Self-naming and the third line of Notley’s “Poem”

St. Mark’s Place caught at night in hot summer,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now.
Tompkins Square Park would be midnight green but only hot.
I look through the screens from my 3rd floor apartment
As if I could see something.
Or as if the bricks and concrete were enough themselves
To be seen and found beautiful.
And who will know the desolation of St. Mark’s Place
With Alice Notley’s name forgotten and
This night never having been?

*

Poets.org

*

Not as distant as Guadalajara nor as threatening as Vesuvius. Not noisy like the former nor certain like the latter.

As urgent as? As focused as? 

The Ghazal-type signature pines, and I return a moment to Corman. Differences truly between Corman and Notley, but I can’t place these as surely as I can a distinction between two of my children forced to a morning goodbye.

Notes on John Ashbery’s “Variant”

Sometimes a word will start it, like
Hands and feet, sun and gloves. The way
Is fraught with danger, you say, and I
Notice the word “fraught” as you are telling
Me about huge secret valleys some distance from
The mired fighting—“but always, lightly wooded
As they are, more deeply involved with the outcome
That will someday paste a black, bleeding label
In the sky, but until then
The echo, flowering freely in corridors, alleys,
And tame, surprised places far from anywhere,
Will be automatically locked out – vox
Clamans – do you see? End of tomorrow.
Don’t try to start the car or look deeper
Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster
On luster, transparency floated onto the topmost layer
Until the whole thing overflows like a silver
Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears.”

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[ Sweatshirt Poesy ]

*

—

Really missing the old platform. It’s really as simple as NOT imposing paragraph spacing (which we can do by ourselves, thank you very much). Was trying to replace these s and
s with
s too, but was unsuccessful.

—

Hello to you both. I’ve been thinking of "wimpling" and how it seemed to me an Oulipian V+7 variant of what would’ve been a trite "eternal weeping of the sky." Took a longer at the wimple and it took me to church, and then to something earlier, Magdalene before the empty cave where Jesus had been sneakily buried. A lot of poem now echoes the Bible for me, from the first line where the beginning is the word, and all the way to Christmas. Hands and feet, sun and gloves (and that enjambment at "wooded") carry shades of Golgotha with its armed Romans and the final rite.

—

Not sure why he’s not "laying down the law," but maybe he is, you know, precisely by not doing so, because you can’t lay the law that way any more.

—

Finding this true. And there are contrasts between lightness and weight (maybe also, light and darkness) if the lines are suspended from each other. On the one hand, the hands and feet, sun and gloves line, the "lightly wooded" line, luster on luster, cake, while on the other we have your bleeding line (smoke? ink?) and the mired fighting.

I hesitate to include cascade of tears and the flowering echo in either "camp" as they seem to me images where the values are blended.

—

It seems very light at the outset for me, first couple of lines, a word, hands and feet, it’s going, it’s going. Then yes, as had been mentioned above (many times, many ways), that syllable heavy (fraught) with history and meaning and cargo and consonants. Then it becomes a sort of dance between light stuff and heavy stuff.

The "it" in the first line seems light, not carrying any noun or what, not yet anyway. What could "it" be? We’re not sure yet, we’re just getting started. Is it the car? An argument? The marriage itself? The poem or poetry as a way of life? The cosmos? Interiority (as an echo flowering freely in corridors...)

Soon it’s clear (or not) that it might carry all of the above and more, it’s fraught, and every meaning we put into it is imperiled or itself a peril. So perhaps, don’t try to start it! Don’t carry it across (see metaphor’s etymology).

My favorite part here’s the sixth line, because that’s where I kind of lets it out, staccato, pitching back to you everything you said.

How did it come to this? Thus far, fraught has been said by you (original), but not directly quoted so this word came to us via I (first variant), who also returns the word to you, highlighted and quote-marked (second variant).

Even in a simple conversation, without paraphrasing anything, just an exchange of one word, we get a terrifying weight of possible meaning and misinterpretation. There’s possible accusation, a correction might be made in a while (excuse me, did I just hear you say fraught?), and then come the repercussions, cascading, cascading.

And the form, wow. So there’s that quoted "fraught" up there, the star up the tree, followed by an overflow of other things you said "but always, lightly wooded... cascade of tears."

I suddenly decides to return a chunk of what's been said by you, including not-starting. They are indeed mired in all this: looking deeper at (closely reading?) everything including not-looking-deeper.

—

Drawn to this image of the ruined cake, cascading as tears. Story of a failed marriage (or are those tears of joy), or someone’s watching home videos year after "home" has collapsed from the frame.

—

Notes on John Ashbery’s “The Template”

was always there, its existence seldom
questioned or suspected. The poets of the future
would avoid it, as we had. An imaginary railing
disappeared into the forest. It was here that the old gang
used to gather and swap stories. It
was like the Amazon, but on a much smaller scale.

Afterwards, when some of us swept out into the world
and could make comparisons, the fuss seemed justified.
No two poets ever agreed on anything, and that amused us.
It seemed good, the clogged darkness that came every day.

*

[ The Times Literary Supplement ]

*

—

These are often “greeted” with derision, most interestingly I think by those in search of something new, something else. Ashbery’s closing here strikes the same set of notes as Rumi’s line, at least for me, both seem to embrace what we customarily fear: darkness, pain.

—

In philosophy they ask, “What is the color of an orange in the dark?” In linguistics there was some curious play when Chomsky said “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” but in physics, Schrödinger had us thinking of a cat inside the box with some trap or radioactive bit, then asked us if the cat was alive or dead. When it was asked, it was suddenly us who were “in the dark” (definitely not in the same darkness that the cat was, and I’m now considering the Reinhardt variants as proposed). Was the cat dead or alive? The answers yes and no come, but neither and both also become thinkable, and so this cat plus darkness plus our multiplying answers (also, inadequacies) result in a state called superposition.

I think that’s what we’re embracing here, what’s clotting: the multiplication of possibility that only happens when we engage (as opposed to flee, or fight—as in your encouraging regard of fear) the darkness. And the magic of it is, we do something like it all the time, when we read and think, when we speak to each other: forming opinions about things we don’t fully comprehend, answering half-baked questions, finishing each other’s sentences.

—

His school seems to come alive in the amusement in the second stanza. Would love to see that explored. I remain partial to the clotting wound reading (nursing one at the moment, minor gardening mishap, and because of “The wound is the place where the Light enters you”), but your post remains a favorite spot on this thread. Light enters it.

—

Based on your edit, are we looking at catharsis here? I’ve been wondering about the source, where’s the conflict that got us to the wound and to the clotting? Did trying to fit into the template harm us? No two poets agreeing, that sounds like a whole forest of debaters, so much agon and agony: are each of the issued arguments in fact wounding? (If so, then there might as well be a hint of desperation, and this is maybe why I’m drawn to your use of lifeline).

—

Add to those, his pantoums.

Looking now at how he cut the first line at “its existence seldom” and it seems as if the these “templates and railings” flicker in and out of the world. As if they’re really only there when we question and suspect them, and maybe only as communities, conventions in the truest sense of the word.

“No two poets ever agreed” okay, but the amusement is shared. That’s the (new?) template begotten by the all the fuss over traditional forms and custom styles.

—

This portion of the thread takes me to the root of template, a temple, as it is an open, consecrated place, associated with what is solemn, calm, in search of order and a force.

