For anyone who wants to make “sense” of Ashbery’s poetry, I suggest the remarkably perceptive essay on his work by the poet and critic Mary Kinzie in her essay Irreference from her book The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose.
Given the title of her book one might come to think that Ashbery’s poetry points to the supremacy of prose over poetry in our day. Like much of non-metric, it might as well be prose. And at times beautifully so.
Kinzie points to his system of poetic construction by which he makes sense of experience. Whether using verb tenses or word particles, which Kinzie exhaustively explores in his poem Houseboat Days, Ashbery teases out some kind of meaning from his words.
One summary Kinzie gives of his poetry: The “plot” of an Ashbery poem is a matter of the arraying of tense movements to support metaphors and images of time consciousness—a stylized and masked durée. The ebb and flow of the images (deluge and rapidity versus hollowness and contraction) produce a time consciousness based on nostalgia.
“Nostalgia” leapt out at me as a primary emotion in Ashbery’s poetry—that is, for those who ever felt any emotion besides frustration or anger when reading him! If his writing is quicksand or his meaning as fixed as mercury balls slipping through one’s fingers, then as Kinzie beautifully puts it: …it is helpful to view his relation to the heterogeneous dreck of the modern world as primarily an elegiac one. It is poetry of continual loss. Including of one’s mind if that was all you had to read on a desert island.
For me, I am mostly indifferent to his poetry because after a while I need terra firma. His ocean of wave after wave of images, statements and mis-directions sooner rather than later leave me wanting the downright conventional like a beautiful sonnet. On the other hand his dexterity of language is impressive, overwhelmingly so. I’m convinced he would have made an outstanding metrist (technically he could do anything). But he applied his genius elsewhere: taking a sledgehammer to any kind of rational discourse, argument and clarity.
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