John Ashbery's Poetry: Style, Meaning, and Modernism

Introduction: Ashbery's Place in American Poetry

John Ashbery is widely regarded as America's greatest living poet of his generation: his collected earlier work is currently published in a Library of America edition, an honor that has been accorded to no other American poet of his generation. Ashbery's career spans generations and centuries: his first book was published when it was selected by W. H. Auden for a literary prize in 1956, but in 2007 he accepted the honor of being Poet Laureate of MTV. This might give some sense of the breadth of Ashbery's achievement — something in his work could appeal to the intellectually demanding, cantankerous English formalism of Auden and also to the "here we are now, entertain us" mindset of the MTV generation.

The critic Harold Bloom has noted that Ashbery seems to uphold the previous poetic tradition, working within it while also struggling with the work of his predecessors. Bloom writes that in Ashbery's work the reader can "recognize a strength that battles against the death of poetry, yet also the exhaustions of being a latecomer" (Bloom 12). It is clear that Ashbery commands wide respect — perhaps the greatest sign of this came in 1975, when his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror received all three major poetry prizes: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ashbery has also worked as a journalist and critic: he supported himself while living in Paris for a decade by writing art reviews for the International Herald-Tribune, and went on to write art criticism for other publications, including Newsweek.

This paper proposes to examine three poems by Ashbery in order to illuminate how they can help readers better understand this difficult but rewarding writer.

Reading 'Cantilever': Difficulty, Humor, and Expectation

I would like to begin with a short and perhaps minor poem by Ashbery, from his 1997 collection Can You Hear, Bird? I choose this poem particularly because it gives an excellent introduction to some of the pleasures and difficulties a reader might encounter in a characteristic Ashbery poem. These difficulties can be significant for some readers, and it is worth noting that while Ashbery may be America's most important and most praised living poet, his work is hardly uncontroversial — it might even be termed polarizing. This is almost entirely due to Ashbery's style, or styles.

Poet and critic Mary Kinzie, in an important essay on his work, refers to "John Ashbery's styles of avoidance — the stylistic contours of his resistance to the devices of literary meaning allied with realism, plot, and verisimilitude" (Kinzie 246). What Kinzie's comment suggests is a poet who understands in advance what readers might expect from reading a poem — not just formal devices like rhyme or meter, but the standard "devices of literary meaning" — and who constructs the poem to tease those expectations. We can understand Kinzie's observation best with reference to Ashbery's 1997 poem "Cantilever":

I knew we should have stopped back there —
but the pudding people were so — well —
full of themselves.

The Sphinx didn't want us to come this far
even though we answered her questions
and threw in a bonus answer: "As honey is to the jaguar."

And we so well along too
Coming up is the world's longest single cantilever span.

I am numb with thrips. (Can You Hear, Bird? 25)

The first thing that needs to be said about "Cantilever" is that if it does not make you smile or laugh, your own approach to poetry may be at fault: a reader of poetry needs to be open to the experience offered by the poem itself, and "Cantilever" is offering an experience that is partly comic. At the same time, it is difficult to react to a poem as though it were merely a joke when it includes genuine difficulties — most obvious are difficulties in vocabulary. (A "cantilever" is a type of bridge or engineering structure anchored at one end and extending over empty space; "thrips" are a type of insect.) But there is also, as Kinzie observes, a difficulty in the storytelling.

We know what kind of story this is — it appears to be a narrative about a road trip or a journey. But it is clearly not Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In some sense, Ashbery writes a poem that takes into account the reader's prior experience with poems like Frost's: everyone who has learned to read poetry learns to understand that Frost's story of a journey carries larger metaphoric or symbolic resonances, implying that the poem is about the broader journey through life, or into death. Ashbery's "Cantilever" is too busy playing with the expectations of what it means to read — or write — a poem like that.

Language, Metaphor, and the Logic of Dreams

As a result, any realistic description of a scene has vanished. The reader can be fairly certain that, even if Robert Frost liked to go on sleigh rides, Ashbery probably never actually visited a "pudding station," nor (one hopes) did he meet a Sphinx. Instead, the episodes of the poem play with readerly expectations. A "pudding station" sounds something like a "filling station," the sort of thing one might encounter on a journey. But it is inhabited by "pudding people" who are "so — well — / full of themselves." Perhaps it is a filling station, then, where people are filled with pudding. But "full of themselves" is already a kind of fossil metaphor that exists in daily speech: we use the phrase to refer to conceitedness or tiresome self-admiration. We do not ordinarily imagine it literally, in the way that a gas tank or a bowl of pudding can be empty or full.

What "Cantilever" is about — if a poem needs to be "about" something — is the way in which language and storytelling are used to describe experience poetically. We are all familiar with the sense of rueful dread expressed in the first stanza, and the sense of bizarre and unexpected ominousness that creeps into the second. It is one thing to say that someone (like Oedipus) goes on a journey and has to answer a riddle posed by a Sphinx. It is another thing altogether to successfully answer all the Sphinx's riddles and still face disapproval, even after throwing in a "bonus answer." The phrase "bonus answer" sounds like terminology from a TV game show, while its content — "as honey is to the jaguar" — sounds like a more obviously poetic statement, a simile intended to be interpreted. But applying meaning to the "bonus answer" is pointless if we are never told the Sphinx's question.

The logic here is like the logic of a dream, except that the third stanza gives us a good sense of what Ashbery is really exploring: "And we so well all along too —" This is not a complete statement. Rhetorically speaking, it is aposiopesis, the literary device of breaking off mid-statement to make a point. The point here concerns the incapacity of language: throughout the dream-journey described in the poem, there is a sense of aggrieved innocence, but the sentence that seems to express it trails off into silence.