John Ashbery wrote “The Hod Carrier” in the mid-1960s, publishing it first in Angel Hair before collecting it in The Double Dream of Spring. The poem contains within itself many of the elements that have made Ashbery the great “crossover” poet among the New Americans. Perhaps most significantly, the poem can be read as an instance of dramatic monolog, a mode that would appear – on the surface at least – to align it as much with the work of, say, Richard Howard & Frank Bidart as it does with Frank O’Hara or Jimmy Schuyler.

 

Of the three great poetic innovations of the 19^th Century – free verse, the prose poem & the dramatic monolog – it has been the dramatic monolog that has been most completely adopted & adapted by the conservative elements of the school of quietude. Ashbery’s dramatic monolog’s, however, are of an entirely different order than normative ones that propose to reveal the true meaning of an “I” without directly “saying” it. The first person singular in fact never appears in “The Hod Carrier,” nor does Ashbery ever demonstrate much, if any, interest in unpacking the narrator as subject. Rather, the “I” is posited mostly by the poem’s address to “you,” reinforced by an occasional “we”: “Your curved visor’s the supposition that unites us.”

 

Although the text certainly can be read as suggesting that “you” is the hod carrier, the poem never says so directly, coming closest really in that line quoted above. Instead, “The Hod Carrier” permits that noun phrase to pose at the page top in all its “titleness,” a working-class occupation that implies rough trade, hinting at a context for a line like “The stone you cannot perfect, the sharp iron blade you cannot prevent,” but otherwise aloof, its relation to the text not unlike a painting’s title typed onto a card pasted to a gallery wall.

 

The energy and language of the poem are organized around two formal tensions. The first has to do with the prosodic implications of the question. The second – and they’re not unrelated – has to do with the ambiguous relationship between stanza and sentence.

 

Questions entail something akin to a reverse prosody – the hard stop of the question mark is almost always at the point of greatest emphasis, whereas in other sentence types such emphasis moves around a fair amount. Like this isn’t so uncommon among teenagers? Especially in California? But it is somewhat uncommon in poetry. If you count the number of question marks in a book of contemporary poetry & poetics – not that hard to do in the age of PDF files – you get a sense of them as relatively rare. Pierre Joris’ 18 page chapbook (16 of text), The Fifth Season, has just 9; Michael Palmer’s anthology Code of Signals, which includes critical articles and transcribed conversations in addition to poetry, has just 76 in the 99 page version on the Duration Press website; Keith Waldrop’s Garden of Effort has just 19 in its 67 pages, although that number is swollen by the three times that two question marks occur on the same line.

 

“The Hod Carrier” fills two pages in the new Angel Hair anthology, a half page more in the 1976 Ecco Press paperback of the Double Dream of Spring. The poem offers three questions, two marked by punctuation. As one has come to expect from Ashbery, they are not typical questions. Here is the first:

 

But this new way we are, the melon head

Half-mirrored, the way sentences suddenly spurt up like gas

Or sing and jab, is it that we accepted each complication

As it came along, and are therefore happy with the result?

 

This sentence is more than half the way complete – & a characteristically long half way for Ashbery as well – before the element of the verb phrase is indicates that it is turning into a question. It alters the tone of the passage as if retroactively. The second instance, immediately following the passage just quoted, is even more obtuse in that it lacks that terminal punctuation, forcing the reader to decide where precisely the question ends before finally arriving eleven lines and five stanza breaks later at a period. Again, prosody & tone will shift depending on where the reader identifies the question as somehow being asked or over. After a “normal” sentence that may itself be several, depending on how you decide to interpret its eight lines and two internal stanza breaks, we arrive at the third and final question:

 

Are these floorboards, to be stared

in moments of guilt, as wallpaper can stream away and yet

 

                                                    You cannot declare it?

 

Even following the verb-first character of a normative question, Ashbery manages once again, right between yet and You to completely torque & twist not just the syntax, but also the typical questioning tone. If the first example above represents a fairly common linguistic occurrence – a normal sentence into which a question has been inserted – this last one raises the stakes by giving us a question into which a question has been inserted. It’s almost impossible to read these lines aloud without your voicing going beyond a comfortable pitch.

 

Which, often enough, in Ashbery, seems to be the idea. I’m going to further illustrate the second tension, between stanza & utterance, with the stretch of language that includes the second of the three questions in ”The Hod Carrier,” ending with the next moment of actual punctuation:

 

Or was it as a condition of seeing

That we vouchsafed aid and comfort to the season

 

                                                            As each came begging

 

And the present, so flat in its belief, so “outside it”

As it maintains, becomes the blind side of

The fulfillment of that condition; and work, ripeness

And tired but resolute standing up for one’s rights

Mean leaning toward the stars

 

                                                       The way a tree leans toward the sun

 

Not meaning to get close

 

                                                        And the bird walked right up that tree.*

 

Where the reader decides the question ends, if it does, will determine how the passage itself is read. The possibility that the question merely fades away amounts to a minor form of torture for a voiced reading. Because Ashbery begins each line, & especially each new stanza, with a capital letter, both permits the reader multiple possible “new beginnings” without committing the author to any one of them.

 

Ashbery is often treated as though he were a poet strictly of philosophy & dazzling imagery, and while both aspects are certainly active in his poetry, he is also – and has always been – a supreme poet of the ear, as strong in a very different way at this as, say, Olson or Duncan. If only we open our ears, to hear.

 

 

 

 

* The Angel Hair Anthology version has no stanza break between these two last lines, while The Double Dream of Spring does.