Are limes the fashion

Notes on John Ashbery’s “A Sweet Disorder”

Pardon my sarong. I’ll have a Shirley Temple.
Certainly, sir. Do you want a cherry with that?
I guess so. It’s part of it, isn’t it?
Strictly speaking, yes. Some of them likes it,
others not so much. Well, I’ll have a cherry.
I can be forgiven for not knowing it’s de rigueur.
In my commuter mug, please. Certainly.

He doesn’t even remember me.
It was a nice, beautiful day.
One of your favorite foxtrots was on,
neckties they used to wear.
You could rely on that.

My gosh, it’s already 7:30.
Are these our containers?
Pardon my past, because, you know,
it was like all one piece.
It can’t have escaped your escaped your attention
that I would argue.
How was it supposed to look?
Do I wake or sleep?

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[ New Yorker ]
[ SoundCloud ] 

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I know nothing of Shirley Temples other than what I'm reading here and in previous discussions of Hejinian's My Life. Her lines there were: "But nothing could interrupt those given days. I was sipping Shirley Temples wearing my Mary Janes." Back then, I thought it was a gendered drink. Now having second thoughts. Following this exchange, I'm taking that it marks sophistication? Coming of age?

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Thank you so much. Sipping it now the way you both say it. Makes me appreciate why this poem was chosen to close a book.

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breezeway
/ˈbriːzˌweɪ/

noun 
1. a roofed passageway connecting two buildings, sometimes with the sides enclosed

I wondered about the title because you wondered, and ended up with this. When I hit image search on my browser, the immediate thought was to compare this structure with Dickinson's House of Possibility. Then I thought of a breezeway's horizontal openness (as opposed to ED's which seems—at least in that poem—vertical) and got to thinking of Whitman's grass. 

Lots of (breezy) thinking to be had. How this works as a metaphor for poetry (and for an Ashbery poem in particular, all the connections encouraged by it, as we his readers know firsthand) . And contemplating "breezeway" as a life endows us with both linear, chronological purposefulness (point A to point B to point D) but also openness (memory, digression, possibly escape).

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I like that—even as refuge—the breezeway is temporary. In a way it seems more sincere than a house, even if a house is the greater necessity.

It can’t have escaped your escaped your attention 

In the sound file, I heard: "It can’t have escaped your escaped attention"—if it's all the same to you, I'd reference the way it's spoken. Your morbid comment (which seems to me supported by the final lines) has caused me to look up the possible containers in the poem.

The clothes are first up: "Pardon my sarong" and later on "neckties they used to wear." There's culture and time, perhaps gender too as a sarong seems to become something of a skirt when it crosses the pacific.

Are these our containers?
Pardon my past, because, you know,

And time, as the neckties and the dance were chosen to indicate. But when the first line of the first stanza is echoed in the last, time becomes more explicit (culture too, I think, and the much-touted primitive color of the Orient, cf. Edward Said) and becomes "all one piece" (unity of West and East?) or, more accurately, a seeming or illusory seamlessness ("like all one piece").

The drinks have been covered quite fluently by you guys. This speaker's hyper-aware, perhaps insecure about how he seems, how it all looks, maybe about being "authentic" in terms of time and place when suddenly, out comes that commuter mug. So contemporary, on-the-go. Very much (and importantly) out-of-place.

It can’t have escaped your escaped attention 

So all this "appearing" had to go somewhere, and that is toward "escaped attention," itself a mobile container. I wonder what's the tone here? I'm quite used to teachers bewailing the "short attention span". Poets, requiring as they often do some lingering on the page, would probably echo this lament. But there seems to be some acknowledgement of this here, an embrace of the fact. Not sure if I'd go so far as call it celebratory.

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I found that it's also "It can’t have escaped your escaped your attention" in this article by Epstein. If you covered "Pardon my sarong", Epstein looks into the title as well as the last line and trace these back to Herrick, Keats, and ("you guessed it!")... O'Hara! Read on—

“An interesting footnote: in Frank O’Hara’s 1953 play Try! Try!, O’Hara had one of the main characters, who is named John and who was played by John Ashbery when the play was first performed, say — you guessed it! — the phrase 'Do I wake or sleep?'”

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Pardon my past, because, you know,
it was like all one piece.

"Also the unity of one's own life, perhaps." Yes. His singular word "past"—like your singular word "life"—makes it one piece. The frame keeps all these fragments together, somehow both a denial of the fragmentation and a distinct method of putting these tensions together in one place. What's to be said about a (white?) man in a sarong, wearing an old movie? About an old man drinking a child's drink?

And if we'd like to go meta now, this unity might be a truth based on (or forced by) effect or belief. The poem puts everything together, "You could rely on that." But does it diffuse the tensions by leveling them with each other, or does the poem cause greater unrest my putting these contraries so close to each other?

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I've been looking at this picture (without checking on its provenance), and was brought to reading the poem a certain (perhaps foolish) way.

