I am not often intimidated by poetry, but John Ashbery is a notable example of an influential poetic figure whose work I have avoided for fear of not quite grasping it. Finally, I intend to change that.
This excerpt from Poetry Foundation’s profile of Ashbery offers the following explanation of his work:
Although even his strongest supporters agreed that his poetry is often difficult to read and willfully difficult to understand, many critics also commented on the manner in which Ashbery’s fluid style conveys a major concern in his poetry: the refusal to impose an arbitrary order on a world of flux and chaos. In his verse, Ashbery attempted to mirror the stream of perceptions of which human consciousness is composed.
The first poem of Ashbery’s that gripped me was the fairly brief “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” from the manuscript Shadow Train. Deliberately unattached from context and, often, sense, the poem begins with an intriguing declaration.
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Upon reading further, I recognized that the word “plain” here means apparent, not easily comprehensible or clear.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
One can glean without much difficulty that the poem is concerned with language. Arguably, every poem is concerned with language, so there is a tinge of irony in even saying so.
Its title invokes linguistic moves: the paradox and the oxymoron. Ashbery’s focus is various, and if not meticulously followed, frustrating. While the title primes the reader to search for paradoxes and oxymorons within the text, the poem itself is advanced by way of personification.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
In this stanza, the paradox is heightened by rhetorical questioning. The poem wants to be seen and accepted while it bewilders its reader with talk of plain language and begs an assessment of the author’s intent or meaning.
I also feel that the poem offers a direct challenge to the reader, echoing their thoughts with the question: “What’s a plain level?” as if to say that asking this at all causes one to drift further away from a meaningful encounter with the poem. The latter question, “Play?” seems directed towards Ashbery himself. What does he mean by “a system of play”? What misunderstanding of the poem’s “plain level” estranges the poem from its reader, and saddens it?
There is also the plainness of confession in a poem— the concept of “saying it plain” and laying bare some human feeling. Alongside this, there must also be surprise and bewilderment.
A poem I haven't been able to get out of my head recently is Tony Hoagland’s “A Color of the Sky” which uses the vehicle of plain language to pose a more involved question:
Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio, and on the highway overpass, the only metaphysical vandal in America has written MEMORY LOVES TIME in big black spraypaint letters, which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.
Reality and imagination are co-conscious in this stanza, extracting the existential undertone of the poem. Instead of using “last summer’s song” as a jumping-off point from which to enter a conversation about time and memory, Hoagland extends the poem’s reach even further, placing impossible metaphysical interactions within the physical world.
This, to me, illustrates what Elisa Gabbert called the “lyric decision.” In her recent article “The Lyric Decision: How Poets Figure Out What Comes Next,” she explains that a lyric decision is how poets assemble a poem, leveraging coherence and surprise. Essentially, “a series of lyric decisions is how we write something between order and chaos.”
In Ashbery’s poem, plainness is both the order and the chaos. Ashbery personifies the poem; it is a complex, moving system comprised of multiple levels of meaning and language. It is also a simple object, wanting.
The final stanza of “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” is wonderfully confounding:
It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.
The word “you” is itself a mark of bewilderment and varied interpretation. When engaging with the romantic arts, mainly music and poetry, audiences have an impulse to interpret the “you” as a person, a beloved, especially when such unabashed desire accompanies the mention of the word.
In a well-known interview a couple of years back, Mitski spoke with Margaret Talbot of The New Yorker about the ways in which her lyrics are misinterpreted. She had this to say on the subject:
Mitski told me, “Maybe it just boils down to: I’m a woman who’s really into her career, so I’m obsessed with the craft of my work. . . . There’s a romance in that for me.” She went on, “I obsess over one phrase of one line of music, over and over, and I switch out words. It ends up being my biggest relationship.” Indeed, some of her songs that address a “you” aren’t about a person at all; they’re about music itself.
Similarly, the ending of “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” may be about Ashbery’s relationship to his own work. The “poem” is an active agent within the poem, and questions of craft and composition (“What’s a plain level?”) quite literally interrupt its procession.
While a creative medium is often the stage on which the artist can express some human, interpersonal desires, this is not always the case. Sometimes, the medium is also the subject: invoking, describing, challenging, and revering itself.
In his final stanza, whether Ashbery is comparing someone else to a poem or engaging a in dialogue with the form of poetry, he is navigating order and chaos on the stage that poetry affords him. “Geyser,” the song that Talbot mentions in her profile of Mitski, similarly allows for multiple interpretations.
Even though Mitski admits that the “you” in these lyrics is music, it reads and sounds fairly romantic:
You're my number one You're the one I want And I've turned down every hand That has beckoned me to come
By the end of the song, she places herself uniquely in relation to her own music, proclaiming that she “will be the one [it] need[s].” Undeniably, craft is not secondary or trivial to someone who truly lives a life informed and inspired by art. It is a relationship that must be sustained and treasured to the highest extent.
Like Ashbery, she personifies the craft within itself, composing an intricate meta-expression and injecting a bit of ambiguity into the piece’s seemingly plain language.
Friends, I’m so happy to be back to writing these little analyses for you. This one felt chaotic but I had a great time working on it, sharing what I’ve been reading and thinking about. I’m still consistent-ish with posting excerpts of my own and others’ poems on Twitter, if you want to follow me there.
Until next time, whenever that may be.
<3 Bee