Ashbery Instruction Pamphlet
A lot of blogs have linked to Meghan O’Rourke’s essay in Slate on “How to read John Ashbery”. I finally got around to reading it. It is a well written, insightful piece that I highly recommend. I’ve never been a big poetry reader, but this made me want to read Ashbery, to delve into his chaotic systems. I much like this passage which makes Ashbery sound contemporary in accord with modern information overload:
Ashbery becomes a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter, so that the poems are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long. Sometimes (as you can imagine) this is infuriating. But in the best of Ashbery, the excess verbiage helps make the moments of lyric focus all the more propulsive and startling, like coming across a lost tune as you spin the dial—the sort of thing that briefly brings promise of “a movement out of the dream into its codification.”
And this which brings visual abstraction and verbal abstraction together:
Admittedly, there is something peculiar about giving up your right, as a reader, to understand the sentences in front of you. It’s one thing to do it while looking at a Cy Twombly painting—somehow, it’s easier to relinquish visual logic than verbal logic, perhaps because vision is already a logic, organizing the waves of information the eye receives into an understandable picture. Words, on the other hand, are our effort to create a logic for ourselves.
This is something I’ve always had trouble with, relinquishing my desire for logic and narrative in works, even visual ones, which is probably why I like comics so much and my favorite Twombly paintings are his series on the Iliad in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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