He doesn’t even remember me.
It was a nice, beautiful day.

If we assume a single "I" moving through the stanzas ("all one piece"), could we likewise assume a single other? I didn't do so on my first read. The waiter-server didn't translate to the "He" of the second stanza, though that "He" and the "You" of the second and third stanza seem related (but a case could be made that the you could be the reader or some other you, making for 4 initial distinct people: I, waiter, he, you).

This could be an exercise in futility ("because, you know," multitudes), but I tried bringing the waiter into the second stanza as either the I or the He. It's like, after the dialogue (taking the order, first stanza), one of the two shifted to interior monologue. They had a "past"!

There's this subtle game we play with strangers we meet more than once, always testing if we're remembered or not by the guard at the school gate or the boy at the cashier, or yes, the waiter... also, by our customer or client-in-passing.

So there, I've been trying to collapse the poem into a narrative of two people. It's fun because by the third stanza... they argue!

Why not collapse it to just one character? Would that be too much of—too sweet—a disorder?

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Not sure if you've linked this interview elsewhere, but I think it's a good thing to introduce this here because it begins by asking questions about the cover of Breezeway and the titles of some of the poems it contains. And because of other things. For example, you get to find shiny trinkets like these:

ASHBERY: I don't read my poems very much after I've written them besides at a reading. I put them away and then it's on to something else. I mean, I'd love to say yes, and that would be wonderful for this interview, but I'm just not good interview material. And yet, people always want to interview me. And, of course, the interview is a tragic fact of our time. 

So, I think it's a keeper... and I'm not even halfway through.

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Same goes for the wabi-sabi tea bowl where "asperity" and "asymmetry" are among expected aspects. Yum yum to this grenadine mythology (thanks so much for bringing it up), and I'm all for a gender (gendered or gendering) reading.

I've been looking at "disorder" along these lines, as perhaps an internal imbalance (presupposing asymmetry). Maybe the interior is too rich, open, playful for the constraints of the exterior (age, gender, culture). Certain lines, I think, mark a possible (strong? tentative?) stance regarding this:

Strictly speaking, yes. Some of them likes it,
others not so much. Well, I’ll have a cherry.
I can be forgiven for not knowing it’s de rigueur.

Are these our containers?

that I would argue.
How was it supposed to look?

There's a concern about how things ought to be, these tacit, largely arbitrary but definitely compelling strictures. But questions are being asked. Arguments are about to be raised. Possibly, even the fact of having a stand is expected in language (and languages: "strictly speaking," "de rigeuer"), making this a special concern for poetry.

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Or, Berrigan and the Whale

3 Pages
by Ted Berrigan
for Jack Collom

DE— Let me just say that my heart skipped a beat when Berrigan's list mentioned the Hunt for the Whale. I read Melville in my youth when no teacher required it of me, and it was one of my greatest reading experiences. In fact, when the line struck me, the whole poem was suddenly flooded by the novel's immense waters. Even the title reminded me of Ahab's own 3 "pages," Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, petty officers and middlemen on this the grandest and most foolish of ventures.

AN— the first part of the novel is encyclopedic, a sort of melville's a dummies guide to whales, whaling, and the color white (that last part is my fave). formally, they're essays. if i remember right, there should be a good handful of lists in the pequod: what to do with blubber, what to do with whale parts (look up cassock!) and others, a lot of how-tos here and there. starbuck was the most practical of them, the least metaphysical, and he must be partial to these lists. of course ahab would dash them all and have it his way! he has his own list. and his methods of staking the ship to his own TO-DO, his theatrics, his mythic references, that sinister, inert doubloon!

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AN— schopenhauer sounds right in this case. perhaps not only in our reading of the poem but also in berrigan's writing of it.

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[A post was deleted]

DE— Ahab's mission, and this list of ten things to do. They're a whole universe apart in terms of grandeur and scope and yes time (and diction, as I think you're pointing out too). Though they're both America, that much is true. And maybe I'm forgetting (and you've reminded me) that the creation of this poem is itself the hunt for the whale.

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AN— it could be a key to this, i agree. one among many, i'm sure bec of the nature of the poem, but still, a welcome entrance!

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DE— The last lines after NO HELP WANTED doesn't seem like things you do every day. There's the heart attack, the medal of honor, the house in the country: these are things to aspire to, such that every day builds up to them. I guess in the back of the psyche there's something that gnaws, a less obvious, less acceptable desire, something more Quixotic (forgive the mixed references though I'm fairly certain Melville the sailor was likewise referencing Cervantes the sailor), therefore more grand than any desire. Still, there's that other thing. Ahab was all about revenge. Could this be the hidden motive (motif) of the poem? Berrigan's revenge on US conservatism (prosaic, sorry!), it's pretensions, how if it has any greatness in it, you'll find it solely in the shortcomings? For some deep yearning here is unanswered (WCW on the poem: for lack of which people die miserably every day). Which brings us back to the port of poem as whale as poem.

