Game Theory, and non-syntactic linguistic constructions. Its closest analogous model in American or British writing would be the work of Wallace Stevens, but the French Surrealist poets and artists are clearly much closer to his conception of literature. Indeed, Ashbery's incorporation of surrealist elements in his work--absurdist, parataxis, automatism, chance, dreams and free association, etc.--has produced a hybrid Camp that functions through the use of Surrealist technique, to undermine the emotional and intellectual syntax of ordinary kinds of feeling and expression in literature.
From the beginning of his career, his work has never been about anything specifically identifiable in his biography. It does not refer to a body of experience, an organic personality derived from specific event or detail. Its employment of experiential matter is wholly disconnected from a nameable entity, and thus is utterly without commitment to any program, agenda, or personal interest. In Ashbery, the person is a shell, and the voice is completely generalized into a shifting persona.
Despite these limitations, Ashbery was once able to carry out complex, and fascinating experiments, and to conduct involved dialectical arguments, using expedient, imaginary stand-ins. The shape of his early career exhibits an upward sweeping arc, a stepped ascent marked by distinct advances in command and purpose, beginning with Some Trees [1956], to The Tennis Court Oath [1962], Rivers and Mountains [1966], The Double Dream of Spring [1970], Three Poems [1972], and culminating in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror [1975]. There is a distinct cooling of inspiration in the succeeding 35 years of work, though the actual production has been impressively generous. Beginning with Houseboat Days [1977] and As We Know [1979], there is a steady decline in formal affect, a glibness and homogenization, flattening of style. My interest in his work evaporated after Houseboat Days, and I've not found anything of interest, formally, in any of the books since 1980.
Planisphere: New Poems appears in his 82nd year, and exhibits the same qualities as his first trade collection, Some Trees, although the style has undergone a further denaturing, or sterilization. In his very earliest poems, Ashbery was able to mimic traditional poetic devices and tropes, undermining them with comic and absurdist elements. In Tennis Court and Double Dream, this became a kind of grand surrealist circus in which fragmentation, poly-contextuality, and madcap theatrical miming predominated. A counterpoint style, employed in longer form, first in Rivers and Mountains, was exhaustively carried out in "The Skaters," "Fragment," Three Poems, and finally "Self-Portrait." Each of these longer works functioned as a formal meditation, and gave nearly every indication of being conducted as a serious commitment to inquiry as such. The driving motivation was a processional unfolding, a dispersal of temporary, extemporaneous, shifting assertions along a temporal scale. They furnished the impression of a philosophically curious, slippery, clever, questing, nervous butterfly, alighting successively on one flower, then the next, then the next, sampling modes of belief, surmise, oddity, beauty, jeopardy, without allowing any overriding principle or influence to deter its progress; ultimately rejecting all possible alternatives for the inertia of pointless existence ("echoes out of time" "that I sing alway").
This kind of provisional, mediational, refusal to invest in any of the likely contents of language has led Ashbery to a formal dilemma. Having exhausted all the ways in which he could think of to burlesque the usual disguises which literature offers as a set of forms of personal expression or conviction, what's left to perform? Ashbery has never shown much obvious sensitivity to the contemporary milieus of experimental writing, preferring to define them for himself. But Planisphere may be the exception. There were hints (e.g., 100 Multiple-Choice Questions [2000]), that he had begun to think of separate lines, sentences, as having a discrete, autonomous integrity within the temporal dimension of the work. Thus each line could be totally unrelated to the overall context, and to every other line. A collection, then, of lines drawn from any possible source, to produce a poem or prose construct without even the formal requirement of self-referentiality; a poem of literal nonsense, forced into meaningless proximity through abstract, random parataxis: A heightened sense of the absurd, of the accidental, the deliberately silly.
Sleepingly
In a whole lot of ways the unique
drizzle isn't over it's tied to your side
while we enumerate pets and animals.
Close it down urges the governor.
Forget the painter's pants he got the
far side of the bargain anyway.
We're all strangers in here we can't see,
his magic crotch singing away
in time for school of, was it,
a distant lawn that spat the wind
out of my sails. How many, how far
do we have to get along with this
thing on our necks? Not since you came along
has there been so much slogging outside and in.
We're combing the area.
Bound to be more tips whatever fellas.
This mode I choose talks back.
We had just about decided about life,
a factitious mess you urged, and I, enthused,
pored over new books from the store.
Or else dispatch hassles, she being star
with lemon in her car
walking on a par
cheapskate missiles hurled
from one garden to the next
is what we're all about.
I mean how little can you toss off
and be ready for the rest of tomorrow's dense
armillary.
--poem on page 90-91, The Planisphere: New Poems, New York: Ecco Press, 2009.
"Sleepingly" has no ostensible subject. It is not about anything--any experience or object or belief. It is not an exploration of a formal shape (it's its own shape). There are no people in it: The "you" and the "we" have no referential reality--they're just convenient nominatives for author and reader, though even that is probably a stretch. The governor, the painter, and the star are all too vague and undefined--simply cardboard dummies--like the pets and animals. The crotch, the lawn, the books, the car, the missiles, the garden--none of these objects (or nouns) is connected in any meaningful way to an experience, an idea, or a rational sequence--or to each other. None of them is elaborated, or refined, or explored, or related to anything that makes sense. The glib, flippant tone is characteristic of all of the poems in this collection, signifying weariness, minor distraction--a kind of fluently facile tossing-off of dumb patter.
The Author of Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror--who once proved he could pretend to be any kind of poet he wanted, now pretends to be that paradox, a poet who is not a poet at all, but only a court jester, one without disguises, without pretense, without ambition, without desire. The actor has removed his Venetian mask to reveal--nothing.
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