I'm about half-a-dozen digests behind everybody, due to an innocent
jaunt out to Liverpool - to see four of the most aptly juxtaposed
exhibitions you could wish to see: Constable's Clouds at the Walker, &
JMW Turner: The Sun is God, Douglas Gordon, and American Abstraction
(Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell et al.) at the Tate - all meditations
on clouds and light and various forms of airy nothingness that some
might variously consider obscure or banal. Some of Turner's paintings,
painted as long ago as the 1840s, and shown here stripped of the usual
ornate gilt frames, are paintings of almost nothing, nothing even as
discernible as the sea and the sky, not even a horizon line between the
two. Luminous obscurity, you might say. Or as Stevens might have put it,
"nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is". On John Ashbery,
who in certain periods of his career, is one of the poets who has meant
most to me, various inchoate, unformed things strike me at this hour,
most of which I can't even begin to articulate now. One is that
'banality' is a register, a tone, even a subject, like any other - he
once said - and this may have been to me, since I had the pleasure of
interviewing him once, for a local (Manchester, England) zine called
'Debris', that he was interested in cliches 'since they didn't get to be
cliches for no reason'. Another is that there's a characteristic trope
in many of his poems about something great and wonderful being about to
happen, which either never does, or is indefinitely postponed, or is
missed by the protagonist or speaker of the poem. If I was less tired,
I could cite examples, but it's one of the main things I could point to
to attempt to expain why I find his work, at it's best, poignant, and
full of meaning. Then there's the sheer variety of his tonal
register(s). I might go on, but I've had a long day...
Dave
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|