Ashbery--Amy

     In his book of poems, "The Tennis Court Oath," John Ashbery plays with structure and syntax. Ashbery's manipulation of form and structure is apparent in his poem, "Rain." The poem is divided into many short stanzas, some of them four or five lines, others only a line or two, which seem to float across the page like drips of rain falling from the sky. Ashbery manipulates the structure of the poem in order to illustrate the title of the poem.
      Within the poem itself, there is an interest in breaks and transitions. For instance, the poem is divided into four sections, each one titled with a Roman numeral. But even within the lines and stanzas themselves, there are abrupt breaks and transitions. Take, for instance, the first two lines: "The spoon of your head/crossed by livid stems." These two lines make up the first stanza of the poem. The two lines seem to be describing the same image, however it is ambiguous as to what "the spoon of the head" looks like and what sort of "livid stems" are crossing that head. Because Ashbery chooses to use the word "crossed" rather than "crosses," the sentence is grammatically incomplete, and the reader is held in suspense, expecting the next line to complete the sentence and perhaps add clarity to the image of the "head" and "stems." However, the proceeding stanza is "The chestnuts large clovers wiped." The capitalization of "The" implies that this is a new sentence or idea, even though the previous stanza did not end on a period. Also, syntactically speaking, there is no continuity between "crossed by livid stems" and "The chestnuts large clovers wiped." If one disregards the grammatical structure of these two 'sentences,' there is perhaps some continuity between the "livid stems" and the "clovers," however, the syntactic disconnect between the two lines makes this connection ambiguous. It is as if each stanza, or line even, is a separate raindrop or separate idea, and all of the raindrops are falling into place in a disjointed, broken order.
     Ashbery's disjointed style keeps the reader on her toes, however, the poem is not completely unapproachable. Although ideas and sentences are constantly shifting, the interesting and vivid poetry keeps the reader as grounded as is possible in a poem such as this. What is most interesting about the imagery is that it is vivid, but still has an aspect of ambiguity. Again, consider the opening lines, "The spoon of your head/crossed by livid stems." When Ashbery writes, "the spoon of your head," he is clearly has a very specific image in mind, however, different readers may picture "the spoon of the head" differently. Same goes for the "livid stems." "Livid" and "stems" are specific enough words that they conjure up a distinct image in the reader's head, however they are still ambiguous enough that no two people will have the same interpretation of "livid."
     By playing with imagery, syntax, and structure, Ashbery is able to create interesting poetry that is both specific and ambiguous, jarring, yet not completely arbitrary.