Great piece - seems that 'The Australian' is actually doing something
positive towards a 'critical culture' in poetry.
regards
deb
----- Original Message -----
From: John Tranter <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 3:25 PM
Subject: Young People Against Poetry - against Ashbery?
I thought the listmembers may be interested in the following: a column by
Peter Holbrook (who teaches English Literature in Brisbane, Australia) in
"The Australian's" 'Higher Education Supplement', 29 November 2000
(reprinted here with the permission of the author)
_____________
Because 'poetry makes nothing happen', as W.H. Auden said, one can usually
assume it's unlikely to be turned into an 'issue', material for one of
those tedious national 'debates' we are forever having now.
My assumption that poetry was out of harm's way was shaken, however, by a
phone call some time ago from Brisbane ABC. They wanted 'a quick comment
on the recent poetry debate'.
Qué?
Apparently, in reaction to the Brisbane Writers' Festival, there had been a
putsch against poetry, orchestrated by the kind of group newspapers call
'shadowy'--in this instance, a certain Young People Against Poetry.
These budding Savonarolas had accused poetry of being 'frivolous' and
wanted it 'banned from schools'. They were indignant at 'poems ... 300 to
400 hundred years old being pushed down people's throats' (HES 25 October).
I must say I didn't realize today's teenagers were so oppressed by the high
culture of the past. It is pleasant to imagine them compelled to toil over
their dog-eared copies of Paradise Lost, but experience in the tutorial
room ('Dr Holbrook, did the French Revolution come before or after the
Renaissance?') suggests intellectual parochialism is alive and well in our
schools.
One feature of the YPAPistas' uprising did appeal to me: sending a plane
over Brisbane with the banner 'Poetry Wrecks Lives'. I wish I'd seen that
aircraft, with its surrealist slogan, dementedly whizzing over the office
towers. It reminded me of an image you might encounter in the poet John
Ashbery--though he would come up with something whackier still.
For decades this American has been producing some of the most baffling,
haunting, and beautiful poems around.
Ashbery was born in 1927 and has lived mostly in New York; from 1955-65 he
wrote art criticism in Paris. (30 years of such writing have been gathered
in Reported Sightings (Knopf, 1989)). He's published 21 books of
poetry. The most recent are Your Name Here (FSG, 2000) and Girls on The
Run (Carcanet, 1999). His Harvard lectures on poetry appeared this year
(Other Traditions, Harvard UP). They give a welcome glimpse into the mind
of this difficult yet entrancing poet.
'Difficult' is some understatement. Most Ashbery poems are serenely,
glassily impermeable to the understanding--and all the more disorienting
for frequently sounding pedestrian rather than oracular. Ashbery gets a lot
of his effect from raiding the spoken language of his country, so that his
poems, which sometimes have the cuteness and weightlessness of fairy-tales
or cartoons, also include the bland diction of American suburbia: 'sheesh',
'ouch', 'heck', 'kinda comfy' all find a home in his poetry.
Girls on the Run is a narrative poem (supposedly) based on the work of one
Henry Darger, who lived in Chicago from 1892-1972. An isolated psychotic,
Darger was also a self-taught graphic artist of rare talent who over a
lifetime constructed a massive illustrated prose fantasy about the amazing
adventures of a band of brave little girls. Ashbery's poem gives us the
delirium of language, in which sentences have forgotten their beginning
before careering to their end. Its opening is less strange than most of it:
A great plane flew across the sun, / and the girls ran along the ground. /
The sun shone on Mr McPlaster's face, it was green like an elephant's. //
Let's get out of here, Judy said. / They're getting closer, I can't stand
it. / But you know, our fashions are in fashion / only briefly, then they
go out / and stay that way for a long time. Then they come back in / for a
while. Then, in maybe a million years, they go out of fashion / and stay
there. / Laure and Tidbit agreed, with the proviso that after that everyone
would become fashion / again for a few hours. Write it now, Tidbit said, /
before they get back. And, quivering, I took the pen.
While Ashbery's poems defy explication--who is the 'they' in this
passage?--they aren't empty. Rather, they convey what Ashbery calls 'all
that we think about when we stop thinking'. In Other Traditions he admits
he is 'mildly distressed at not being able to give a satisfactory account
of my work because...this inability seems like a limit to my powers of
invention. ... If I can invent poetry, why can't I invent the meaning?'.
His answer is important: 'For me, poetry has its beginning and ending
outside thought.'
From one point of view this must be wrong. Surely poets think? Yes, but
Ashbery's point is that the essential in poetry lies not in the what of
language but the how. Students like to 'boil down' a Shakespeare play to
its 'message'. But thus stripped down the play's 'moral' invariably turns
out to be some ghastly commonplace:'Pride Goeth Before a Fall', say. There
are easier ways of learning that than reading Shakespeare. Ashbery quotes
Lytton Strachey's fine question: 'Who cares what Milton had to say?'. You
don't read Milton for the ideas but for the awe-inspiring words with which
he did his thinking.
And it's in the words, more precisely their sound, that Ashbery shines. He
is a master of cadence, and thinks of his poetry as music firstly. As with
music, the arabesques of his poetry cannot be straightened into statement,
and yet they communicate distinct awarenesses and feelings. Often in his
poems an unpretentious, self-ironic, seriously intelligent voice is trying
to tell you something which, it seems, it may be terribly important, even
vital, for you to know, but which for some reason you are failing to
understand, as if you were hearing only the fragments of a conversation.
It's also possible that Ashbery, like many Americans since Emerson and
William James, is deep down suspicious of thought--that he sides with
experience itself, unresolved into metaphysical meaning. So he admires the
nineteenth century English poet John Clare for an 'accumulation of
particulars' that isn't finally worked up into some grand philosophic
'vision' (as occurs in Clare's near contemporary Wordsworth).
Plato said a poet is 'never able to compose until he has become inspired,
and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him'. It's true of some
poets anyway. Ashbery, simply, is working in latitudes of the mind most of
us don't go to that often. Here is 'At North Farm', from one of his best
collections, A Wave (Penguin, 1984):
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, / At incredible speed,
traveling day and night, / Through blizzards and desert heat, across
torrents, through narrow passes. / But will he know where to find you, /
Recognize you when he sees you, / Give you the thing he has for you? //
Hardly anything grows here, / Yet the granaries are bursting with meal, /
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters. / The streams run with sweetness,
fattening fish; / Birds darken the sky. Is it enough / That the dish of
milk is set out at night, / That we think of him sometimes, / Sometimes and
always, with mixed feelings?
So long as poetry as powerful and mysterious as that continues to be
written, it will continue to be read and taught. Let's hope the YPAPistas
eventually find their way to Ashbery, and to the great tradition in which
he can claim an assured place.
END
Peter Holbrook can be contacted at this email address:
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________________________
John Tranter, Jacket magazine
from John Tranter
Editor, Jacket magazine: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/
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