—

That imaginary railing seems to come out of that tennis court without a net. That it leads to a forest, wow. It’s like the template preceded us, was ancient, or an ancient need. We’re in that discourse where the world is a jungle and the poem is something of a preserve or a garden, but if the form came before anything else, then it seems to me that poetry takes us to the wilds, is the closest thing we have to it, and that our everyday lives merely derive from this. Clot signals a wound, perhaps day is that wound. Or light, or reason, or civilization. It inverts Genesis where Yahweh also found that “it was good” but referred to what ensues after light.

—

Now that you mentioned it, that sort of railing lines up right between questions and stories. I remember that thought experiment about a tree falling in the forest without anyone hearing it.

—

What there might be some sort of template for is the “storytelling” in the clearing. Someone tells the story one way, say Petrarch. Then others follow suit, so it’s a Petrarchan series. Someone says it another way, keeping some of the oldspeak, putting in some novel spins and turns. Let’s call them Elizabethans. Soon others follow, after many nights of this, we have people like Dickinson and Williams and Stevens giving it a go, often refusing to tell it any way other than theirs, but they’re still taking a place among the others, in the wilds, dead of night.

—

I would love to see how that that plays out. Will it be like milieu but on a cellular (bodies, antibodies, templates, anti-templates), evolutionary level?

I’ve been thinking about your sense of railing. That invisible railing as a structure seems like an internalized restraint, akin to the missing tennis court net. Railing as complaint or set of charges seem to me unrestrained, an spilling out of anger into outrage. Kept in only by the domain of speech, but almost always a mere breath away from physical violence.

—

      There it was, word for word, 
      was always there, its existence seldom

      Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged, 
      would avoid it, as we had. An imaginary railing

      Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds, 
      used to gather and swap stories

      Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: 
      was like the Amazon, but on a smaller scale

      Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, 
      and could make comparisons, the fuss seemed justified

      The exact rock where his inexactnesses 
      seemed good, the clotted darkness that came every day.

—

Yes it is! And thank you for bringing this mountain here, it fits. Actually, it supplants, it overwhelms, it might yield if we ask nicely, but I do think that these two (as with all of us here) might be brought to speak to each other. Though Ashbery in this case would seem the more sociable guy, but I’m sure they would soon be lost in each other’s landscapes.

—

Notes on John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”

You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.

*

[ Poetry Foundation ]
[ PennSound ]

*

—

My experience thus far has been curtains pulled up every other line.

—

I'm taking *murmuration with me too now, thanks! I heard starlings could gather over a town to the point of being pests so murmuration seems like a town possessed by gossip. I once thought MacLeish was being clever, maybe even sly with "A poem should not mean / But be." When you factor in that negation such as that which our friend saw then it might as well go "A poem should not mean / But be mean."

—

That seems to be a self-referential song with lots to say about rhymes and meaning, and as for this poem, "Ut Pictura Poesis" is not a very ordinary girl or name. Meanwhile, it's fun to put "Closer to her than to me" and "hearts that never played in tune" on the same page as "His head / Locked into mine."

—

It's great to see you here (and I found her too). "Dangerous Moonlight" had a title that was taken from a song (or a film with a song?), so I suppose it's something he could have done for this poem as well. Putting Horace and Bread together, that kind of thing's just wow for me, though I suppose high brows would like to keep JA "literary". But that's just it, he's expanding what "literary" or "poetic" could be. Latin's the classic source, a dead language in the sense that no one's born into it, but it's renewed here, even if only to say that it can't be said that way anymore. That's what I think about the Latin, though I'm certain there's more to be said about this particular sampling, esp it's place in the title, the place where you'd easily (conveniently?) find a female name (as in the poems of Jonson and Poe and even in Williams, in a lot of songs, perhaps excepting "A Boy Named Sue").

"As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must / Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, / Dull-sounding ones. She approached me" comes across to us as pointers for a new (or renewable, renewing) poetic diction, but JA might as well be talking about sources. This poem could be a lyric equivalent of his keeping Zeus and Popeye together in one rambunctious sestina.

—

Dolphins are associated with Dionysos (Apollo's aesthetic opposite, if we trust Nietzsche). I looked up delphinium images (will probably never see one "face-to-face") and saw that they were very skyrocket-like.

"Personified," maybe, an embodiment... muse?

—

Or that poetry should bypass usual logic for a logic all its own? Of your take on hinges, I'm most drawn to "two media of expression". In this poem, there's an opening to more media ("or other centers of communication, so that understanding") as if JA anticipates that the reader's off to other "lovers" after the poem, maybe trying to "catch" (in painting: "capture") the reader in the act of leaving a poem behind.

—

I'd look for hinges under the seesaw, and by implication, between the locked heads (of reader and poet? of poet and artist? poet and poet?). There might be one in the sled too, but I'm not sure. Or between boy and sled? Kane and Rosebud? If hinges are how one thought connects to the next in this poem or in Ashbery in general, then I'm all for that picture (and many other pictures besides).

Or "hinges" could very well be one of those low-key words that we'd been asked to look for. Now I'm looking for hinges everywhere, even along the spines of those testaments.

—

Poem Took Place

There it was, word for 
there, its existence seldom

last, the view 
would avoid it, as we had. An imaginary

shifted the rocks and picked his 
used to gather and swap 

in an unexplained completion
on a smaller scale

down at the sea 
the fuss

exact rock where his inexactnesses 
clotted.

Intertexts for Ashbery’s “These Lacustrine Cities”

[ Poetry Foundation ]
[ PennSound ]

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That Escher up (or below or across) there reminds me of Borges's structure in "The Immortal," doors and stairs of timeless design and symmetry but often leading nowhere. Doors and stairs don't have to be practical features if you're building from the point-of-view of immortality. The builders sleep outside* that magnificent useless structure. As "The Immortal" seems to be Homer, this also presents an "idea" of literature as vision and enterprise.

*

Thought of pairing Auden's lines with those from Ashbery. An exercise that not everyone might find agreeable:

Lakes × These Lacustrine Cities

Lake-folk require no fiend to keep them on their toes;
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,   

They leave aggression to ill-bred romantics
Who duel with their shadows over blasted heaths:
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.

A month in a lacustrine atmosphere
Would find the fluvial rivals waltzing not exchanging
The rhyming insults of their great-great-uncles.
Much of your time has been occupied by creative games

No wonder Christendom did not get really started
Till, scarred by torture, white from caves and jails,
Her pensive chiefs converged on the Ascanian Lake
We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,
To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air   

And by that stork-infested shore invented
To you, pressing you back into a startled dream

The life of Godhead, making catholic the figure
Of three small fishes in a triangle.
You have built a mountain of something,Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,   

Sounded out each of Auden's lines and looked for the closest resonance from those of Ashbery. I think Auden is more given to narrative, to a clear exposition of cause and effect. 

This is a unique topic for poetry (though not for anthropology): the features and beliefs of people as they develop communities alongside (or atop, astride) lakes. I think "Lacustrine" is a formal response to Auden's "Lakes". Auden looks at lake-folk with their chiefs and rhyming great-great-uncles. He won't rhyme as they used to, he's leaving that, he'll sing in another way though of course cognizant of the source, inseparable from it. Ashbery's uncle is Auden, and he's responding with "cities," with the sound of cities, with pieces of effects and causes that might seem to stray, even fight, wondering how they could be sitting side-by-side, this apartment and that studio, but still somehow cohere in one pulsing view.

