"And Ut Pictura Poesis is her name": John Ashbery, the plastic arts, and the avant-garde

Comparative Literature, Fall 1998 by Sweet, David

The word "seesaw" concretizes the overall strategy of the poem in an oscillating image that also associates the instructive aspect of the poem with the promise of copulation. As both temporal movement and concrete object, the seesaw suggests both time-here associated with the discursive, narrative, or lyric movement characteristic of literature-and space-associated with the frozen or "timeless" appearance of the plastic art object. Moreover, the word also suggests an unexpected "rapport" between these two "sister" arts byjuxtaposing the past and present tenses of "to see" in a compound noun that implies the temporality of "seeing" itself. In this way Ashbery ironizes the modernist assumption that the plastic arts have an instantaneous appeal to the sense of sight, which, unlike the sense of sound, experiences the relations between a work's visual elements simultaneously, enabling an immediate or accelerated apperception of its plastic properties.3 This "simultaneity" was the Avant-Garde's rationale for the creation of a more "painterly," "objectivist," or "presentational" poetics in the first place. But for Ashbery seeing ultimately takes just as long as hearing; thus, a certain temporalizing "discursivity" not only accompanies aesthetic judgments about the visual, but helps produce it. Furthermore, the relation between painting and poetry here is analogous to that between "modern" and "traditional" poetics (as the corresponding tenses "see" and "saw" indicate), and it is a quirky synthesis of the two that Ashbery sustains in the interest of a new realism. Because the chief precedent for bridging these constellated categories of time/space, poetry/painting, discursivity/concreteness is in many respects surrealist automatism itself, Ashbery concludes the poem with an image that echoes surrealist interests, but with a proviso about fostering "understanding" and "communication" in ways that seem less self-consciously marvelous than those the Surrealists envisioned:

Austere emptiness (the given? being?) and lush communication (the negative? the ideal?) are both components of the final product, which seems to have been occasioned bv some startling revelation -as if before a painting or beautiful person. This collision of "empty mind" and "lush Rousseau-like foliage" clearly gestures toward Surrealism (Rousseau was one of Breton's favorite painters). Thus, even after Ashbery has presumably re-evaluated his relation both to the Avant-Garde and to the "tradition," one can see the tenacious persistence of the poet's surrealist memory.

Certain early works of Ashbery, on the other hand, assert almost violently their radical avant-gardist assumptions, most notably in The Tennis Court Oath, a collection Harold Bloom angrily criticized as mostly "calculated incoherence" (Bloom 53) that resisted the Stevensian genealogy Bloom had established for Ashbery. Although other critics appreciated the work's experimentalism that seemed to link it with the concerns of the language poets, the most sustained attempt to resituate Ashbery in an avant-garde tradition of painterly poetics was Leslie Wolf's essay "The Brushstroke's Integrity," which argues that Ashbery's early poems, like the paintings of Pollock and DeKooning, emphasize medium over message and thereby achieve an effect of "all-over" abstraction. Wolf's argument loses momentum, however, when he attempts to associate Ashbery's technique with DeKooning's on the basis of "action"-a personal, creative struggle with an artist's particular medium that assumes heroic proportions.' This spirit of heroic self-absorption is absent in The Tennis Court Oath. Instead, Ashbery's poems resort to alternative strategies derived from pre- and peri-surrealist experiments. Indeed, the works seem premised on the exhaustion or exhaustive repetition of avant-garde strategies, primarily collage. Through their almost ritual collagism, these poems continually reject Abstract Expressionism's insistence on personal immediacy, energy, and action. As David Shapiro suggests,