You mean he’s not just this way on the written page?
I took this class because of Prof. Wallace’s reputation as an author. What a mistake! This guy just likes to hear himself talk, and he won’t shut up. He knows how to play the part of a enigmatic “genius” all right …
[Link courtesy Bookslut.]
I can see that Ashbery might stake a claim to being the most influential poet since 1955, though, given how many of his poetic descendants fall over themselves to be even more willfully inscrutable and opaque than Ashbery.
For instance, there’s Not Even Then, a recent volume by Brian Blanchfield (who teaches at Pratt Institute), which is called a “confident debut” in the NYTBR.
One of the poems (“Ferdinand, The Prize”) uses an epigram from Althusser about interpellation, which is a grad student’s idea of perfection.
At the end of the book are “Some Notes,” including:
“Code Orange under Love, Part I” is informed by the discussion in William Eggleston’s How the World Became a Stage of similitude and contagion as concepts integral to medieval “sympathetic magic.” Apparently unrelated, a placard in the Sonora Desert Museum World of Darkness reads “Agitation produces both hailstones and cave pearls.”
And:
“One First Try and Then Another” is informed by the video work of Martin Schwember, which was used in the Ballett Frankfurt’s production Kammer/Kammer, a work its director, William Forsythe, describes as “oriented around the idea of voice, instrumental and literary, that dilates between an immediate, raw desire to articulate and the European tradition of virtuoso.”
And:
“Receipt” fits on a receipt for admission to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Actually, the notes are more poetic than the poems themselves, which I defy anyone outside of Blanchfield himself to make sense of. A sample from “Infraction”:
The body hurries. And then not pants, after all,
is the trouble in the offing, the percent sign
with the little o’s these legs went to wear.
Why have math wrecked by the bed? Is any
aptness outlasting the stereo’s shuffle mode,
planted hours ago, tracking our hideous goodnight?
The NYTBR intones that the Blanchfield poems “appear at first to depict nothing at all,” which is accurate enough, then observes that “they come into focus and portray a life: a young gay man learns to inhabit New York City, seeking out peers and lovers while sifting through information overload.”
I’m sorry, I don’t see that at all, not even remotely, unless the lines “Crotch high, the problem will not, itself a hundredth/the privation of pain, be pressed and hurry out” somehow imply “young gay man learning to inhabit New York City” in some mysterious way beyond my limited powers of comprehension. (Perhaps the attraction of poems like this is that they obscure concrete detail and leave out the explicit stuff, which seems to be the style these days, following in the delicately mincing footsteps of Reginald Shepherd and Mark Doty.)
But then I’ve never been the typical poetry reader. So the publishers of poetry (in this case, the University of California Press at Berkeley) can keep grinding out their pointless runs for a rapidly diminishing audience, while at the same time lamenting that nobody really seems to want to read anything written more recently than 1955, and the questions about poetry’s relevance will keep bouncing inside an increasingly rarefied echo chamber until somebody somewhere finally realizes how solipsistic the world of modern poetry really is and does something about it, maybe (God forbid) even writing some poems that speak to somebody outside of an advanced graduate seminar on postmodern semiotics.
Harold Bloom calls John Ashbery in the upcoming Poetry Issue of the Sunday New York Times Book Review “our major poet since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955.” I don’t know where that leaves Allen Ginsberg, for example, but it seems a highly dubious claim, especially given inscrutable, maddening lines like these, from a poem called “Silhouette” in As We Know:
In the white mouths
Of your oppressors, however, much
Was seen to provoke. And the way
Though discontinuous, and intermittent, sometimes
Not heard of for years at a time, did,
Nonetheless, move up, although, to his surprise
It was inside the house,
And always getting narrower.
All of Ashbery’s poems read like this. Way too many commas, way too many subordinate clauses, way too little in the way of meaning. I take nothing away from them but frustration.
I had some time to kill this afternoon, so I did some reading in one of the carrels on the third floor of Hatcher. I turned to look out the window and saw a fascinating display on the radiator below the window. The radiator was one of those old 1960s/1970s models with hundreds of vents, and each of the vents had a sloping slat on which it looked like various students who had used the carrel over the years had scribbled slogans, epithets, and messages.
This wasn’t the usual obscene stuff you see scribbled on bathroom walls, though certainly there was some of that. This was a meticulous collection of pithy and often trenchant comments, most of which were carefully dated, as though adhering to some unspoken tradition. I didn’t copy all of them down, but the ones I did copy were mainly comments about the weather on a given day, along with the occasional complaint about grind courses.
10/7/90 Dreary!
10/22/90 Horny!
10/4/91 Raining
11/17/91 Kinda cold but you can go w/o a jacket & not freeze
3/4/92 55° sunny
4/28/92 Sittin’ at home watchin’ Arsenio Hall
5/5/92 Dismal & muggy
11/2/93 Physics bites!
10/4/95 Cold & rainy
1/30/96 Windy, cold
12/16/96 Snowing
11/11/97 Cloudy & cold
11/17/97 Cold 28°
11/23/97 Frustrated
3/23/00 Perfect
12/17/00 Econ loathes me
2/18/04 Damn this blows!
I went into Ambrosia twice today, once at 11.30 and once at 3.15, and both times it was too packed to find anywhere to sit down inside. I realized that the place has hit its tipping point of popularity, although Ambrosia has always kind of flown under the radar, never winning (or even placing on) any of those ridiculous Best Of polls that college towns are known for. I went in this morning and grabbed my tea to go (this thoroughly obnoxious law student was cursing a blue streak and bragging about a relative being the prosecuting attorney for a county north of here, and that was enough to drive me out), but it was even more packed this afternoon, so I just picked up my tea and sat at one of the outside tables and read some poetry. The weather was cold, but not really chilly by any means; I didn’t have to wear cap or gloves today, and it was actually kind of gloomily nice out there, with the delivery guys wheeling supplies on hand carts past me into the Indian restaurant next door and the cars whipping up and down Maynard as though it were a major thoroughfare and not a side street. Atmosphere: Ann Arbor does not lack in that. It may not be a given person’s kind of atmosphere, but that’s a debate I don’t get into. Other blogs are way better at those debates than I. Anyway, now that Ambrosia’s hit the big time (and their new counter people are getting snootier and sniffier and more Starbucks-ish), I wonder if it’s time to look for a new hangout? I really don’t like the utilitarian Espresso Royale much, I’m sorry to say. It’s almost always packed, and when it’s not, it’s good for a ten-minute sit, but not for lengthy meditation and musing. There are other coffee shops around, I know; I just have to start looking.
Tomorrow is my final registration appointment at the University of Michigan. Hard to believe.
Damn, these 15 months have gone by fast! I am pretty sure what I’m going to take, including the dreaded 502 class that I put off last winter and now have no choice (poetic justice, since the title of the course is Choice and Learning) but to take. I hope my plans work out, and that none of my chosen classes are schedule conflicts, and … the usual stuff. I have been pretty lucky this term. It’s been incredibly busy, but I’ve actually had time to breathe once in a while. I kind of doubt my last term will be that way. Last terms never are.