If in Auden's view God is "invented," in Ashbery what we have is a "startled dream" and you'd have to get pressed back into it if you're going to make your own mountain of something.

*

These two together reminds me of "Ozymandias":

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

Dali then, and his wonderful sand. No hope, maybe, but some regeneration is achieved in the constructs of the poet. The idea is derived from shambles. But I've yet to know of a civilization that was one idea. I imagine a main idea, a mythology, and then digressions and transgressions come from and go against and (sometimes) come back into it, reshaping it and the society it's supposed to have brought into being.

*

Recalling Hobbes's Leviathan, the idea we need a state because we'd be at each other's throats without something like a government to keep us in line.

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Or, if a city, then a mountain of garbage? The poet is figured to be attuned to his culture and history, to chunks of it anyway (perhaps synced differently from others because of intense attention). And I'm thinking that yes, the last stanza in particular points in the direction of that poet building from the rubble. And of course, this solitary one:

But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.

*

I'm taking Guest's lines for myself, putting them right beside "Lacustrine":

The siege made cloth a transfer

learned from invaders who craved it;

spindle thieves. 

She sang high notes and pebbles went into her 

work where it changed into marks; in that room

*

Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.

I'm grateful to have been returned to this poem, to find that I read some of it very differently. The "useless love" here, for example, seems to me something of high value. It's a way of re-figuring "unconditional love," where even one of the most basic conditions—usefulness of the love, of lover and beloved—has been discarded.

*

Yes to your implication. Hate your friends, said Nietzsche. Healthy stuff. But here's another angle: love that doesn't bear children. I've been trying to play this reading out with the rest of the poem, but it unlocks something and turns the whole thing into a series of sexual positions. It's like there's a hidden slideshow, and it ends in tears.

If I'm to be a responsible academic and connect it with the rest of the readings, I'd say that habitations could be "forced" toward the path of citihood, the teepees crushed underhoof. Loathing, pillage, rape.

Celibacy's another angle. I think it was Leonard Shlain who said the middle ages was something of a eugenics disaster for Europe, attracting the best and the brightest to don habits and cassocks, most of these thinkers institutionally kept from the possibility of progeny.

*

Then you are left with an idea of yourself
And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon
Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others
Who fly by you like beacons.

And "charged" makes another appearance, in something of a similar airy movement, but "charged" with (perhaps) a different sense. Sounds monetary, "charge this call to." The "I" here seems to be at rest, or in some state of stillness, while it's others that do movement, that transmit "like beacons". Others, and that distinct feeling in the second line, which perhaps would eventually lead to transcendence... but transcending toward... what? Something other than civilization?

*

That's worth re-posting and seconding. Indeed a gift, and I'm glad the rules say she must keep on giving! Paraphrasing her remark, these lacustrine observations elevate my own. For instance, she turned us to the plurality in the title and how the poem somehow specifies, zeroing in on a certain You. I don't have anything to add to that, except that yes, it's really got me to thinking more about the scope of this poem, something I hadn't thought of even thinking about before. Here's a thought regarding that from Calvino's Invisible Cities, published some six years after Rivers:

And Polo answers, "Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name."

*

It's this precisely. And my experience with Ashbery is that no matter how many times I read a poem of his (and what eloquent, keen, sometimes playful notions we bring from/to it), the poem remains an unpossessed place. And... odd, but I find this so reassuring.

*

My mother used to starch handkerchiefs and shirt collars for my father. It makes for crisp fabric. It marks formality, serious business. There's something even more serious, it's from the urban dictionary, really makes that connection with desire, but it might not have been applicable back in 1963 or 66. There are others that relate to being intoxicated, knocked out, or drugged. I'm not sure about these though.

*

Stepping back (but I think I'd still be along these trajectories) to test a couple of things:

Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.

There's something oddly familiar about how this line was done, and if you saw the airport control tower in the second stanza, maybe you'll consider "starching a petal" as something akin to gilding the lily. In fact, if we go full Shakespeare (a nod to you), Salisbury will also reward us with the "rainbow":

Therefore, to be possess'd with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

So John's dipping back into King John, those last three lines getting us "tapering, branches / Burning," and... let's just do the whole thing:

Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,

Into the past for swans and tapering branches, / Burning
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light

until all that hate was transformed into useless love.
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

The cities are "doubling" the "pomp" of the lake, adding beauty to beauty only wastes it ("embalm" and "entomb" was, I think, inspired). This is the classic problem of art, of literature. Perhaps Ashbery is touching upon the limits of mimesis as the measure of the poem. Don't go sending it to the middle of the desert to record things for you. The poem now its own "private project" which is something "no climate can outsmart" because, maybe, it is its own climate, its own body of water.

Starch is the byproduct of plants. Pure starch is a product of people refining what they found in nature. "Gilding the lily" is extended by "starching a petal" because you return to the plant something that's been extracted from it, now in tampered (or refined) form, perhaps enhancing the plant, maybe clogging up its pores and stiffening it.

If desire starching a petal is in any way like gilding the lily, then maybe this is a development "useless love". Love's not only useless, it's become a method of negating use, of killing (by giving back more of the same in adulterated form), and thus could be judged "horrible" if not loathsome or hateful.

Itself, the city is a crime of passion.

*

Two thoughts about this. First is Wilde's, 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Which will end in—

Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Perhaps you kill to preserve (the love, the beloved)... but is there any other way? If your answer is poetry, then maybe that poetry isn't potent enough.

The second comes from Noah. Those are tears of disappointment, the melancholy wrath of the Godhead (these lakes but remnants of that magnificent flood). It's an eternal agreement signed with rainbow flourish. This stops now, dear, I won't drown you again.

Ashen Bird Candidates for “Poem at the New Year”

[ Poem Hunter ]
[ Locus Solus ]

*

Read rationing in waiting "in line for things," but couldn't quite place it.

*

If the "great ashen bird" is Ashbery as phoenix—as you and the others have noted—than it also marks the passage of time (cycle phases spanning five, ten, or more centuries). The word "spiky" is curious too, and seems to me a mainstay of corporate meetings, seen in charts and progress reports: a way of telling time in terms of ups and downs, successes and failures. The use of "adjective" here suggests another filing system, the dictionary, which co-habits the time-keeping of the calendars and clocks as well as that of the map in the fourth stanza (time-space).

*

So familiar with this feeling. 

A sort of "time" that was suspended in the early nineteenth century was the French Republican Calendar. It was part of a whole drive toward decimalization. As always, reality would thwart "perfect" systems (showing that systems have yet to be perfect or that perhaps systematization itself is an abnormal, curious trait). The Leap Year tells us that the earth-sun relationship refuses to give us a whole number—365 is off, and so is 365.25, currently our most elegant solution.

The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off-center.

I've also been staring at this use of the word "polarized," often a political word, but here it seems to carry also the idea of time zones (north and south poles), of long-distance (relationships?). And yes, since the earth is not a perfect sphere, it can't have a single center.

