John Ashbery is among the most
popular contemporary American poets. He was part of the avant-garde movement
and thus developed a very unconventional form of poetry. In The Tennis Court Oath, a collection of
his poems, Ashbery utilizes interesting techniques to construct his lines. In
my opinion, Ashbery’s poems were not difficult to read but instead difficult to
obtain a clear meaning out of. Although the form and construction of lines in
John Cage’s writing was not traditional, he still had a distinctive approach;
his approach was explicit and identifiable. With Ashbery on the other hand, it
is tricky to pin point exactly what approach he is taking to construct his
lines. But based on some reoccurring themes and patterns, we sense an
underlying surrealist disposition in his poems.
Initially when one starts to read his
poems, the first line makes sense, but as soon as you move to the next line,
there is a sudden shift in subject. In the poem, “The Tennis Court Oath,” for
example, he begins by writing, “what had you been thinking about” which as we
normally read seems to make sense, but in the second line, he writes, “the face
studiously bloodied.” The structure of the line and type of phrase that we
would expect to see following the first line is not there, there is but rather
something odd and clearly not fitting here. This constant occurrence of jumping
from one subject to the next after every line creates dysfunction. However,
this technique is reflective of surrealism. The thematic shifts that commonly
occur in his poems are parallel to the process of thinking. Our thoughts are
not fluid and consistent, but instead they are moving from one idea to the next
without any conscious effort. That is simply how the mind works and Ashbury’s
alternations between connected and disconnected lines mimics this human
process.
Furthermore, there is evidence that unlike
some other poets that we have studied like James Joyce, Ashbery puts a great
emphasis on the meaning of the word rather than the sound. Often times, his
poems do not follow a clear rhyme scheme; he instead uses his lines to pose
contradictions. He juxtaposes themes frequently throughout his poems. One
example of this that stood out to me was at the end of his poem “How Much
Longer will I be able to Inhabit the Devine Sepulcher…” In the last two stanza
of this poem, he talks about sand. But in the first stanza, he presents the
image of darkness along side the sand and in the second stanza, he presents it
along side the image of light.
Ashbery also tends to us imagery that
is powerful yet paradoxical. In “The Suspended Life” for instance, he uses the
phrase the “igloo sun.” While this may be easy to imagine, we see that these two
images are very different from one another; an igloo often evokes the feeling
of coldness whereas the sun symbolizes warmth. In presenting theses two images
together, Ashbery develops a certain degree of strangeness in his writing.
Overall I think all of the comments and ideas about Ashbery that Manal mentioned were accurate and thought provoking. She talks about his line structure, his relation to Cage and surrealism while mentioning some of the language devices he uses. Manal talks about Ashbery’s use of difficulty and I fully agree with what she had to say. Ashbery was in no means difficult to read word for word but if you asked me what I was reading, I would have no clue. Understanding his poetry was very difficult and nearly impossible because of the subject shifts that happened in nearly every line. Every line could talk about something different then the previous but also sometimes Ashbery would add in a strange word to a line to really throw you off. It was almost as if just when you thought you were understanding what you are reading, he switches subject or adds random words and punctuation and your lost again. I agree with Manal when she says it relates to surrealism and the thought process. In our thoughts, we often have the tendency to relate one thought to another seemingly unrelated one. I would have to say that I thought Ashbery exaggerated what he thought a thought process was because there was no association that could be found between each line. Manal mentions that this technique that he uses creates dysfunction in his writing and I have to agree. I wonder if Ashbery really intended for his audiences to be so confused or frantically searching for a relationship in his poems? I somewhat don’t think so because the title of his poems don’t confuse me. For some reason I feel like the title of his poems relate to his poems singularly even though I cant understand his poems overall. Manal also mentions that Ashbery can be paradoxical in his poems with his wording but I think that adds to his dysfunction. She relates it to imagery and how powerful his imagery is. Ashbery has this awesome way of creating powerful and vivid images from just a line of his poetry that consisted of maybe five words. The images would always be short lived line by line because once you read on to the next line the image would disappear because your brain wouldn’t know how to connect the previous image with the new information it was interpreting. There is one idea that Manal had that I thought was pretty interpretive of Ashbery’s work. She mentioned that Ashbery focuses more on the meaning of the word rather than the sound. At first, I had a hard time seeing how he did that but then I realized just how much he did it in each of his lines. Every word placed in a specific line was placed their to add to the other words of that lone and not to the overall rhyme scheme or overall meaning of the poem. As I said, every line in his poems could almost be read as a separate sentence on a different page.
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