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

Comparative Literature, Fall 1998 by Sweet, David

With this sarcastic invalidation of sweeping cultural decrees (identified with that Joycean windbag, Aeolus), Ashbery distances himself from any energetic program of change. Yet the distance is only by half, only a measure of self-abnegation, insofar as his own past experiments also made vigorous "editorial" use of trash. And although it does seem a pity to blow the very breath out of the streets, some effects of the potentates' decrees also appeal to Ashbery's sense of novelty. But novelty is not the same as revolution, and in the end it is novelty-not revolution-that the poem recommends:

The answer is that it is novelty

That guides these swift blades o'er the ice

Projects into a finer expression (but at the expense

Of energy) the profile I cannot remember. (34) If "The Skaters" offers an image of this "finer expression" in the form of lines cut in ice, crisscrossing in ways that suggest overlapping and transparent collagist edges, "The New Spirit" blurs those edges even further by dissolving collagism itself in a matrix of abstract prose. Ironically, the medium (prose) traditionally associated with "explanation" is virtually ubiquitous in this poem, with only occasional lapses into the graphic modulations of free verse. Yet in no sense is this prose a form of mere explanation or even traditional narrative; Ashbery is appropriating it for avant-garde purposes, or at least those of an idiosyncratic avant-garde. The poem both drains prose of its didactic potential and deprives avant-garde poetry of its graphic energy, the visible disjunctions that formerly signalled novelty. Ashbery also reduces the imagery of the visible, including those catalogues of concrete phenomena that proliferate in "The Skaters." These phenomena are here things beyond expression: natural elements which may be "reclaimed" bv-or themselves reclaim -art ("The New Spirit," Three Poems 36, 29 respectively).

Interestingly, this movement away from the conspicuous physicality and randomness that were indicative of an aesthetics of medium in the painting of the 1950s parallels a movement away from visual media and toward verbal discourse in the art of the 1960s, particularly conceptual and minimal art. In the context of avant-garde poetry, however, any such resumption of discursivity comes provocatively close to resuming the narrative strategies of an older poetics. The old and the new, then, seem to overlap here in the narrow, conditional interests of something even newer (if less presumptuous than its "contributors"). Within these confines, Ashbery conceives an expressive "self" that ironically finds a kind of freedom in diminished options: "One is aware of it as an open field of narrative possibilities. Not in the edifying sense of the tales of the past that we are still (however) chained to, but as stories that tell only of themselves, so that one realizes one's self has dwindled and now at last vanished in the diamond light of pure speculation" (Three Poems 41 ) .

A recurring, escalating dialectics of "self" and "other" provides the structural framework for "The New Spirit." The fusion, separation, and mannered variation of these meditative categories are the formal modes of the new spirit in its perpetual task of` "putting in" and "leaving out" in the process of going forward. The poem describes the task in the opening lines, initially calling the leaving-out business the "truer" way, but quickly remembering that "forget as we will, something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but-yourself" (3). While "they" represent everything omitted, the "you" is the domain of everything "put in"-that is, everything that resists the "I's" "leaving out." Thus, "The New Spirit" seems to trace the subject's coming to terms with a tendency-exemplified by the Avant-Garde on one hand and democracy on the other-toward greater inclusion in expressive media that traditionally operate through a process of elimination. Both resignation and bravado characterize a discursive voice in the poem that can only know itself through another, but must also define itself against that other. Consequently, it is virtually impossible to know whether the "I" and "you," subject and object, of the poem are distinct entities or internalized divisions. A strange, hostile complicity surrounds them, like that between the "leaving-out" and the "putting-in," a numbing, confused complicity rooted in the need perpetually to advance on the future: "I can only say that the wind of the change as it has happened has numbed me, to the point where the false way and the true way are confounded, where there is no way or rather where everything is a way, none more suitable nor more accurate than the last, oblivion rapidly absorbing their outline like snow filling footprints" ( 17) .