*

May I add to your list? I expected "composed" but was given "packaged". And while these may sound like verbal slips, off-kilter, perhaps indicative of a failing system, some of us might also appreciate them as inventive, layered, "the best way to put it." For example, your "O I was so bright about you" could mean so many things even only on the semantic level: I had intelligent ways of figuring you out; I was glowing around you (handsome, pretty); I felt intelligent in your presence, haloed, etc.

*

yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal.

My first go at the title's "At" is that, well, it's the best way to sound it. Before or along with any level of meaning, the way it gets through the ear is most important. But addressing those "raised and lower levels," perhaps it's a poem that's thrown at the new year. Or, it recognizes time now (more than ever) as a place (as said). Perhaps it's just  coincident with the new year, one not meaning the other, just two pieces of a collage overlapping.

*

It's 29 lines. 30, if you consider the title a line. I was keen on this yesterday when I was thinking of French decimalization. It was two words short of 300 though, so there goes that tangent.

The first two stanzas seem to belong to a narrative (with many layers and branches, of course, but still, really, just one at least to me). Someone asked for the suspension of time in the first stanza. Something like this happens in the second stanza. So after these "packages," things are lost and that signals the third stanza: a list of world-self / self-world questions, and images of time (rush hour, fluttering pigeons) yield to the stillness of the frozen swamp, perhaps reentering the narrative of time having stopped while the consciousness keeps on.

Movement resumes after that double-size third stanza. But what is this "it" that slips past? Is it the same it that never became a gesture? Is "it" the great ashen bird?

*

Every reading is an act of translation. And yes, I always choose texts that I look up to, one way or another. Translating seems to me the closest form of reading. At each turn (as you demonstrated) we embrace the limits of any reading.

*

This would be an interesting basis for a highly self-aware poetics. Ashbery is not translating him into English. Ashbery is translating him into Ashbery. Which is perhaps as fine a way as any to manage these situations.

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I'm going with "unavoidable". A pessimistic way of translating this comment is: it's all the translator of poetry can do.

Seeing it as a job means that the translator has come to absorb other concerns as part of the self: marketability, "the literary," posterity, previous translations, advocacy, etc. It's possible to see the translator as a "scrivener," getting stuff handed to her, handing stuff back. But what if translation begins with someone catching sight of something and seeing something of herself glinting in it? Maybe then translation would be a pursuit of that passing image, hoping to see more of it.

You need to zero in (that is the job), but the thing is elusive and you are left to your own devices.

And when/if you do "capture" it, it's already something else. For one thing, the smell of your pursuit is all over it. Finally, everything I said has been a muddled translation of Borges's clarity: "Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers."

*

I’ve been thinking of the little girl in your personal note, and so—as they did—I went to the Washington link. I’d like to give something back (which I don’t think is off-topic but is perhaps a bit off-Ashbery, though maybe not, considering what the owl crushes at the end):

Tomas Tranströmer and Robert Bly Translate Each Other’s Works
by Sandy McIntosh

Tranströmer writes: “You changed my line to: ‘The plow lifts from the furrow like an owl slowly airborne,’ but what I meant was: ‘The plow lifts the furrow like an owl crushing rocks.’ Well, I like yours better in English, so please use it that way.” Bly writes, “My English word ‘headlong’ means ‘rushing at something heedlessly.’ But I like that you’ve translated it as ‘He grows a head of enormous length.’ I send you several new pages of verse that go in the direction you’ve pointed out.”

Meanwhile, where there are no negotiations:

Kruschev thunders in 1956: “We will bury you!” after the Soviets explode an H-Bomb, and the Cold War is ratcheted up. But the correct translation should have been, “We will outlast you.”

In 1945 Truman demands that the Japanese surrender. Japan issues a statement that it will consider the demand, but it’s mistranslated: “We’re ignoring you with contempt.” Ten days later, thousands die at Hiroshima.

Early in the first millennium, Saint Jerome translates the story of Moses returning from the mountain with horns on his head, having been hung with them by the Lord. But “horns” could be translated as “a great light on his face.” Yet, for more than one thousand years, Jews are believed to descend from Satan. Millions are killed.

Can poetry matter?

*

"Un-file-able" too, maybe. Gesture seems to me a touch that did not land, so a gesture that did not happen feels like utter negation.

*

Thinking about this poem on the meta level, my two candidates are "this glum haven," "filing system," and yes, that "gesture". Perhaps this poem refers to itself as a glum haven, as a field of both flight (wish, angel) and limitation (sobs), one yielding and yielding to the other.

The phrase "filing system" occurs in a short catalog of questions (cataloging is a staple Whitmanian device, and making poems out of lists of questions became a project for one of his many self-appointed heirs—Neruda). Normally the New Year's list is a set of resolutions. Questions are seldom resolute (they "flutter," in a sense), and questions listed in this way (haphazard or seemingly so) doesn't quite come out as a full-fledged interrogation.

"It never became a gesture." Perhaps pointing to the futility of the new year, or of new year's celebrations, or of the poem itself. Or maybe the arresting of the gesture is the accomplishment of this particular gesture.

*

Still on the meta, both poetry and narrative partake of an off-centered time. "Now" therefore becomes one of the weirdest words. Whose "now"? The poet's? The poet's character? The reader's? And what if the poet returns to the poem in the future?

my song bird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.

*

Care for a few more birds? JA's ashen bird appears to me as flying somewhat like Shakespeare's:

Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

Definitely a songbird, but while there's a contrast in Shakespeare, the "sullen" quality seems to have pervaded JA's tableau (c/o pipe smoke) including the bird. What was once a hymn becomes "lettered" on the windows, orality becoming print becoming advertisement.

An earlier line from this same sonnet was lifted, rephrased a bit, and used by Eliot in his "time"-heavy "Ash-Wednesday":

Shakespeare: Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
T.S. Eliot: Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

Whether these desires are related to the wish(es) in Ashbery's poem, you'll be happy to know (or have we not crowded heaven's gate enough?) that Eliot opens this poem with an aged eagle then recruits, towards the end, a crying quail and a whirling plover.

*

Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs,

Could the first line be taking us (also) to the Rhine? Wagner's "Twilight of the Gods" sets some key scenes there for Siegfried and Brunnhilde. (That's a "later" twilight though, and a bit later than that: Nietzche's "Twilight of the Idols".) Still, the whole thing ends in two immolation scenes: the pyre of Siegfried and the burning of Valhalla which would signal Ragnarok. Which might mean that the gray ashen bird is a raven of Wotan's. Either Thought or Memory streaming from that last stanza.

Men in Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air”

[ PennSound ]
[ poet.org ]

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None for me, no. But I’ll take this one over a game of dice: “The Rubicon is merely a brook.” Might it not take offense that it was named for its mud (“red”) and not its water? It has gained the function of a border and a heavy sort of ward by virtue of edicts and customs. It becomes a measure of such stuff  which might not necessarily concern it: loyalty, audacity, sacrifice, transgression. Won’t mean any less mud, perhaps no increase in fish.

*

 we must / Find a way to freeze it hard. 

There’s a “we” though. And it's so audacious in its intent that when you return to the title, it sounds imperative. Is the poem itself the way of freezing it hard? And perhaps even more basic than that: our act of naming rivers, of making them human, holding “slumbering,” “remembering” rivers in our mind and seeing them “choked”.

*

Naming creates opportunities for rivers. Which aspects of it might be perceived (color, tranquility or violence, produce, deity association, political, historical, or even literary significance), which to downplay or ignore. All of these rivers named and unnamed meet in the sky, that one overhead “sea”.

