'Whispers Out of Time': The syntax of being in the poetry of John Ashbery

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1995 by Jody Norton

To follow Ashbery's interrogatory reflections for any length of time is to be made inescapably aware of his speakers' relentless desire to arrive, amidst the "blizzard / Of speculation" (As 44), at some understanding of their subjectivity, momentary though it may be. In the closing lines of "The New Spirit," Ashbery refers to

the major question that revolves around you, your being here. And this is again affirmed in the stars: just their presence, mild and unquestioning, is proof that you have got to begin in the way of choosing some one of the forms of answering that question, since if they were not there the question would not exist to be answered. (Three 51)

Despite the self-satirical effect of this less-than-earnest play with "questions" which are not questions at all, the point beneath the amusement is a serious one. "Being here" is an unavoidable question, urged simply and powerfully by experience, and one feels pressured "to begin . . . choosing some one of the forms of answering" (cf. "Why are there essents rather than nothing?" the opening sentence of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics).

Ashbery writes, in "Litany":

Who cares, anyway, about What it is or what it was like? You must be made to care. Yes, I am mad, I think, and I do care. I can't help it. I am mad, And don't care. (As 59)

In an internal dialogue reminiscent of Wittgenstein's curious conversations with himself in the Investigations, Ashbery's speaker drives himself to the most uncharacteristic admission that "I do care. / I can't help it."(10) For Ashbery, the question of being cannot ultimately be separated from the impulse of caring. This feeling-like-an-I, and caring, is a fundamental motivation of his poetry.

For Ashbery's caring is a caring of the speaker not just about, but for, himself - the kind of care that alone makes possible the caring for another. This one-who-cares can know himself as the subject of love only through accession, not to a language of desire, but to desire as language. In this connection it is striking that Ashbery, who is gay, should so curiously efface from his poems the question of a specifically gay desire / gay language, a question equally strikingly absent from the criticism of his work, with the exception of John Shoptaw's recent book.(11)

Ashbery's poetry is not entirely without allusion to gay sexuality. In his prose poem "Description of a Masque," Little Boy Blue is described as "apparently performing an act of fellatio" on Little Jack Horner (Wave 19). Typically, however, Ashbery's language and images are neither sexual nor erotic in any obvious way.

There are several possible ways of accounting for Ashbery's disconnection from the contemporary problematic of homosexuality - a sexuality that has been called, among other things, the origin of "a species" (Foucault History 43) and a crucial formation in "that remorseless mockery of Philistine common sense and bourgeois realism which is modern art" (Steiner 118, qtd. in Dollimore 307). One is that Ashbery chooses to avoid allowing his poems to run the risk of being collapsed from broadly applicable meditations on the instability of postmodern subjectivity into personalist ruminations on the plight of a "disposable" minority. Ashbery has remarked, for example, that "I do not think of myself as a gay poet" (Shoptaw 4). Another is that the thinking of subjectivity as language tends to discourage a preoccupation with being in its psychosomatic materiality.