[This is the final install­ment of Anthony Madrid's note­book on John Ashbery's Plani­sphere, prompted by my writ­ing about same for the London Review of Books. I saw Madrid read at Myopic Books in Chicago last night. He should not be allowed in public with­out a han­dler.—mr]

ONGO­ING PLANI­SPHERE NOTE­BOOK

Anthony Madrid

5.

TWO BITS:

(a)

Pol. What is the matter my Lord.

Ham. Betweene who.

Pol. I meane the matter you reade my Lord.

Ham. Slaun­ders sir; for the sater­i­call rogue sayes here, that old men haue gray beards, that their faces are wrinck­led, their eyes purg­ing thick Amber, & plumtree gum, & that they haue a plen­ti­full lacke of wit, together with most weake hams, all which sir though I most pow­er­fully and potentlie belieue, yet I hold it not hon­esty to haue it thus set downe, for your selfe sir shall growe old as I am: if like a Crab you could goe backward.

(b)

mrs teas­dale: I’ve spon­sored your appoint­ment because I feel you are the most able states­man in all Freedonia.

fire­fly: Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say, you cover a lot of ground your­self. You’d better beat it. I hear they’re gonna tear you down and put up an office build­ing where you’re stand­ing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t leave in a taxi you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. You know you haven’t stopped talk­ing since I came here? You must have been vac­ci­nated with a phono­graph needle.

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These are sam­ples of bewil­der­ing non­sense. Which is not to say there isn’t any sense there. In fact, it’s almost all sense. It’s just strange.

What exactly would have to be left out from those bits to make ’em into Ash­bery poems? And what would need to be added? I feel like if I could put my finger on that, I’d really have some­thing.

I think most of what stops the Hamlet and Grou­cho bits from being Ash­bery poems is the jiu-​jitsu aspect. In both cases, an affront is being pros­e­cuted, quite single-​mindedly. Ash­bery would never do that. He only allows bitch­i­ness or obnox­ious­ness to show their heads for half a second.

You know some­thing?
I don’t care. [p. 12]

—and the like.

But even if we leave out the aggres­sive energy, the Groucho/Hamlet things still have too much for­ward momen­tum to count as Ash­ber­ian. Their logic doesn’t zigzag any old way; rather, it spi­rals upward and comes to a point, like a sundae with its cherry. The cherry is not ice cream; crabs have noth­ing to do with it; where did that phono­graph needle come from—and there you are. It’s the “and there you are” effect that makes Hamlet or Grou­cho quite dis­tinct from the author of Planisphere.

Ah. To make a poem that might pass for gen­uine Ash­bery, you have to create speed with­out momen­tum. The asso­ci­a­tions have to move as rapidly as they do in the mate­r­ial quoted above, but they can’t seem to be tum­bling down­hill. You can have an excit­ing ending, but it has to come out of nowhere. Or seem to.

Nat­u­rally, the above prin­ci­ple is vio­lated occa­sion­ally by the master him­self. But when he does so, he pro­duces a poem that would never win a Pass-Yourself-Off-as-Ashbery Con­test. Wouldn’t even make semifinals.

(Young poets should take heed. For many and many a mag­a­zine does indeed oper­ate almost exactly like a Pass-Yourself-Off-as-Ashbery Contest.)

6.

Occurs to me to men­tion. People need to stop talk­ing about Ashbery’s poetry like it mimics the way people think. I mean, I guess it does, in a sense. But.

Here, look at this famous thing out of Hobbes:

For in a Dis­course of our present civill warre, what could seem more imper­ti­nent, than to ask (as one did) what was the value of a Roman Penny? Yet the Cohærence to me was man­i­fest enough. For the Thought of the warre, intro­duced the Thought of deliv­er­ing up the King to his Ene­mies; The Thought of that, brought in the Thought of the deliv­er­ing up of Christ; and that again the Thought of the 30 pence, which was the price of that trea­son: and thence easily fol­lowed that mali­cious ques­tion; and all this in a moment of time; for Thought is quick.

In that sense, yes. Ash­bery mimics the flow of, etc. But real free asso­ci­a­tions don’t have any­where near the kind of verbal body that the poems in Plani­sphere have. When one is ambling through one’s day, wash­ing dishes, unload­ing the car, one’s thoughts are like a muddy river on which a few twigs and sticks are being pulled. Those are words and phrases. The river itself is some­thing else again. If one were to trans­late the whole river into lan­guage, it would look like noth­ing you’ve ever seen before. It cer­tainly wouldn’t look like a Plani­sphere poem.

I say this with some heat because I have heard Ash­bery explained ten bil­lion times in terms imply­ing that the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for his pro­ce­dures lies in the way they reveal some­thing about how con­scious­ness oper­ates. As if that’s why he’s good! But how unin­ter­est­ing Ash­bery would be if his explain­ers were right about him. To me, the exhil­a­ra­tion of the thing is not that it mimics the flow of con­scious­ness; it does some­thing much better. It mimics the flow of a super­hu­man consciousness.

This is the thing it has in common with the Hamlet and the Grou­cho. Nobody could make all that stuff up at that speed in real time. If a person pulls it off to the depth of twenty sec­onds, he or she is said to be in rare form, “on a roll,” and so on. You wanna run off and write down what they said.

7.

The speed of the asso­ci­a­tions is its own thing. It doesn’t need defend­ing under color of mime­sis. But there is one thing about Ashbery’s poems that really is won­der­fully mimetic of ordi­nary mental oper­a­tions. The strong—and indeed unignorable—presence of banal­ity. Ash­bery has found a hun­dred good uses for that.

I’m reminded of Auden on the sub­ject of Boswell’s journals:

When we read Rousseau or Stend­hal or Gide, we are con­scious of artful high­lights and shad­ows, and keep asking our­selves, “Now, just what was his secret motive for con­fess­ing this or recall­ing that?” But when we read Boswell, the char­ac­ter pre­sented is as com­plete and trans­par­ent as a char­ac­ter in a novel by Defoe or Dick­ens; we cannot imag­ine there being any more to know than we are told.

Take for exam­ple, the fol­low­ing extract:

When I got home, I was shocked to think I had been inti­mately united with a low, aban­doned, per­jured, pil­fer­ing crea­ture. I deter­mined to do so no more; but if the Cyprian fury should seize me, to par­tic­i­pate my amorous flame with a gen­teel girl.

An ego-​conscious writer like Stend­hal would never have allowed him­self to write phrases like “the Cyprian fury” or “my amorous flame”; he would have reflected, “These are clichés. Clichés are dis­hon­est. I must put down exactly what I mean in plain words.” But he would have been mis­taken, for everyone’s self, includ­ing Stendhal’s, does think in clichés and euphemisms.

—Auden’s defense of cliché is lim­ited to its deploy­ment in self-​portraiture: diaries and the like. He prizes it as evi­dence of hon­esty, authen­tic­ity. But that’s not what I’m saying about Ash­bery. I’m saying Ashbery’s insis­tent use of phrases like “I kind of liked it, though” and “it was so nice out­side” rep­re­sents THE thing his poems have in common with normal thought. NOT the speed of association.

When it comes to speed, the poems are anal­o­gous to thought. The banal­ity, on the other hand, is the thing itself.

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Anthony Madrid’s The Get­ting Rid of the That Which Cannot Be Done With­out was a final­ist for the Fence Modern Poetry Series. He is the author of The 580 Stro­phes. His poems are forth­com­ing in Poetry & Boston Review.