*

But right after that (and catching the light) there’s something of a release:

Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes
And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored
Thames. Into the Atlantic Ocean
Pours the Garonne. Few ships navigate
On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen
On the Elbe. For centuries
The Afton has flowed.

And at the end, I think, there was a (feeble?) attempt to “capture” stillness through minuscule “acts” of light:

The Ardèche glistens feebly through the freezing rain.  

*

If the Rio Negro
Could abandon its song, and the Magdalena
The jungle flowers, the Tagus
Would still flow serenely, and the Ohio
Abrade its slate banks. The tan Euphrates would
Sidle silently across the world. The Yukon
Was choked with ice, but the Susquehanna still pushed
Bravely along. The Dee caught the day’s last flares
Like the Pilcomayo’s carrion rose.
The Peace offered eternal fragrance
Perhaps, but the Mackenzie churned livid mud
Like tan chalk-marks. Near where
The Brahmaputra slapped swollen dikes
Was an opening through which the Limmat
Could have trickled. 

That conditional seems to me a way of returning to the first few lines of the poem where unconnected rivers are held within one sentence, by the thread of a metaphor sometimes. The disconnectedness seem to be stressed in these lines, one river’s effect doesn’t much care for another’s cause. But that possibility of connection between the Brahmaputra and the Limmat is wow, a killer. And maybe these three lines, this moment of wish and speculation—is exactly what provided an opening.

*

A young man strode the Churchill’s
Banks, thinking of night. The Vistula seized
The shadows. The Theiss, stark mad, bubbled
In the windy evening. And the Ob shuffled
Crazily along. 

Seeing these passages as if but one movement of unrest, perhaps a conspiracy or a long breath before a tryst, a big thing just about to happen. And all these players are reacting in their own peculiar way, all of them theatrical.

*

See the rhetorical (big) stick now adrift in the Potomac. The whole of it, and those passions and intents: swept away.

Notes on John Ashbery’s “This Room”

The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.

*

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[ Poetry Foundation ]

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Because of the title, I came into the poem thinking of Stevens's "Gray Room". Those last two lines compel me to look the two up together.

Ashbery:
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.

Stevens:
What is all this? 
I know how furiously your heart is beating. 

Stevens begins his room with "Although you sit in a room that is gray," but here the "you" is denied. I'm finding it a hard to take a bite of this poem without intertexts so I suppose I should unburden myself of some of these so I can somehow enter this dream within a dream (Poe). And by unburden, I mean that I would like to get to Ashbery's last two lines without Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" suddenly playing in my room.

*

I don't see imagism as Ashbery's main project in this poem. I did try to think of it in terms of the manifesto, but I became something of a very partial bouncer. Ashbery mumbled something in a distinct, lovely way and so I let him in, believing it was the password.

*

Thinking about the possible tones of "You are not even here". Is it matter-of-fact, bitter, melancholic? Is it a nudge, as in a teacher's or a roommates's hey: you're not here aren't you? You're thinking of your own sofa, the time you had a dog or wished for one, and yes, your own Sunday with your own helping of tomato sauce. You never had quail, at least not one so "induced" so you're leaving that to me, okay, but please come back.

Poetry's the most lucid dream possible. And that's only part of the magic. It doesn't merely double when somebody else enters, participates. Something more happens ("shimmers"). I think some poets do their poems like Vatican I with their backs to the readers. That's not Ashbery, at least not how he seems to me. And certainly not in this particular poem. I'm not even sure he's Vatican II. Though no, he's not doing it Whitman-style either: I am in the midst of you and of you, assuming you assuming me. He is trying to participate in all these roles, to contain his own multitudes with a sense of connection, some refreshing nonchalance, a lack of pomp:

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.

*

We might want to tentatively read Ashbery's "you" as the reader who isn't in the room—or the meta-room?—with the macaroni and the dog portrait. The reader is "induced" into the poem with the last two lines, the presence stressed by the act of denial... or expression of longing.

You are not even here.

Let's look at "even" in the sense of balance or fair. The lines certainly aren't cut "even", there's a ten-word opening and a three-word portrait. Perhaps in you's own room or some other elsewhere, "evenness" is possible, desired, and sometimes achieved. But not "here" where "here" can't be plainly decided much less leveled.

*

We had macaroni for lunch every day 
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced 
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?

I found another poem where Ashbery writes a line that goes something like "Why do I tell you these things?". It's "Yes, Dr. Grenzmer. How May I Be of Assistance to You? What! You Say the Patient Has Escaped?" which appears in Can You Hear, Bird (1995). It goes like this:

like pickling spices. And all the girls turned away
to weep, but were changed to ivy
and stuff like that. Why am I telling you this?

In this earlier Ashbery though, we get something different, not the dismissive (or bitter, or matter-of-fact) "You are not even here."

To assuage my conscience, perhaps, hoping bad dreams
will go away, or at least become more liberally mixed
with the good, for none are totally good
or bad, just like the people who keep walking into them, 
and the scenery, familiar or obvious though it be.

*

"This Room" invites (and rewards) contemplation on certain types of poems, Stevens and likely Dickinson types, poems that are in, of, and about the mind. How can you be "hard and clear, never blurred and indefinite" about something like a dream? That would defeat the purpose of the dream, or lack thereof.

Hard Times × The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring.
They have no time to return the calls in hell

The first sentence asks for credence and negates credibility. The mention of “calls” and “hell” casts the speaker as a possible seducer/tempter. The second line also adjusts the image of the “world is run on a shoestring” from shoe to phone, and for me anyway: a phone abandoned, hanging on a wire from its booth.

*

Played a hunch that a sort of association could be made between this and a poem by Stevens. Below are the lines that seem able to participate in such a give and take—

Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring.
They have no time to return the calls in hell

The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

And pay dearly for those wasted minutes. Somewhere
In the future it will filter down through all the proceedings

As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
Succinctly they will tell you what we've all known for years:

That the power of this climate is only to conserve itself.
Let be be finale of seem.

Whatever twists around it is decoration and can never
Be looked at as something isolated, apart. Get it? And

On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.

He flashed a mouthful of aluminum teeth there in the darkness
To tell however it gets down, that it does, at last.

Will have to dispel the notion of being like all the others.
To show how cold she is, and dumb.

In time, it gets to stand with the wind, but by then the night is closed off.
Let the lamp affix its beam.

10th line of “Here Everything is Still Floating”

Occupying liminal spaces among the motifs here: the steps, the shower, maybe the bar too, and the asylum (or the mind of the person committed).

*

Ashbery came to write “Lining of fabricating living from the instantaneous” then found it beyond revision.

*

What a decisive turn from “making a living”. Could it be that “lining” produces a threshold, as in to draw a line in the sand? Except it seems as intimate as a seam or piping in the cloth, effectively keeping a body from another body. As in Genesis.

An anti-intimacy.

*

If we take “lining” as a verb, then the line reflexively calls out poetry for all its attempts to make a unified sense from individual moments. This could be seen as a central duty of literature, to bring order to chaos, a preparation of the world for human agency. As in dressing up. As in buttons, before Stein saw to them.

Then come and consider this a violation, the moments plucked from their own magic and woven into “a life”, a “history”, brought in service of a whole. The whole we find either unaware or in denial of its own arbitrariness, its fabrication.

