In our first review, of Patti Smith's Just Kids, we were lucky to be in agreement about pretty much everything. Not so this week. Because our responses to John Ashbery's Planisphere are so differing, this week's Uncommon Response is set up as more of a debate about the book than strictly a review.  As always, we hope our disagreements espouse further ones. 

--Peter Milne Greiner & Rachel Herman-Gross 

  

A is for Argument 

A Reading of John Ashbery's Planisphere 

  

PMG: Right before Where Shall I Wander was published in 2005, I met John Ashbery at a dinner party where I overheard John Yau laud him as being a poet without an agenda. His next appearance was in a poem my friend Andrew wrote in which Ashbery is incontinent, washing his hands in a fountain outside of a colleague's villa. Five years and two volumes later, we sat down and read Planisphere, Ashbery's twenty-fifth, yes, twenty-fifth book of poems.  

  

RHG: Thank goodness there are 24 other volumes I can geek out on the complex syntaxes of. 

  

PMG: That is our job as critics. With that in mind, and as it has been discussed in other critical venues recently (see Helen Vendler's review in The New York Times and Craig Morgan Teicher's for Book Forum), we must suck it up and avoid cursory praise and, worse still, cursory dismissal. Yes, you could wrap his poems around the Earth a hundred times and still have lengths of it left over. Yes, there might be a problem with mannerism that has surfaced in his work over the last, Christ, fifty-seven years. But hot damn if I didn't just read this cover to cover without getting bored.  

  

RHG: I got bored. I'm not sure if it was just the sheer amount of poems, but there were moments when I felt let down, as though Ashbery was writing just to fill the space. The alphabetical arrangement of the poems presumably is, as Helen Vendler claims in her NY Times review, an A-Z life guide. Planisphere illustrates perfectly that life is not always thrilling, and is, in fact, sometimes quite dull. 

  

PMG: I can agree with that. Although I doubt that if one's new book of poems is 114 pages long, one is really struggling to fill space. Rivers and Mountains, a collection Ashbery published in 1962, contains twelve poems and is 63 pages long. This might be a graphomaniacal issue, but I doubt it has much to do with a lack of inspiration. There are ninety-nine mostly one-page poems in this volume. I'd say four out of five, maybe three out of five, contain an idea or a turn of phrase that detonates the mind--or at least causes it to flare up a little, which is a pretty good ratio.  

  

RHG: I'd say three out of five don't contain such an idea, although the ones that do explode are definitely to be embraced. I find the elegies to his love of his partner particularly beautiful and poignant. The opening poem "Alcove" is a stunning example of this: ...We indeed/looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,/catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night/in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly. The one page phenomenon, at times perfectly economical, started to feel grating after a while, many of them felt abrupt, almost truncated. 

  

PMG: It's true there are some definite fragments here, but life is full of fragments.  If we accept Vendler's notion of the guidebook we must also accept poems like "Episode" for what they describe: the day was raging crisp / heavily outlined / he had been in touch with old buildings. Here is a poem in which Ashbery turns his back on all punctuation, on the complete sentence itself.  What is left is slightly bleak but austere; a few phrases and a terminal metaphor bespeaking the narrator's loose ties with decay. It astonishes me that one man could articulate or find so much that is still irreducible in language, and I think an awareness of that ability is what catapults Ashbery from book to book, poem to poem. 

  

RHG: Fragmentation's place in a poem is far from my issue; it is the feeling of a thought trailing off, as opposed to being incomplete. For the first time in my reading of Ashbery, his voice is evocative of his age. I don't think we're dealing with "loose ties with decay" so much as with an in-depth meditation on the impermanence of life, and the ramifications of what mortality, and morality, have in those terms. The range of experience and the wisdom and reflection that one hopes to have after a lifetime of writing extraordinary poetry is clearly hard won, and well deserved. Even when the musing could conceivably apply to any one at any age: "The Later Me" shrinks from encounters with the earlier one,/you know, that one. The one we don't speak about/except occasionally between Thanksgiving and New Year's. 

  

PMG: I believe these moments abound in Planisphere, and what interests me about the volume as a whole is the interplay between a life of accumulated wisdom and the poet's tendency to approach it nonchalantly, even coyly. Poems like "Default Mode" and "FX" and "They Knew What They Wanted" introduce some vital if un-genius comedy to the mix, and are actually stand-out. We must remember that a poem doesn't need to be an unprecedented miracle of language and thought and epiphany to... be striking, after all. Games are meant to be fun. But to be sure, these are smiley oases in the midst of a much larger and more variously voiced terrain, where the conversational and the idiomatic are scarcely a word or two away from Ashbery's own kaleidoscopic sleight-of-phrase. The results here are sometimes grim, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes funny, and often all three on the same page. 

  

RHG: We can find humor only if the archaic contractions in "FX" (...matters more ne'er is told/...or 'twixt the merge of star, etc) don't immediately pull one out of the poem; or the monotonous repetition of "Default Mode" and "They Knew What They Wanted" don't cause the eye to glaze over the beginning of each line as if it weren't there at all. These small reprieves from the otherwise compelling language seemed to smack of "melisma." 

  

PMG: Well to allow those contractions and that mode to take you out of the poem is to miss the point, and more importantly the joke. 

  

RHG: That is exactly my point. I did miss the joke. 

  

PMG: Look I'm not saying these three poems are brilliant; I'm simply paying attention to how they differ from the rest of the collection. I'm thinking about why they stand out in the way that they do. I'd say that, along with one or two others, these are the misfit poems. I'm attracted to that. Next question, please? How about this? With a body of work as sprawling and at the same time exacting as Ashbery's it seems inevitable to miss a few volumes over the years--and just as inevitable to pick things up right where you left off. What does that say about Ashbery's development as a poet? Maybe that's an erroneous question to have. This much we do know: lyric poetry has always taught us that the heaviness and lightness of experience (and our crude tools for looking away from and at it) leads us toward some always expiring revelation. Hopefully. Or, hopefully not. 

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