THE SAME STUFF WE GROPED THROUGH

I've never been able to fully enter Ashbery. Some Trees felt energetic but mysterious, especially for someone like me who arrived at contemporary poetry through those narrative confessional poets--James Wright and Ai--inheritors of Lowell and Jarrell. I can still remember the moment I first read Wright's "Small Frogs Killed on a Highway". Before this poem I sat in the library and memorized Shakespearean sonnets, eyeing the stacks for some answer to my loneliness. Instead I had lines that summoned some idea of the lover's brutality. I still remember them:

Sweet Thief, whence didst thou steal that sweet that smells

if not from my love's breath? Thy purple pride

which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells

in my love's veins thou has too grossly died.

I was still a virgin when I found Wright's poem, that I loved but did not understand. I still remember the first lines, that in retrospect sound like something from Gluck's Wild Iris:

Still

I would leap too

into the light,

if I had the chance.

It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field

on the other side of the road.

I was moved first by the line break, the confidence of that word alone, and then by the symbolic weight of that movement into a light which is death. I'm sure my Catholic upbringing had more than a little to do with that. His work is filled with this kind of directness, filled with music and symbolic intention. My copy of Above the River, Wright's collected, was the first collection of poetry I ever bought and it's rifled with scraps of paper of copied lines, versions, love letters to a dead man's meter.

So coming to Ashbery has been long, tenuous. I don't feel as though I can read him. Mostly. There are lines I love, and then they feel corrupted by the vulgarity of, I'm not even sure how to say this, the commonplace. I've bought several of his books, and most recently--this past winter--really lived with A Worldly Country, which I must say overwhelms me in much the same way a book by Michael Burkard does, porous darkness, the halo of a hidden thing. Ashbery's is a book I clutch to me, but without really knowing why.

For Now

Much will be forgiven those

on whom nothing has dawned. But I wonder,

does our polemic have an axis? And if so,

who does the illuminating? Isn't not as though I haven't stayed,

stinking, in the dark. What does this

particular mess have to do with me, surely

one or more may have wondered. And if he

or she suddenly saw in retrospect

the victimhood of all those years, how pain

was as reversible as pleasure, would they stand

for nothing selling in shops now, the cornucopias

of bargain basements open to the weather?

From pantry and hayloft spiffy white legs

emerge. A way of sitting down

has been established, though it's the same stuff

we groped through before: reeds, old motor-boat

sections, skeins of herring. We brought something else--

some enlightenment we thought the months

might enjoy in their gradual progress through the years:

"sudden realizations," the meaning of dreams

and travel, and how hotel rooms

can become the meaningful space one has always lived in.

It's only a shred, really, a fragment of a life

no one else seemed interested in. Not that it can be carried away:

It belongs to the decor, the dance, forever.

If Wright has light and darkness, nature and the resurrections, Ashbery has the city, filled with lives, fragments and trash. We might think here of Doty's memoir Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, really a kind of ars poetica that explores his interest in the object, the glitter of commerce, and the way human history is an inheritance of beautiful trash, how experience is marked by artifact. One cannot abandon the literal in Ashberry, since his philosophical meanderings ("Much will be forgiven those / on whom nothing has dawned. But I wonder, / does our polemic have an axis? And if so, / who does the illuminating?) easily reflect other subjective experiences. Isn't the reader forced into a moment of self-examination here, as we become the "he / or she" of the poem and must consider "in retrospect / the victimhood" of our own years, how "pain / was reversible as pleasure"? Ashberry's thinking in the first stanza is anchored to a consideration of the objects at the "bargain basement" of the second, "reeds, old motor-boat / sections", an event to which any of us, in any part of the human city, surely bring along our own '"sudden realizations", the meaning of dreams". This is the dance, that in a capitalistic culture, we are always faced with the awareness of our own insignificance--our loved things end up for sale to strangers, "the meaningful space one has always lived in", indeed our very life itself, is no more than "a fragment / no one else seemed interested in . . . forever".

It's not until reading Helen Vendler's essay (from Invisible Listeners) yesterday on Ashbery, "John Ashbery and the Artist of the Past", that I finally had some insight as to why I can almost never seem to reconcile Ashbery's meaningful insights with his crass Americana. In it she writes, "Ashbery's greatest formal contribution has been to bring into lyric a vast social lexicon of both English English and American English--common speech, journalistic cliche, business and technical and scientific language, allusion to pop culture as well as to canonical works. . . . In his syntax, as well as his diction, Ashbery juxtaposes the high . . . with the demotic."

Ahh, that's it exactly. Vendler makes me so wet. Whereas Wright's spiritual vision is exemplified by the way words in his poems have a hierarchic value, so that the literal is regularly symbolic, in Ashbery all hierarchy becomes horizontal, and the effect is at times a surreal relationship between different kinds of speech.

I think it will be a lifelong struggle with Ashbery's work for me, and I'm ok with that. I'm drawn to his poetry because it's so tonally rich, even if, as Vendler says, he's ultimately a "comic poet". Though I think he's doing more to return language to language, I struggle and mostly feel uninvited, which I know is its own kind of invitation. I'm much more attracted to poems by Tomaz Salamun, who's so much more aggressive about the inaccessibility of language and the juxtaposition of the symbolic with the archaic. Still

in my sleepless brine, I toss between the struggle of Ashbery and the lyric meditations of Wright-like prayer, poems say, from Michael Dickman's first book, The End of the West. Here's the first section of "My Dead Friends Come Back", something James Wright may have been saying to those small frogs killed on a highway at night:

If you want to

come back, just you

I say, it's fine

From the flattened universe

From His side

of the bed

Shave my head and put me in the ground with you surrounded by

trillium

Trillium or

something else

Shit and violets

. . . . . . .