Line Continuity in The Tennis Court Oath

Throughout John Ashbery's anthology The Tennis Court Oath, the unconventional use of line breaks is a common feature of each poem. Ashbery's line breaks are often startling and unexpected--each line sounds like it has been prematurely cut off, and lines and stanzas are a vast variety of contrasting lengths. Punctuation is used infrequently, and is rarely used to separate lines. Lines begin with both upper and lowercase letters in a way that appears hopelessly arbitrary. Indentations, and general line placement, also fluctuate in a seemingly random fashion. Extra spaces and quotation marks are also seemingly arbitrary features of the poetry. Take, for example, the following selection from the anthology's title poem:

like a particular cry not intervening called the dog “he’s coming! he’s coming” with an emotion felt it sink into peace   

there was no turning back but the end was in sight 

(Ashbery) 

One of the most striking elements of this selection in terms of line breaks is the relative length of the first line as compared to the second line. The first line break seems especially abrupt, as well. With the exception of the quotation marks and sole exclamation point, there is an absence of punctuation in several places a reader might assume there would be punctuation (after the repetition of the "he's coming" line before the quotation marks close, perhaps also at the end of some of the line breaks). Ashbery is clearly disrupting everything poetry claims/claimed is true about how rhythm, cadence, and pace work together in a poem to make it "beautiful." None of Ashbery's poems in Tennis Court Oath "flow" in the way most classic poems do, something I thought was evidenced by our in-class out-loud readings of many of Ashbery's poems. No matter the configuration for the read-aloud sessions--whether readers were asked to read just one line or an entire stanza before switching to the next reader--the poetry, when read aloud, actually seems stubbornly un-flowy. The way each line is highlighted as its own entity by the weird line breaks, absence of punctuation marks that signal how to pace one's reading of the poem, and by the insertion of random indents and extra spaces seems to make each line stagnant--not in a way that suggests that the poem is poorly constructed, but in a way that suggests Ashbury has a desire to allow each line of his poetry to function as its own entity. He challenges his readers to change the way they fundamentally assume poetry should sound by replacing the flowing, breezy cadence poetry typically strives to achieve in lieu of a more disjointed, start-again-stop again rhythm that keeps the reader on his toes. Ashbery's work seeks to evoke a certain emotion from the reader, not necessarily a concrete idea, image, or narrative. His use of line breaks reflects this desire to really connect with the reader viscerally by employing methods of construction typically unexpected in poetry.