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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by John Vincent

This part prose-part haiku poem suggests that difficulty is a way of preserving the constructability of his poems for homosexuals not yet born, preventing the poems from being "claimed by the first person who happens on them" (39). Ashbery declares that he wishes to preserve his poems' power to name, and therefore hold and reduce, pain for this particular "not yet born" audience. While this does not suggest that his poetry is only addressed to homosexuals, it does suggest that he has particular designs for serving an audience of homosexuals; he wants to aid and abet a particular use of his poetry in the midst of other uses, trying to ensure that other critical and readerly appropriations do not interfere with his transmission of the "possibility of getting along without pain, for awhile" to future gay readers. More general meanings, as discussed above, are not being dismissed out-of-hand but are considered possible obstacles in the way of this poetic project.

Shoptaw's scheme, then, with these readings in mind, proves useful, not insofar as it accounts for a hypostasization based on the absence of homosexuality but rather that it accounts for a hypostasization simultaneous with its presence. This general sense that homosexuality infuses all of the poetry seems helpful insofar as it carves irrigation canals by which gay readers and readings can reach the poems, but, when forwarded in the absence of homosexual thematics, it flattens the peculiarities and specificities of influence that homosexual meaning has in poems across Ashbery's career. I want to argue that Ashbery does precisely not leave homosexuality out of his poems, while they still "behave differently."

Homosexual thematics arise from both readings of single poems and from readings of Ashbery as a theorist across poems. The difficulty associated with these thematics is not just self-protective in the sense that it protects the author from persecution, but is more often self-protective in the sense that the homosexual meanings are precisely that which is being protected. Ashbery's misrepresentative poetics are partly symptomatic of what types of articulations around gay desire are available in culture and language, but they are also willful refusals to settle into narrative, lyric, or imagistic wholeness without registering by disjunction and breakage the realness, specialness, and particularity of gay meanings and lives.

SHIFTY PRONOUNS: "THE GRAPEVINE"

Some readily available sites of this different behavior are Ashbery's famous shifty pronouns. Critics often quote the interview with Ashbery in which he discusses pronominal shiftiness directly:

The personal pronouns in my work very often seem to be like the variables in an equation. 'You' can be myself or it can be another person, someone whom I'm addressing, and so can 'he' and 'she' for that matter and 'we.' (qtd. in Perloff 258)

Ashbery suggests that the "point" to this shiftiness is that "we are all somehow aspects of a consciousness giving rise to the poem and the fact of addressing someone, myself or someone else, is what's the important thing at the particular moment rather than the particular person involved" (Perloff 258). He then makes the much-grasped-at comment that