Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by John Vincent

Among critics there is no disagreement about John Ashbery's sexuality. Perhaps that is because Ashbery is actually a registered homosexual. He came out to the draft board and was exempted from military service during the Korean War (Shoptaw 5). On the other hand, Ashbery, although registered with the draft board, often does not "register" as a gay poet. For instance, the Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (ed. Stephen Coote) does not include him, even though it was published years after Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the "Triple Crown" of American poetry prizes: Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. Ashbery's absence in this anthology is even more striking when one considers that at the time of its publication by Penguin, Ashbery was one of the "Penguin Poets." Critics do, however, pay enough attention to Ashbery's sexuality to note that the masculine pronoun in Ashbery's poetry can address "a friend," "a lover," or "the poet himself," and when examining him as a love poet, critics make sure to consider the beloved as male.(1) These same critics, though, while they acknowledge that pronouns and reference are transformed in the aura of Ashbery's sexuality, do little but remark about the transformation.

Contemporary cultural events like the passage of the "Defense of Marriage Act," which made sure that states could deny gay marriages before states were even asked to consider accepting them, underline the huge difference in cultural value between heterosexual and homosexual love bonds. Homosexual and heterosexual desire and bonds, given their different cultural valuation, have entirely different available narratives, legality, forms of expression, as well as different available relations to abstraction, specification, self-definition, community, ritual, temporality, and spatiality. This is not to suggest that there are not overlaps, but rather that any treatment of homosexual desire as simply another form of desire (read, heterosexual) will be fundamentally flawed, if not also in the service of a homophobic fantasy of a world without gay people in it.

This said, there is little argument among critics who have the slightest sympathy for Ashbery's work that "homosexual moments" in a text are interesting and useful ways to tease some of his poems into meaning Homosexuality enters and then exits this critical stage with little fuss, which means it causes little outrage but also attracts little serious, sustained attention. This ease is underwritten, in part at least, by "Ashbery's difficulty." That is, as Helen Vendler has remarked, "it is popularly believed, with some reason, that the style itself is impenetrable, that it is impossible to say what an Ashbery poem is 'about'" (Music 224). Since reading "homosexuality" in Ashbery's poetry allows a point of penetration through grammatical, referential, or epistemic murk, its value as a critical tool seems inestimable At the same time, the difficulty of Ashbery's poetry allows critics to disregard homosexual thematics when they are not useful to their other projects.

For instance, Helen Vendler, against what she declares is a popular belief that Ashbery's poems are not "about" anything, elucidates some themes in the lyrics in Ashbery's 1980 volume As We Know. Vendler suggests that these lyrics are about "growing up, fidelity, about identity, about death, about ... the permanence of art, about construction, about deconstruction, and perpetual creative joy in the face of death" (Music 237). Notice how homosexuality is not just missing as its own thematic but is also missing as something that would inflect the other thematics, as in "growing up gay, "fidelity without heterosexual marriage narratives in place," "identity in the face of erasing and phobic cultural forces," "death without a comforting/troubling narrative of reproductive continuation," and so on.(2) These do not seem mere qualifications but are actually constitutive of the themes that Vendler locates "Fidelity," to point out the most striking instance, needs to be positioned in terms of the kind of relations it describes. A gay man has no uncomplicated relation to "adultery" or "fidelity" since these words depict activities and conditions based on a legal marriage bond; in order to use such heterocentric terms about gay people or bonds one needs at least to mention that they are being torqued from their general cultural usage. Furthermore, this is not a volume without explicit homosexual content. Many of the poems entail homosexuality as an inflection of their central thematics, and two poems in this collection are eponymously and frankly about male-male relations; they declare themselves up front and go on to meditate on the male-male bonds suggested in their titles.(3) "My Erotic Double" has the poet flirting with an image of his own lazy self, and "The Plural of 'Jack-in-the-Box,'" the final poem of the collection, muses on how homosexual bonds might affect the spatial, mythic, and linguistic boundaries that contain them.