Notes on John Ashbery’s “The History of My Life”

Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even, there was I: a stinking adult

I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in. No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed
like the pleasant early years. As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up for what seemed like months or years.

*

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[ New Yorker ]

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It's seven stanzas. Yahweh marked Cain so that everyone who met Cain would know that harming him would invite a sevenfold return of investment.

        Once upon a time there were two brothers.
        Then there was only one: myself.

Maybe this is survivor's guilt, the poet transfigured as Cain. A kinder intertext would be the longing of Gilgamesh for Enkidu.

        I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
        even, there was I: a stinking adult

Gilgamesh was wanton royalty and the gods conspired to bring him down to size by providing him an equal, someone he would later know as brother. Someone he would lose.

        I thought of developing interests
        someone might take an interest in. No soap.

Gilgamesh would develop an interest in solving death. It was an unnecessary pain, if it could be solved, then let's. He would actually come very close, he was given a flower of eternal life. So he went home, but a snake stole the flower, ate it while he was taking a bath. "No soap."

        I became very weepy for what had seemed
        like the pleasant early years. As I aged

Could be Gilgamesh. But could also be the ancient, seemingly immortal Noah-like figure who would lead Gilgamesh to the secret flower. Instead of returning to his "interest", Gilgamesh just continued on home, ruling wisely until the end of his days.

        increasingly, I also grew more charitable
        with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

Gilgamesh would be made immortal in another way, through the epic. In a way, his "interest" is the poet's: a quest for immortality. But how to do that years after the giants of literature? The Moseses and Gilgameshes, the Shakespeares and Audens?

        thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
        Then a great devouring cloud

        came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
        it up for what seemed like months or years.

Notes on John Ashbery’s “Decoy”

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That ostracism, both political and moral, has
Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;
That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,
For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a
Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval
And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply
A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated
By acts of corporate vandalism every five years,
Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its own standing.
There is every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom,
Over the imminent lateness of the denouement that, advancing slowly, never arrives,
At the same time keeping the door open to a tongue-in-cheek attitude on the part of the perpetrators,
The men who sit down to their vast desks on Monday to begin planning the week’s notations, jotting memoranda that take
Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows
Above the city pavements, turning and wheeling aimlessly
But on the average directed by discernible motives.

To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries
And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next
Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit
Until the day it spreads out in all its accumulation, delta-like, on the plain
For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out.
But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other.
There was never any excuse for this and perhaps there need be none,
For kicking out into the morning, on the wide bed,
Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them:
Husband and wife
Man and wife

*

[ PennSound 1 ]
[ PennSound 2 ]

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Another "angle" we might wish to look at (which might need the connections you brought) is the presence of painterly terms and techniques. "Decoy" could be Chirico's dummy, or any such model we use for painting and is usually unseen in the final product. It might also be fowl decoy for hunting season (there's enough bird presence to hint at that maybe? delta-like accumulation, flocks of sparrows?).

Also borrowing from fine art: foreshortening. Which is among the illusions necessary to achieve a 3D effect on a 2D plane. Connecting it with "memory" makes memory merely an attempt at truth, a (more or less) willful perversion of actual values to achieve verisimilitude.

In sum: much meta to be had.

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Before "Husband and wife / Man and wife" I'd like to comment on how this begins writ large (Declaration, nation, etc) in the first stanza and ends with that focus on a couple (or a couple of couples, or a couple of ways to couple a couple). If it's "pyramiding" inversely, then it's perhaps how citizens escape civil involvement by going into (exclusionary?) relationships.

Or perhaps, this was the way it's fashioned (the "motives" being so "discernible"), each couple a result of ostracism. (You are already of this democracy, so why don't you just go home and enjoy it with your husband yes?)

Pyramiding it upwards, we might recognize the couple as the start of the family which is the unit of aggrupations moving upwards to the first line where it becomes a component of the state. That customary "Man and wife" has always bothered me, and I'm glad this poem brought it up. Just playing around with it surfaces so much thought on socially supported gender roles in marriage: "Husband and wife," "Man and woman," "Man and wife," "Husband and woman."

Which is the decoy? Man or woman? Their married alter egos (husband / wife)? And (as you've pointed out) what's the decoy for? What's it defending against? (Or, what's being hunted?)

As usual, a rich Ashbery sample, one able to hold so many readings. I can imagine a reading of "Decoy" framed by a question such as: Is the marriage a foundation of the state or a defense against it? Which might also be re-framed according to your question: Is the marriage a foundation of the state (ie, the first two) or a defense against it (ie, the last two)?

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I think we're more used to the idea that a state harnesses us as individuals to make it run. That's the default setting, well at least for me, and of course before this poem where it seems we should look into how power takes relationships, rewrites these social scripts in favor of keeping the status (or, if we go by the line on "memoranda," perhaps it enlists us to properly rewrite these ourselves as "the common good," in the service of "invisible" elite interests).

You're right that we ought to look who the original declaration ostracized, what it kept in to make the nation work but did not arm with the full complement of political power otherwise enjoyed by the peers, the white menfolk enjoying equality (and the idea of equality) on the leather cushions of their boy's club.

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And below, something from the internet to punctuate that!
(Though that hidden line seems to ostracize everyone anyway)

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Maybe the poem also somehow explores a possible declaration of independence from the marriage construct, or at least the aspect of it that is "seen into" by the state (statistics office, joint taxes, licenses, certificates), just one thing among the bureaucratic process envisioned here as a flight of documents. It's also guarantee of state power: each marriage a reduction of possible individual threats to a household adhering to state-sanctioned values (a pledge toward civic duty, keeping the peace, socio-economic mobility).

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Pound's next line—CONTRA NATURAM—seems also a point both poems share. Things are not as they should be, love reduced to a socio-economic contract, people kept in offices, the violence bottled in these "moral" compartments spilling out into the streets. Which in turn gives the state more reason to exist, to keep the peace, maintain order, so forth.

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"Decoy" might also be commenting on the notion of a poem as something representational. How a representation does not necessarily share the same function as the thing on which it was modeled.

Take the "perpetrators" and their notations. It looks like they're city planners or the staff of politicians or bussinessfolk. But the memoranda that "take" (the line cut as it is on "take" sounds like insidious somethings have so easily been jotted down against the interests of others) will go on to take "Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows"—a curious turn toward the type of language we're used to seeing in traditional poetry. Are these "perpetrators" also poets? Or are poets, working as they do over documents (of a different sort, given) "decoys" for the "perpetrators," looking enough like the ducks to be hunted, courting their eyes, going for the kill in circles, in what seems to be wholesome somersaults in language but in truth aimless "turning" (the etymology of verse)" directed by discernible motives"?

An aside: That whole last part of the first stanza reminds me of Stevens in his office, plying his trade and lunching on poetry on the same "vast" desk.

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I think a purely A=B approach would limit our reading of a poem like this, but yes, this is that time when flags are being burned, the US national anthem re-strung, everything's being made less sacrosanct. Down with pedestals! Free love!

The Chirico sample also makes explicit the operations of art, makes visible hidden/perspectival lines and the artist's model. This makes for all sorts of thinking, about how something that betrays the hidden mechanisms (of politics, of art, of poetry) can be made poetry. Even if perhaps it's painful, as maybe the exposed mechanisms will reveal (for example) that the poet has all along been complicit in the maintenance of the power structure s/he had wanted to see brought down or—at the very least—interrogated.