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AN— and maybe beyond the revenge of the poem is the vindictive life. like Berrigan was saying something like: I won't get with your program folks! my poker, my lunch poems these fly in the face of your congressional medal of honor!

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DE— Forgive the re-post here; I'd like the Mates in my ship as well. I tried to read Berrigan by using the 3 MATES of Ahab (as you suggested). There's something there, though not so clear-cut, but perhaps the others can make more of it.

Here it goes. Melville's Pequod is a ship of symbols (although it can be read as a driven narrative even without any eye for allegory, we thus have movies of it here and there) and as such is a very symmetrical construct. The 3 MATES can be read as the stages of the human brain: 1st mate STARBUCK is the voice of reason, the schooled one, a pragmatist at heart. 2nd mate STUBB is much less refined, but in moments of clarity he embodies a folk sort of wisdom. Nevertheless, he's more Gung-Ho and is thus more open to the seductions of Ahab. But 3rd mate Flask has practically sold his soul to Ahab even without him asking for it, and since it's clear we're moving down the brain here, Flask is more bile and vengeance; he really takes the whales personally.

Beer? Jack off? Curse? Probably Flask. hunker down, quite merrily, life goes by: We could probably get a whiff of Stubb's pipe here (though he seems to be smoking with Flask in the earlier parts too). Which means that the last, where happiness is not happiness but something negotiated with weather (sails?), that could be Starbuck there, the only dissenting voice when the ship went mad with Ahab's bloodlust. He's the one with his eye still on Mary, his wife, their "house in the country," their nameless son.

But all of their tempers and powers taken singly or together: NOT ENOUGH

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DE— Others in the forum say that it's part of the incompleteness, the "NOT ENOUGH"

Poem says that it's a list of 10, but it doesn't always add up (though it depends on who's counting), almost always amounting to but nine items. In the anthology, it physically takes 2 pages, though it says three. So 3 pages follows that logic. (An aside, Calvino's "Six Memos" contains only five, suggesting we write the last one, perhaps that's the case here too? Add your page. Or add your thing-to-do?)

The others cut the poem into three, following the sectioning suggested by those phrases with purely capitalized letters. What do you think? Perhaps there's an important 3-page document somewhere in American history we should know about?

Anyway, I'm glad to have to think on it/ of it. Hope this helps.

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DE— Hi! It's an idea I got from your 3 ages thread. I hope I didn't misquote you. But yes, put like that I see that it somehow not only "clusters" but "furthers" all the cutting that's already been done in/by the poem.

AN— a very good idea. the more you read it that way, the more the 3 "sets" or "pages" distinguish themselves from each other

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DE— True and tragic, how the persona "can't even find that wholeness in the lifestyle of other Americans." He lists everything that everyone else is about but comes out empty-handed. Even with fame and security thrown in at the last breath.

AN— perhaps because fame and security was offered in the list? maybe that made it worse somehow?

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DE— It's hard (for me) to put the whiteness of the whale out of the picture when inside North Am Lit, but because Berrigan does it in cuts he could evade full reference (as an epigram wouldn't, or a direct quote) and that sometimes makes for more richness, a more textured reading. Perhaps the "paging" I did with the mates was a stretch as well. But it was such fun doing it.

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AN— the openness of a cropped line is interesting. that's probably why I loved not only following Tzara's instructions but reading the works of people who did. and now that Berrigan gives us a project like this, it's wonderful to welcome all associations in the tapestry of meaning

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DE— Ishmael as the sailor behind (or grafted into) Berrigan's persona, that's promising. What a bummer to miss this, so: thanks! Ishmael's more laissez faire, a down and out man, going where the wind would take him. Melville must have been trying his damnedest to draw a blank of a character, someone who'd soak in the whole Pequod, all its men and methods then live to tell the tale. Ishmael is a survivor (the survivor) of the mad quest, and his presence could change the motif from revenge to just pure survival, openness, going at it one day at a time.

AN— she is on to something. Pip also is mad(dened) enough to deserve a second look as an intertext of this poem

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AN— hegemonic parameters of quality? are you saying they are the gold standard of poets of the time? and that they are oppressive somehow as influence goes? if i hear from you, thanks

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DE— I do love Berrigan too. He and Corman and Armantout, they're great "finds" for me, and only made possible by "This".

AN— perelman too now, and bernstein and hejinian

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DE— I saw this a bit late, here's the summary of some hypotheses offered earlier:

1) NOT ENOUGH. 3 Pages makes you look for a page that isn't there (the poem takes up only two in a book), the texts and contexts from which these lines have been cut. It highlights the insufficiency of the list, perhaps also of listing, maybe of poetry.

2) 3 SECTIONS. Some believe that lines such as "BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN" cut the poem physically into three.

3) That the title refers to 3 PAGES known only to Berrigan (and other such "hidden" readings).

AN— or there are (at least) 3 ways of looking at everything here. maybe read/ lunch/ poems are three pages more than enough!

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DE— Thanks!