Reading Other Traditions, watching John Ashbery explain, patiently & with humor, how to read to his audience at Harvard is instructive, and not only because it demonstrates that this Harvard alum recognizes the limits of education at his old school. If, in fact, Irvin Ehrenpreis, whose three-volume biography of Swift is still treated as definitive two decades after the death of its author, tenured at Virginia, twice a recipient of Guggenheim fellowships, the sort of person who gave papers with titles such as “The Wholeness of History: Social Theory and Literary Criticism,” who was himself the first to argue that there is no consistent narrator in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and who reviewed contemporary poetry from Stevens in the 1940s up to Carolyn Forché four decades later, can be seen trapped within what it would be fair to call the referential fallacy, one can hardly expect less “professional” readers to fair any better.

Close readings of poets, neglected or otherwise, are invariably silhouettes. One highlights what matters &, by contrast, create a landscape against the background of everything else. Ashbery’s approach to all this, indeed his ambivalence & cautiousness, are worth noting. First, he is meticulous & methodical, presenting his poets in order by birth year:

Ø       John Clare, 1793

Ø       Thomas Love Beddoes, 1803

Ø       Raymond Roussel, 1877

Ø       John Wheelwright, 1897

Ø       Laura Riding, 1901

Ø       David Schubert, 1913

Of these, four might be considered modernists, or perhaps postmoderns avant la lettre, the first two romantics. Among the modernists, only Riding outlived Gertrude Stein, and Riding largely forbade the printing or reprinting of her creative work for most of the four decades prior to 1970.

Ashbery is also careful at the outset to place his poets well within a series of brackets. All were chosen because of their influence on Ashbery’s work, “but one can’t choose one’s influences, they choose you.” None qualifies as “major,” even among Ashbery’s own acknowledged influences (e.g., Auden, “chronologically the first and therefore the most important influence,” Stevens, Moore, Stein, Bishop, Williams “at times,” Pasternak & Mandelstam, tho he later adds Hölderin as well), nor among the longer list of poets “who have meant a lot to me at times” that contains F.T. Prince, William Empson, Nicholas Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Ruth Herschberger, Joan Murray, Jean Garrigue, Paul Goodman & Samuel Greenberg. “I could go on, but you get the idea. These are not poets of the center stage, though they have been central to me.”

Each of his poets is presented with a modicum of biography, after which Ashbery poses something of a rhetorical question:

“What is it about Clare that attracts us so much today?”

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“Under the circumstances [of his work being out of print & hard to find], it is still difficult for readers of poetry to know whether or not the case [of Thomas Love Beddoes] represents a significant ‘adjunct to the muses’ diadem.’”

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“Robbe-Grillet says of Roussel: ’Here we have the perfect reversal of what people agree to call a good writer: Raymond Rousel has nothing to say, and he says it badly.’ One could quarrel with this. If ‘nothing’ means a labyrinth of brilliant stories told only for themselves, then perhaps Roussel has nothing to say. Does he say it badly?”

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“It isn’t a question of Eliot’s ‘shadow’ that falls between the conception and the act, but a fertile short-circuiting, the result of many tensions pulling in opposite directions, that is the air [John Wheelwright’s] poetry breathes.”

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“What then are we to do with a body of poetry whose author [Laura Riding] warns us that we have very little chance of understanding it, and who believes that poetry itself is a lie?”

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“How then does one discuss Schubert, or more precisely, how does one talk about him to an audience of whom few will likely have read his work?”

With the lone exception of Roussel, in which the question leads to a rather hasty summation, defending Roussel through a comparison with John Cage that lasts less than five sentences, this posed or framed issue leads to some extensive examples & close, if casual, readings. Ashbery’s response to the question he poses of/for the work of Laura Riding in many ways stands true for his stance with regards to all six authors:

Why, misread it, of course, if it seems to merit reading, as hers so obviously does. This is what happens to any poetry: no poem can ever hope to produce the exact sensation in even one reader that the poet intended; all poetry is written with this understanding on the part of the poet and reader; if it can’t stand the test of what Harold Bloom names “misprision,” then we leave it to pass on to something else.

It is as if, coming to the famous last sentence of Wittenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ashbery would have us revised it to read That which we cannot speak about, we must read ever so much more attentively.

I’m not particularly convinced of Ashbery’s position here, but that’s okay – I’m interested just to hear him make the argument – these are issues worth mulling over, worth dreaming about. I note just how much more specific the questions or posed issues or whatever you want to call them (topic sentences?) become as the lectures proceed from one to the next – the book really doesn’t take off intellectually until the final three essays, but you absolutely have to wade through the first three to get there, as if Ashbery must himself discover what exactly the unifying topic of this series will be. In each case, the answer is some version of how do we know if some writing is great if it is also, at the same time, unintelligible? And what do we mean if we say that unintelligible writing is great?

Good question. Like his influences, Ashbery’s own stance here reflects his age and time. All of the poetry here existed before he himself began publishing – the Schubert poem I printed yesterday was first published by Poetry in July, 1936; it almost certainly could not appear in the decadent edition being published in 2005. There is a lot of work in recent linguistics (from the parsimony principle, a concept of the 1970s, to cognitive blends today) that suggests how one can read work that thwarts a projected referential realism – one senses that Ashbery has read none of it & probably doesn’t feel any need to do so. He may be right.

But one feels further, both in the kind of argument he is trying to make & where & how he chooses to do it – a prestigious series at Harvard, yet dawdling for a decade before getting the volume into print – that this is the Ashbery we know from the poetry as well, at once audacious & tentative, a combination that can be as maddening as it is lovable. What Ashbery is offering here – and consciously doing it without referring to Stein or to language poetry, two sources where it might seem more obvious – is that there exists, existed, a rift in writing, a cleft in meaning, and that it has been there even within the School of Quietude as well as in the salons of modernism & loft spaces of the post avant. He couches it when he writes that “These are not the poets of center stage, thought they have been central to me,” with the even more coy assertion that “If that means I too am off-center, so be it: I am only telling it as it happened, not as it should have happened.”