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What a find! Takes me to a different view of (but I think very much related to) "anomalies," "political and moral," as well as "urban chaos". And yes of course, the idea of sham marriages. I'm familiar with another type of sham marriage where outsiders marry US citizens for a green card. Sometimes it's deception, sometimes there's a pay-off involved, all sorts of schemes ("itineraries").

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That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,

Here's the usual state raison d'etre: keeping the peace. But they're not the only ones looking into the problem. The critics see urban chaos as a symptom of a greater, central problem (fundamental, even, since we're talking DOI) where methods of maintaining peace and order sometimes make the whole thing worse (abuse of power).

"Seeing into" is odd (but also refreshing). It's like a cross of "look into this" (study or investigate) or "see to this" ("man the deck," repair, take charge). Sounds mystical though, or psychic, and it's just like the Eye of Providence (which is also a pyramid!) at the back of the dollar.

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It could be a possible device to more closely resemble the DOI. If you see there the "Facts" about/against the history of the King of Great Britain, it's a list of statements that looks much like a poem. Capital letters, left-hand side. Also the DOI was replete with capitalized nouns like "Guards" and "Despotism" and "Happiness", so perhaps this simple step was a display of slight mimicry.

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Along with estrangement, I also read affluence and comfort in "wide bed". And "kicking out," how is that used? It seems to me a very eager up and at 'em sort of expression. But because of the context, I can't shake off the sense of violence.

(Answering your off point: I don't have this problem of access. Perhaps you could try other browsers whenever it gets tricky?)

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It's so curious how the rhetoric and images switch constantly from contraction to expansion.

To sum up: (contraction) We are fond of plotting itineraries (expansion)
And our pyramiding memories (contraction), alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next
Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, (expansion) for memory is profit (contraction)
Until the day it spreads out (expansion) in all its accumulation (contraction), delta-like, on the plain (expansion)
For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out. (contraction)
But until then foreshortened memories (contraction) will keep us going, alive, one to the other.

That last set of phrases seem expansive to me, but it makes sense also as a summation of the inhale-exhale that's happening here.

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It's increasingly sounding like an affirmation of our usual spotty memory as opposed to total recall. However, the problems suggested by the first stanza (and the last lines) seem to require more "remembering," more reflection and perhaps action based on such an "accumulation" of history.

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Maybe diminishment itself is hopeful. Let's return to Chirico, the artist of "The Double Dream of Spring". But first, a look at another painting of his, "The Disquieting Muses" below:

Kindly mind the lines on the path from the figures in the foreground to the edifices in the backdrop. Eleven lines, seven of which are in the light. In usual geometry (Euclidean), lines as these on the road ought to be parallel (like the sides of a bed). Ideally, two lines in parallel (as in our couple?) would run along forever side by side without ever meeting (far apart).

That's in geometry. However, if you apply that in composition, you would never have the depth that our visual sense affords us (seeing into and seeing into). So when an artist depicts a parallel, the lines move toward each other. Seen this way, a road (or a bed) would look more like a chopped off triangle (or pyramid, chopped off too, as in the dollar) than a rectangular block.

What's chopped off is the point where these parallel lines meet: the vanishing point. It's there in the pencils and you could trace it with a ruler (ex: the vanishing point in "The Disquieting Muses" sits somewhere above the first left-hand tower of that red-brown edifice). In this sense, it's more hopeful in the artist's composition rather than in actual geometry (at least they meet at some point, right?). It could perhaps be both optimistic and pessimistic at the same time, because the lines hold both possibilities: your eyes could move toward (see into) the vanishing point (receding into the common nothing) or down the base of the triangle, which means you're approaching yourself as a viewer.

Anyway, the trade-off if you choose composition over geometry is total recall. Geometry would show you everything, all the points in the lines, but none of them will meet. Composition gives you hope, yes, as it implies a meeting point. But it is only ever a hope, the meeting point undisclosed. And even if it were, that's the place you disappear into.

Or, the place where you "spring" from, depending on your perspective. Which is why I believe your point here is key.

Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval
And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply

In "Decoy," this road (these parallel lines) seems to be a place of loss. Memory, livelihood, and values (and later on, relationships, perhaps society also by "extension").

In "The Double Dream of Spring" we have (at least!) two frames. Both are blue, but let's call one the inner frame (the smaller one, the one housing a sketch) and the other the outer frame (the bigger one, which includes the dummy, the clouds, and the inner frame). I was about to say that the outer frame includes everything, but that would be wrong. Half the white figure stands outside the frame, part of the dummy's head too. What's definitely outside both frames is the vanishing point of the brown "road". In fact, the point is doubly cut-off by the inner and outer frames.

I put "road" in quotes because it only seems a road in the right-hand side of the painting, relative to the building and the mountains and the "diminished" couple (or cacti shaped suspiciously like a couple of people in conversation). On the left hand side, it seems like the wings or legs of the easel, the beam of which cuts the composition in half and shoots upward through to the vanishing point.

"Decoy" seems to begin at the base (society/history) and is chopped off at a smaller unit (a couple/memory). It's incomplete, the future, a child, would have completed the triangle. We don't have the reason for so wide a bed, whatever the bureaucracy had been building up to. It's being avoided, like a central, defining topic that a couple (or state) can't speak of out of fear that everything would descend into chaos, unravel (dénouement, which also points to Freytag's pyramid).

Completion, however, would have also defeated the illusion. The whole poem might possible be a decoy for this unseen, this missing value.

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Hi, and thank you for asking. I went to a technical school and enjoyed the luxury of drafting lessons (learned more about parallel lines and vanishing points later on, when I tried to draw comic books). Also, I guess I've been lucky with art teachers in general. Never amounted to more than a hobbyist though, and so I must redirect you to Wikipedia—

Vanishing point
Parallel lines
Foreshortening

(Which might mean half an hour more of time away from work! Sorry in advance!)

I would have missed these connections had I faced the bare poem, that is, without the benefit of your discursive frame of the collection and without a trace of your reading which finds the poem "ultimately hopeful" and "very positive". Admittedly your takeaway is contrary to mine (mine's pessimistic; odds had been stacked against the couple at the outset). But I wanted to see what you were seeing. This "double dream" of a poem somehow makes that exploration possible as everything now is clearly but a matter of perspective.

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I remember reading about that affair in a comic book...

...which sees to that as well as other great contradictions in the days and thoughts (and pursuits) of Jefferson.

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While the violets bunched then pinned to the dress appear to be a corsage. So the man/wife had been in the works the whole time.

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Notes on John Ashbery’s “Light Turnouts”

Dear ghost, what shelter
in the noonday crowd? I'm going to write
an hour, then read
what someone else has written.
You've no mansion for this to happen in.
But your adventures are like safe houses,
your knowing where to stop an adventure
of another order, like seizing the weather.
We too are embroiled in this scene of happening,
and when we speak the same phrase together:
"We used to have one of those,"
it matters like a shot in the dark.
One of us stays behind.
One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—
follows and falls behind.

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Could O'Hara be the ghost then? His confinement/haunt temporal (noonday, during lunchtime) rather than spatial (mansion)?

