"The tension is in the concept": John Ashbery's surrealism

Style, Spring, 2004 by Ernesto Suarez-Toste

   Memory, forgetfulness, and being are certainly things that are
   happening in our minds all the time which I'm attempting to
   reproduce in poetry, the actions of a mind at work or at rest
   [...]. My poetry is really trying to explore consciousness to give
   it perspective [...]. I begin with unrelated phrases and notations
   that later on I hope get resolved in the course of the poem as it
   begins to define itself more clearly for me.

   ("Craft Interview" 118-19, emphasis added)

Therefore it is not strange that Ashbery has adopted such experimental modes during his career, with a particularly innovative attitude toward language. De Chirico on his part wrote his novel Hebdomeros in French, which was not his mother tongue but allowed him the kind of prose Ashbery has repeatedly praised. Even outside The Tennis Court Oath Ashbery has sporadically afforded such defying gestures as resorting to the techniques of the Oulipo writers group; or simply making use of cultural differences in direct translations from the French. In the poem "Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox" he used the Oulipian strategy of replacing words by their definitions: "On the one hand, a vast open basin--or sea: on the other a narrow spit of land, terminating in a copse, with a few broken-down outbuildings lying here and there. It made no difference that the bey--b-e-y this time, oriental potentate--had ordained their release [...]" (Double Dream 28). In the opening of this passage Ashbery has described a bay ("vast open basin" limited by the "narrow spit of land"), so he pretends that the mention of the bey in the third line demands spelling to avoid confusion, and then provides a crossword definition in two words. This is a challenge to the reader's patience, for many would rather miss the point than find out how perversely playful the poet can be. But there is certainly pleasure in the finding, if one happens to be "in the mood for Ashbery."

Ashbery's adoption of Oulipian techniques seems to work on the basis of personal affinity rather than systematic adherence to the movement. In fact, many of these strategies are very similar to those employed in Ashbery's collaborations with Kenneth Koch, like logo-rally (in the random selection of teleutons in sestinas, for example). Ashbery's self-imposed use of highly demanding forms such as the sestina, the cento, or the pantoum, where form can be said to condition meaning by restricting the paradigm available, pursues a very deliberate aesthetic effect, which in fact constitutes an established genre of Oulipian practice (though it is a genre in permanent flux). In this sense Ashbery is always moving between the automatic-looking experimentalism of The Tennis Court Oath and these restrictions, which are defined by Raymond Queneau as the very opposite strategy:

   Another false idea that is current nowadays is the equivalence
   established between inspiration, the exploration of the
   subconscious, and liberation; between chance, automatism, and
   freedom. The kind of freedom that consists of blindly obeying every
   impulse is in reality a form of slavery. The classical author, who
   when writing his tragedy follows a certain number of rules that he
   knows, is freer than the poet who writes whatever comes into his
   head and is the slave of other rules he is unaware of.

   (Oulipo 123)