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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by John Vincent

"Soonest Mended" begins similarly to "The Fairies' Song": "Barely tolerated, living on the margin / In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued / On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso . . ." "Soonest Mended" campily characterizes the speaker and his lover as heroines in a high poetic drama. (The boundary of the "we" shifts to include a larger group of people at several points in the poem, but the default and most common mode of the second-person pronoun here is singular, and this single other person seems a lover: they have "made a home" together.) However, as we shall see, "The Fairies' Song," the later, more explicitly gay poem, ends not with the assertion that carrying on living is enough, "For this is action, this not being sure," which the earlier poem ends on, but rather with the assertion that the action of living in a "spoiled" identity is intense and exciting, and, in fact, a source of lyric vivacity. Both poems do, however, start by proclaiming a crisis and close with an argument about closure and action, suggesting that true action is often inaction, or undecidedness, and true closure often allows opposites to coexist in tension rather than either repeating and therefore instantiating (and fulfilling) a pattern or following the chemical model of a positive and negative charge canceling each other out to reduce tension.

The second stanza of "The Fairies' Song" shows the result of fairies being harassed and taking harassing as what being gay is all about:

Sometimes one of us will get included in the trash And end up petulant and bored at the multiple opportunities for mischief, Screaming like a gull at vacuity, Hating it for being what it is.

Ashbery hopes to provide some alternatives to this result, thus the paratactically generous "there are. . . there are . . . there are" structure of the middle stanzas of the poem. It is not that "we" can prevent "our" numbers from ending up in the trash, but rather that "we" can forge responses different from "screaming like a gull at vacuity, / Hating it for being what it is." The "there are"'s catalogue sites of waste. Pastoral "Manure piles under the slop and surge of a March sun," "pale plumes of dullness," and "insipid flowering meads" begin to bend toward more abstract and less pastoral wastes: "Wastes of acting out daytime courtesies at night, // Deadfalls of resolution, arks of self-preservation / Arenas of unused indulgence" (9395). In the midst of this list comes a stanza describing a moment of subdued but expressed desire:

Thunderheads of after-dinner cigar smoke in some varnished salon Offer ample cover for braiding two coat-tails together Around the clumsy arm of an s-shaped settee. In a screech the occasion has disappeared, the clamor resumed like a climate.

The "braiding" of coat-tails can only occur under a smelly, dark cloud, around the "clumsy" arm of an awkward piece of furniture. This moment of expression occurs in silence and evaporates in a queeny "screech" and "clamor." The list of images, pastoral and abstract, insists on the presence of waste and discomfort in any momentary beauty or landscape the fairies can achieve. At the close of the list, Ashbery asks when this wild ride of waste and exaltation stops: "Where do we get off / The careening spear of rye?"(95). His answer to this question is the proposition that "we" don't, but that "we" need to theorize the mixture of good and bad from the position of someone who has to drink sour milk telling himself: "But it all gets mixed up in your stomach anyway" (95). Ashbery suggests a change of point of view, or what I have been suggesting is a declared theoretical standpoint: it's not how the milk tastes, it's that it fulfills a nutritional need. Thus, experiences might never be unmitigatedly good for fairies, but it is possible to rethink the mixture of good with bad not as good or even satisfactory but as at least livable and postulate livability as the possibility for exaltation.