But your adventures are like safe houses,
your knowing where to stop an adventure
of another order, like seizing the weather.

The phrase "like safe houses" apply equally (though differently) to Ashbery's poems as well as to O'Hara's for me. The enjambed middle makes perfect sense, a demonstration of indeed stopping where it is most meaningful to stop. And there seems to be something in it about both writing and reading, living as well as relating.

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Ballet within its groove. It's why we keep coming back, I think.

Light Turnouts. Turnouts as results, outcomes possibly? (It's also lovely in that it still preserves the idea of the easier phrase.)

Perhaps a poem (or a poem written in a certain way) is a light turnout. Or more literally, that a ghost is a light turnout (only somesuch percentage remaining) compared to the life from where it was derived.

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One of us stays behind.
One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—
follows and falls behind.

Maybe the conceit here's how lightly he can take a subject matter as loss without demeaning it or resorting to farce. The last lines have that guess-who? and I think Ashbery preserves this moment/puzzle for us, no pronoun confusions as in other poems.

Who stays behind? Living poet or the addressee ghost? And where is "behind"? There is only this liminal space, this bridge and only vague ideas of what sits on either end of it.

Initial reading: Life (the living poet) follows the ghost, keeps calling it, pitching poems at it, never (as yet) becoming it, always something else except dead. In that sense, he's the one on the bridge, loitering, just walking around.

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what someone else has written.

Most fitting! Much darker, and somehow the tone means everything. It's like JA absorbed a debate between Shakespeare and O'Hara, and had been of course, charmingly light-handed and biased:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, (Dear ghost,)
To the last syllable of recorded time; (the same phrase together:)
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools (the noonday crowd?)
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! (advances on the bridge / as on a carpet. / an hour,)
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, (vs Life / marvelous / follows and falls behind.)
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, (vs knowing where to stop an adventure)
And then is heard no more. It is a tale (vs adventures are like safe houses,)
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing. (vs it matters like a shot in the dark.)

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Brings to mind a holy sonnet from Donne:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally 
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Which seems a sort of answer to WS's 146. And is (possibly) fruitful to contemplate in the case of "Lights Turnout" in that the poet here, tarrying as he does on the bridge (as on a carpet), attended by a ghost (real or conjured), seems to me a picture of immortality-in-the-moment, of being in touch with past (life), present (poetry, "the scene of happening"), and future (death) all at once.

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Could very well be that. And if so, it's Ashbery's feat to somehow turn it all out lightly without shedding its gravitas, reassigning the roles maybe to nostalgia, longing.

Thanks for the O'Hara and the Perloff. If it's all the same to you, I'd like to pair off parts of Ashbery's poem that most closely resonate Frank O'Hara's lines for me:

it’s also pretty hard to remember life’s marvelous (Life—it's marvelous—)
but there it is guttering choking then soaring (an adventure)
in the mirrored room of this consciousness (like safe houses, / what shelter)
it’s practically a blaze of pure sensibility (like seizing the weather.)
and however exaggerated at least something’s going on (this scene of happening,)
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected ("We used to have one of those,")
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat (a shot in the dark. / follows and falls behind.)

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Agreeing that we play around with the idea of ghost a bit more. The JA spirit seems to allow that sort of thing. Dante has been mentioned above. Ginsberg summons Whitman. Macbeth was faced with the ghost of his old friend, Banquo.

The Greeks had a lot of ghostly activity, some heroes straight down Hades to converse or commune with ghosts (katabasis). Aeneas went to see his father; Orpheus to retrieve Eurydice. Odysseus also sought a ghost for advice, spilling blood at the mouth of a passage to attract Tiresias. This nekyia is closer (I think) to "Lights Turnout" in that there is a crowd (the crowd of other ghosts that Odysseus attracts, some of them he knew from Troy, but whom he did not address as he did Tiresias).

The conversation between Ashbery and his particular Tiresias sounds casual but also intimate. It seems a case can be made for this poem as a nekyia, perhaps the poem itself is making a case for poetry as a way of breaking bread with the dead, communing with the fact of dying.

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Take one down, pass it around
99 stanzas of beer

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Digression via Taraxippus (or, what happens when you stable ghosts)...

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And dying is such an insult. After all   

(wow)

You're right, Waldman seems more ghostly than Frank here, less substantial, less alive. I like that Frank keeps singing (almost typed "keeps bursting into song" which was how it was in my head while reading this), and it sounds to me like a reversal of the Orpheus-Eurydice roles, the dead pushing the living back out into life.

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This is wonderful. Sounds like "Howl," and has that incantatory effect. My favorite lines were around 2 minutes in:

as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways

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I think enjambment should also be on the priority list when discussing sound, particularly because Ashbery might have been calling attention to it at the beginning of the second stanza. Here are the enjambed (or at least the awkwardly stopped) lines:

Dear ghost, what shelter 
in the noonday crowd? I'm going to write
an hour, then read

your knowing where to stop an adventure

One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—

There's something missing between the first and the second lines, could be "is there for you," "can we find," "should we consider establishing for business purposes," etc. But the elision is rhetorical so it sounds like a sentence though it's a fragment. The ghost is syntactical: the verb absented.

We could also look for "for" after "write" but this elision opens up the possibility that the hour is not merely the duration but also the topic (which could lead to this poem being itself that hour of writing / that hour written).

This hour stays with "read" on the same line, curiously enjambed, but leading to "what someone else had written." Could it be that whatever he writes is attributable to someone else, a loved one, literally, literally also a ghost writer (which could be weird if the ghost writer writes in behalf of someone writing to a ghost, which could be the ghost writer himself), or a literary influence, an imaginary friend or friend-like somebody (Lautreamont), a muse or djinn, a kindred spirit.

Stopping on "bridge" prevents passage, allows us to dwell there indeed "as on a carpet." And while stopping at "Life" would have been enjambment, putting in "—it's marvelous—" complicates it, makes an end-stop out of it (stopping it by judging it, by appreciating it) but the appositive is our way in prose to produce a sort of enjambment in usual speech, to disrupt the flow without cutting it.

Placing greater attention now to "—it's marvelous—" as it is the poet's addition, perhaps the product of his interaction with the ghost. Not only life, it's his annotation to life that matters (his use of life to justify one more hour of it).

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Loved your alepoem. And this stanza, where I kind of like "adventures" being its usual nounly self, but also somehow venturing into verb territory.

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Not exactly a ghost: phantom of the opera? These lines in particular bring him to mind:

You've no mansion for this to happen in. 

it matters like a shot in the dark.
One of us stays behind.

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Barthelme says in an interview: "One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects. Ashbery does this all the time."

We saw this while working on the title of the poem. And now you see this type of "extraordinary effect" on the idiom "a shot in the dark." Because it happens in the context of speaking with a ghost, of already having gone through the motions, the phrase gets charged with the terror you speak of. It doesn't lose the usual meaning which is an attempt to get something you have no prior information about. But now it's begun to sound like this something you have no prior information about is also out to get you.

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That is the reason we're having such fun. Rereading "Light Turnouts" now, Susan. And keeping your annotations handy while considering the possibility of "Dear Ghost" as Ashbery addressing his mother...

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Will  have to read up on this Baudelaire-Lautreamont connection. And after that, walking over to Susan's Walser. Many fine hours of "what someone else has written" ahead of me.

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