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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by John Vincent

A poem called "The Fairies' Song" from The Vermont Notebook (1975) not only takes homosexuality as its explicit theme but also addresses Ashbery's own position in his poems as a "fairy singing," putting forward a poetics explicitly inflected by his sexuality. This poem outlines and enacts a poetic strategy for dealing with the trials of homosexual identity. It suggests why homosexuals might have a particular relation to songs, that is, poems or verbal expressions in general, and also offers a strategy for keeping this particularity particular. In other words, the poem is both a fairy's song and has as its subject the further production and encouragement of fairy songs.

"The Fairies' Song" begins with "Clouding up again. Certain days there is a feeling that whatever we arrange / Will sooner or later get all fucked up" (93). That "certain . . . feeling" arouses "explosions of a 19th-century, garden-variety form of intellectual rage." But Ashbery suggests that, when confronted with this "certain . . . feeling," a fairy is "too far in the glade, the way this is all about harassing." "This" is the condition of being homosexual. A homophobic culture "fucks up" plenty in its harassing, but, Ashbery asserts, being harassed is not the sole defining mark of being gay, though it might sometimes seem it. To get caught up only in the unpleasantness of life in a homophobic culture is to miss not only what pleasures there are in ecstatic moments but also what "charity" there is in "the hard moments" (DDS 19). This formulation is offered in "Soonest Mended" from the earlier The Double Dream of Spring (1970), which shares the thematic of making the best of a "spoiled" identity with "The Fairies' Song," but is far less explicit in locating its subjects as homosexuals.

"Soonest Mended" takes its title from the cliche "least said, soonest mended," and its performatively absent first phrase could possibly even dictate both a poetics and a politics almost completely in opposition to those in "The Fairies' Song." This title could be advocating discretion or even silence as strategies for negotiating the difficulties of homosexual politics and life in American culture. The later poem, in contrast, while not a battle cry exactly, does call for self-celebrating song. But as is often the case with solitary phrases (even ghost phrases like this one) in Ashbery, "least said" may be embedded in another context of irony, comment, or persona, and refuses to be pointed in any single direction. The title could be the best expression of the culture that "barely tolerates" (DDS 17) the speaker and his lover, which then serves as the spur for the utterance that is the poem. The uncertainty that clings to the title must be considered as having its own "charity" as well as humor. "Least said, soonest mended," the cliche, commands terseness and action, neither of which occurs in "Soonest Mended": there is nothing particular to be done and much verbal production about it. In face of the advice to constrict speech and act, Ashbery's poem dilates dreamily, but his dreamy tone takes on a kind of argumentative weight in the proximity of this credo.