This otherness, this

“Not-being-us” is all there is to look at

In the mirror

—from “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

John Ashbery didn’t much like poetry readings, especially his own—“I can’t stand listening to myself reading poetry,”  he said with visible discomfort in that 2011 TIME Magazine ordeal of an interview; nor did he really like attending poetry readings in general. He never seemed to me to greatly enjoy the many readings I heard him give over the years. Listening now to his early readings from The Tennis Court Oath and other books—those on PennSound from ’63 and ’64—I’m reminded of the confusion I felt back then as a student attending his readings when I sometimes found it hard to make sense of what I was hearing. He tended to read in flat and barely nuanced rhythms that seem to sound along a consistent and fairly regular surface even as the content is anything but consistent and regular—a sort of mirroring askew of content. Then suddenly the poems are funny, and it’s hard to say when it happens but one gradually begins listening to or through the person John Ashbery, the actual being there in front of you, while getting little sense of who that person is. One feels one knows him without knowing him; and, in a way, knows him less and less, as the surprises accumulate. It’s all in the voice, a persistent familiarity to which one nevertheless has little actual connection. A certain bare sense of person persists through it all, its basic completeness, even as new gaps never stop opening. The sense of familiarity allows one to inhabit often very strange territories, making new connections that nevertheless can’t quite be made. 

Listening recently to Ashbery reading in 1998 from Wallace Stevens' "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" I got the sense that here may be one source of his permission to read very richly textured and nuanced verse in a rather flat voice, although Stevens retained a certain literary solemnity and basic musicality. It also suggests another connection of Ashbery to Stevens as a poet of the mind, as in Stevens’ “Of Modern Poetry”: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice.” Stevens also tended to read all poems alike as if to suggest that the mind’s nuance precedes arrival in the voice and so is best left undistorted by interpretative vocalization. 

Anyway it’s hard to imagine a nuancing of voice appropriate to Ashbery’s powerful long complex poems like “Fragment” (from The Double Dream of Spring)—which is anything but itself a fragment—or “The Skaters” (from Rivers and Mountains) where current of mind and the intricacies of surface are indistinguishable. Voice enters the condition close to pure flow. Its aim is in the endlessness present at any moment that strikes a level of mind undiminished in its daily registration—mind as in his Flow Chart. As he says there, 

“This the  

place

to be.”

I recall him explaining why he chose not to read in a more nuanced way by saying he didn’t want to influence the experience of the listener. He was no doubt aware that listeners tend to expect the performing poet to do the work of understanding for them, putting them at ease while keeping them entertained, even at expense of freedom to create their own perspective—a sacrifice of options Ashbury had the generous awareness not to encourage. So apparently he created an overall voice aiming to make a free space in which unpredictable experience could happen. What he conveys is a habitable space peripheral to himself and personality itself; the poetic transmission is not content as such but a way of being and its quality of attention.  The consistency of that openness is what leads to an encompassing music. One is not encouraged to bear down on the sharp particulars but to let the flow lift you onto the immediate wave in viewing through the listening. 

Quite often reading his poems I have the sense of being in a conversation in which certain things are disclosed, and afterwards it’s not the specific information that remains but a lingering yet revelatory intimacy. There’s never any doubt one is listening to the unembellished actual person who, unlike any other poet I can recall, barely departs from his most ordinary, relaxed voice in order to make the poem sound a certain way. And once having heard the poet read the work, the voice tends to stay with you even in silent reading, a power of “person” paradoxically having become sheer vehicle, a veritable impersona. One leaves with the effects of a meaningful event, as if some subtle thing has changed, something has shifted. 

The daimon is not in the details but in the alternative arrangement. 

Listening through the poems, early and late, as written and spoken, I learn to hear ways leading into the total music of his poiesis; one gets a feel for the overall livingness—the life music—indeed, reflexively, even of one’s own poietic being—via the implicate music of a singular voice. It carries a charge and teaches something essential. It’s the voice so much itself that it can allow anything to come into its flow—an implicit freedom to be whatever it finds itself being.

The foreground non-music of the voice performs an other music of space magic like a convex mirror in which portrait happens yet can scarcely be contained. Identity is never not in question. One’s own readerly look is the reference beam that meets the captured soul and frees it for further dis-torsion of recognition, a mirroring by alterity.

What is there to think about a poet who can end a poem with “I don’t think.” And here we are with that “pure/Affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything”—which makes me want to end a poem:

I believe in miracles

in a convex mirror.

___

7/31 & 8/5/22—Barrytown, New York / George Quasha © 2022