Invisible Listeners by Helen Vendler

Author:Helen Vendler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

THREE John Ashbery and the Artist of the Past

As we have seen,many lyric speakers have addressed, in intimate terms, an invisible listener. In the work of George Herbert, the invisible listener is God; in Whitman, it is often a listener-in-futurity.Ashbery is one of those—John Berryman is another—who have sought intimacy with a listener from the past: Anne Bradstreet for Berryman, Francesco Parmigianino for Ashbery.And Ashbery, like Whitman, envisages a second invisible listener—his reader, of whom many of his poems are acutely conscious. Ashbery ’s long ars poetica, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, depends intrinsically on the establishing of an intimacy between himself and the long-dead painter whom he addresses. I want to comment here not only on Ashbery’s changes of address in Self-Portrait, but also on how he allows the ethics of social life to enter the verbal space of lyric.

Because Ashbery has not engaged in explicit political and social action and commentary after the fashion of Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich,W. S. Merwin, or others of his generation, he has sometimes been thought socially apathetic, solipsistic, or narcissistic. In view of this critique—which I believe to be inaccurate—it is ironic that Ashbery’s greatest formal contribution has been to bring into lyric a vast social lexicon of both English English and American English—common speech, journalistic cliché, business and technical and scientific language, allusion to pop culture as well as to canonical works. In Ashbery’s lines, words are often sprung free of their usual contexts: words that began in vertical relation to eachother (as archaic words “stand above” contemporary ones, or formal words “above” slang), or in no relation at all to each other (such as the words “tacked-up” and “angst”) are brought into horizontal (metonymic) intimacy with each other, in a slightly surreal, but comprehensible, narration.

For instance, in the case I’m about to quote—from the poem “Grand Galop” (1975)—Ashbery hybridizes two stories—the medieval myth of a knight’s archaic journey to a tower where he will suffer an ordeal, and its contemporary parodic equivalent, the journey of the hero of a Western movie into a gully where he discovers himself in one of the dead mining towns of the Gold Rush. Naturally—since Ashbery is symbolizing everyone’s life-experience—the quest is unsuccessful. From the point of view of the nowenlightened speaker, looking backward, the story is both true and ironized, absurd and yet angst-ridden. The Ashberian speaker tacitly assumes that his readers have themselves undergone the archetypal well-worn story he is recapitulating, even if he voices it with the impersonal “one”:

One approaches a worn, round stone tower

Crouching low in the hollow of a gully

With no door or window but a lot of old license plates

Tacked up over a slit too narrow for a wrist to pass through

And a sign:“Van Camp’s Pork and Beans.”

From then on in: angst-colored skies, emotional withdrawals[.]1

In his syntax as well as in his diction, Ashbery juxtaposes the high (“One approaches a worn, round stone tower”) and the demotic (“From then on in”).

Ashbery’s history of emotional life invites us to become

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