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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by John Vincent

I guess I don't have a very strong sense of my own identity and I find it very easy to move from one person in the sense of a pronoun to another and this again helps produce a kind of polyphony . . . which I again feel is a means towards a greater naturalism. (Perloff 258.

Ashbery suggests three things that seem to contradict one another, and critics usually just highlight and dwell on the not-very-strong-sense-of-my-own-identity strand without disimbricating it from the others. Dissecting this very statement, we note a shift, if not a shiftiness. There are three seemingly contradictory statements: (1) Pronouns shift in Ashbery poems because inside his poems they are less important than the form of address; that is, the speaking voice breaks down the barriers between pronouns as it sees necessary to balance its "equations." (2) Voice, and thus the equations it formulates, exists in conversation, boundary-crossing traffic, with its subjects such that subject-object relations in his poems inform the speaking voice. In other words, the "equations" formulate and are formulated by their variables in a give-and-take that defines the very speaker who utters them. And (3) Ashbery has a weak sense of his own identity. The first proposition places the speaker in a dominant and the second in a subordinate relation to its subjects; the last proposition, then, seems to contradict the first two propositions by its claimed naivete about identity. However, I think, differently inflected, this last statement is more of a manifesto than a confession. From the above two propositions it is clear that identity and subject-object relations are very much at the forefront of Ashbery's poetic practice and consciousness; his statement suggests that he does not have a very strong sense of "identity" as a flatly formulated condition. Identity is precisely what Ashbery is strongly active in critiquing, strategizing about, and reformulating at both molecular and molar levels in his writing. His comment, inflected with this sense of his investment in interrogating identity, suggests that his work with identity aims toward a mimesis not of his own private "weak" sense of himself as a bounded individual but of identity as it is more complicatedly formulated than in the colloquial "sense of oneself."

The equations in which Ashbery's pronouns are variables do not often have simple resolutions heralded by poetic equal signs. He suggests a way to consider his poems' analogy to mathematics in "Litany," where he writes: "I want to write / Poems that are as inexact as mathematics. I have been / Sitting making mudpies, in the sparkling sunlight, / And the difficulty of giving them away / Doesn't matter so long as I want you / To enjoy them. Enjoy these!. . ." (AWK 91). "Mathematics" and "mudpies," as Ashbery configures them in these lines, are structures of meaning upon which he models, and in whose light he considers, his poems. Mathematics are internally coherent but difficult to translate from the abstract (therefore "inexact"), and mudpies are internally incoherent but coherently categorically constituted by their translation into gifts. The smeared juxtaposition of these two suggests that this speaker/poet sees the internal coherence of math and the external, purely relational coherence of mudpies as equivalent: both are systems and gifts, and their desired giftness outreaches their internal coherence as systems. Thus the logically organized and the pleasurably unorganized share the problem of translation into the world, and the translation requires a willing receiver. But that the chosen recipient is willing to receive them is less important than the maker's desire that he or she enjoy them. This is the organizing principle of math, mudpies, and poetry for Ashbery. In other words, equals signs in Ashbery's poetics, equivalences and closed analogical structures, are at the service of wanting "you / To enjoy them," at the service of the reader's pleasure as the author imagines it. This offers a more coherent sense of what pronouns are meant to do in Ashbery's poetry than usual inflection inflicted on the oft-quoted interview.