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.

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[ The Times Literary Supplement ]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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      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.

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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.

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TERMS: business and parable in “Vespers”

I wish to end summer (or begin ending summer) by replaying my parts in a collaborative reading of Louise Glück. The poem:

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.

I think that a certain mode of interaction with divinity is at work in this poem. Glück’s “Vespers” takes me to some parables, in particular those where a landlord leaves the land to his tenant and returns after a time to call them to account. The Parable of the Talents is perhaps the most famous, but there are others. The persona here sounds like a tenant, but one who recognizes the landlord for the divinity he symbolically is (one who could “withhold// heavy rains”).

I am interested in the diction, especially in the words found at the outset, such as “anticipating,” “return on investment,” and “principally,” all of which where ripped right out of a business management textbook. Because of these words, by the time we arrive at the addressee’s “heart” and the persona’s “doubt” regarding his understanding of it, “that term” takes on another meaning (or understanding) as a period in the venture, or a phase (“twelve weeks of summer”). That’s in business, but it glides (too smoothly, perhaps) into parable where the “term” is the span of time that the lord allotted to the tenant in order to work the land and, in the process, to prove the worth of the earth as well as of the self.

“That term” has another layer for me: metapoetry. Here we return to the place (or figure, as in this poem) where the word “term,” like other words, could be taken in all its multivalence to bear fruit, become “heart”. In fact, we can make a case of the addressee here as poetry itself, as that which withdraws inspiration (in your absence) so that the poet is forcefully abandoned to work the earth.

While doing so, she believes in a return, a second coming which is desired, of course, but also dreaded, because she will be called into account (the Vespers, the evening prayers, the closing of the day), and she fears coming to poetry empty-handed, especially as that would mean that all she has done was waste “that term”: earth, time, and precious life, the span of her heart (perhaps also not only her life, but the lives of those she “grows” such as tomatoes, relationships, children).

"Vines" here is a particularly cruel word. In parable, that means grapes, and wine, and crushing. But the vines also are entangling, like flaws in verse, or wrong life-choices. And there must be a sense of power here, for the persona, when she takes responsibility for that which provides life as well as chokes it out of us.

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“Verse” shares the same etymological root as words like reverse, converse, and inverse and traditionally same sense of the “turn” (These turns are ascribed to the rows of farms, the furrows, which are seen as correlates of the lines in a poem. Aside from formal turns, a poem is usually expected to make a turn in narrative or rhetorical turns. A sonnet takes this turn or swerve usually after the 8th line. Shakespeare takes it further than Petrarch by introducing the couplet, which some read as a further turn, or at least an introduction of a nuance of the turn. It follows rhetorical ends, because you must first show the persuasee that you know his or her mind before you take him or her turn to your point of view).

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that the farming language commingles metapoetry, business, and parable quite naturally because of its place at the root of civilization, that which gives rise and perhaps makes necessary the forms of commerce, religion, and literature we know today.

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God, poetry? Perhaps death is what’s immune to foreshadowing? This a puzzle in the poem for me.

I can’t take vines as a purely beneficent, life-giving image. Maybe because weeds also come in the form of vines. The god of wine, Dionysus, uses vines to collapse buildings, ships. It can be viewed as an entropic symbol, or if that’s too exaggerated, at least a symbol of the earth taking back (in) the constructs of man, as well as man’s own corporeal form. I suppose that the persona’s claiming responsibility over her constructs, her verses, even her life. But the way it sounds to me, she seems likewise staking a claim upon her own death, or at least its form: how she has decreed her decline to proceed entwined with her the fortunes of her verse.

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Early on, I wanted to know the implications of using tomatoes, and this reading fits! It’s a weekly, almost daily thing, so much so that you could lose that all that color (we love it in every one of its stages, from green to red, and all the minglings of yellow and orange in between) and succulence if you don’t pay good attention, the type of attention an artist would give. Of course also, a poet like Glück.

It’s not a special occasion fruit, or something so otherworldly as the pomegranate, it’s almost unsymbolic because of its dailiness (almost). What fun to see your poetry (vocation?) in the image and likeness of a tomato.

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