Essay by Issam Zineh
For a very long time, I thought of John Ashbery’s poems as elitist. When I was younger and more prejudiced, I tended to judge a person by the company they kept. I had a friend in college who I considered an elitist: self-centered, excessively brooding, and snobby (especially when it came to literary matters). I loved him, and he loved Ashbery. I would give Ashbery a try but not before projecting many of these traits onto Ashbery’s work.
When I finally read a handful of Ashbery poems, I highly doubt it helped my perception. I’m sure I found the work opaque if not nonsensical. In her literary biography, Jess Cotton writes: “…Ashbery continues to be perceived as challenging and difficult; he is a figure who is widely read yet rarely put on university courses.” She goes on to qualify in a very interesting way: “Evasiveness can often be taken for difficulty, and difficulty can look elitist and offputting” (emphasis mine). This has me thinking: if it only looks elitist, what does that appearance belie? The opposite? Rather than seeing Ashberian difficulty as alienating, can we see in it a grand gesture toward inclusivity?
This, in fact, is one of the wagers of Cotton’s analysis—that through his specific sensibility, Ashbery imagines the poem “as an extension of modes of sociality and communication rather than as a mimetic object that rests on the page, to be parsed for meaning.” She further mentions, citing a 1992 interview, that Ashbery’s “principle was to write ‘very democratically…to get as many voices and segments of the population into the poem’. If he has an overriding aesthetic concern, he reflects, it is all-inconclusiveness.”
I first read this as “all-inclusiveness.” Then I thought, what is the actual difference? Aren’t “all-inconclusiveness” and “all-inclusiveness” synonyms when we’re talking about poems that try to render the imaginative aspects of human experience in context of the uncertainties, incongruities, and ironies of that very experience? Isn’t that kind of poem—one that deprioritizes clarity of meaning in favor of hi-fi transmission of a singular psychic world with all its particulars—exceptionally generous? And doesn’t it require a generosity of spirit and collaboration on the part of both poet and reader to co-create meaning out of ways of thinking as opposed to, say, theme, subject matter, or even argument?
I’m reading Some Trees, Ashbery’s first book, selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. I’m specifically looking for signs of this orientation in his earliest work. Is there early evidence here that Ashbery is actually a poet of inclusion and candor as opposed to privacy and obfuscation? In fact, Some Trees is replete with sociality and gestures toward companionship. For example, the very first poem in the collection, “Two Scenes,” begins:
We see us as we truly behave:
From every corner comes a distinctive offering.
The train comes bearing joy;
The sparks it strikes illuminate the table.
It is no small act that the first word of the first poem in the collection is the collective pronoun. Technically the first word is “Two” in the title which also speaks to a tandem-ness, a togetherness. Importantly, this “we” does not seem to be the rhetorical, arguably impersonal “we.” This first line precedes a celebration of the “distinctive offering(s)” we bestow upon one another just by being present in the “scenes” of each other’s lives…offerings that are joyful (“bearing joy”) and illuminate the site of fellowship (“the table”).
What a surprise for a train, a symbol of industry, to “come bearing joy.” In another allusion to industry from scene II, “[a] fine rain anoints the canal machinery.” Representations of commerce (train, canal machinery), which are often associated with the dark side of consumptive economies, are, by virtue of being extensions of human imagination and life, transfigured into something joyful if not sacred (offering, anoints).
Ashbery’s speaker arguably reveals his ultimate aspiration in the following lines:
This is perhaps a day of general honesty
Without example in the world’s history
Though the fumes are not of a single authority […]
We can speculate in many different ways how to read this (as is the case with all Ashbery poems), but the idea of an unprecedented “general honesty” that is not attributable to a “singular authority” suggests a desire for transparency and authenticity, perhaps a transformative one, that resides with the collective.
“Two Scenes” employs several of the devices we see Ashbery use to create a sense of intimacy even within poems that are full of semantic uncertainty. One of the most striking is his use of pronouns. Ashbery’s position on personal pronouns (at least in his work): “my point is…that it doesn’t really matter very much, that we are somehow all aspects of a consciousness giving rise to the poem and the fact of addressing someone, myself or someone else, is what’s the important thing at that particular moment rather than the particular person involved.” From the opening to one of his more nebulous poems in Some Trees, “The Grapevine”:
Of who we and all they are
You all now know.
The poem, to my mind, speaks to how we grow into that fact of collective consciousness (or at least the inter-personality of our lives):
…[W]e’ll not know
The truth of some still at the piano, though
They often date from us, causing
These changes we think we are.
The poem concludes with the assertion that when we are young, “[we] don’t care…so tall up there / In young air.” There is an understanding, however, that as we experience, as “things get darker…we move / To ask them: Whom must we get to know / To die, so you live and we know?” In this, the poem’s final gesture, a kind of lifecycle of a shared humanity is enacted: whether or not we consider this poem to be centrally concerned with epistemology, it centers the we, they, and you and situates a collective us at the heart of the matter.
Ashbery’s is a poetics of generosity, and that generosity comes to us in various forms as readers of Some Trees. Even at their most ostensibly impenetrable, Ashbery’s poems invariably contain a buoying feature that helps us maintain some kind of grounding. This might look like recurring images, symbols, or phrases which often link one poem to the next, providing the reader with a sense of progression even in the seeming absence of a clear thematic concern. It might, as in the case of “Eclogue,” sound something like an unexpected outbreak into song (in this cryptic poem, the final six lines of dialogue are iambic, which gives a rhythmically comforting sense against a backdrop of uncertainty regarding the poem’s occasion and events). They might be explicit invitations to dream with the speaker (as with “The Instruction Manual”) or to tally up disparate elements of experience with the speaker ( as with “Grand Abacus”).
Could we take it a step further? Is John Ashbery a “love poet”? It’s safe to say there is consensus that “Ashberian difficulty” is a real phenomenon, a challenge to traditional notions of coherence and meaning (I think largely due to a combination of surrealist imagery and fragmentary narratives). Whether at the heart of that difficulty lies a poetics of love and tenderness is more debatable and probably less obvious. There are certainly marks of deep intimacy and tenderness in many of the poems in Some Trees. Ashbery is not a Pollyanna about it. His speaker recognizes that “Yet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years, / And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason.” Nonetheless, as we see in the title poem “Some Trees,” we are privileged to be counted among the world’s consciousnesses:
[…] you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
The poems in Some Trees often meander through scenes and vignettes without clear connections. They may be sketchy in that regard, and therefore disorienting. Even Auden, in selecting Some Trees, was reported to have been confounded by Ashbery’s work saying “I read him and I can’t understand a word.” The poems, however, are replete with imagined intimacy, with bustling life and intricate detail. Irrespective of the poem-specific technical approach, it seems that an Ashbery poem is, if nothing else, an invitation to collaborate. The key is to recognize we have been invited—and to respond.
Works Consulted
• Ashbery, J. Some Trees. Yale University Press, 2019.
• Ashbery, J. Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists. David Zwirner
Books, 2022.
• Ashbery, J. Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works. ECCO, 2022.
• Bloom, J. and Losada R. Craft Interview with John Ashbery. New York Quarterly, 9
(Winter 1972).
• Cotton, J. John Ashbery. Reaktion Books, 2023.
Issam Zineh is a poet, editor, and public health worker. He is author of Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022), a Trio House Press Editors’ Selection and finalist for the Housatonic Book Award and Balcones Prize for Poetry. His newest writing appears or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, The Hopkins Review, and Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books). He lives on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Piscataway and the Susquehannock people. www.issamzineh.com