A few posts ago, I promised you a Top Five list (with Honorable Mentions!), and though that post included only two main entries, a Top Five list, Gentle Reader, is what you have every right to expect and a Top Five list is what you shall receive. Herewith, then, further entries in the list of Gamechanger Volumes in Twentieth-Century Poetry. A recap: we’re sticking to 1925-1975 for this list (between the release of the Ezra Pound Cantos concept album -- you know, the one with the cool cover and a couple of great hits but also some drum solos and noodling keyboard bits you could, in retrospect, do without – and the release of Dolomite, starring Rudy Ray Moore); and we’re looking for volumes that a chock-full of great poems which, individually but especially when taken together, articulate a new direction for poetry, especially a direction subsequent poets have followed. And so, without further throat-clearing:
Number Three: John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Close readers of this here melopoeic blog might recall that the original terminus of the period to be covered by this list was 1974, but I have since realized that while the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon formed my political consciousness in profound ways, to link this Top Five list to an event in American political history would be like, well, it would be like an English department linking its distribution requirement to something like the passage of the First Reform Bill in 1832. But I also realized that sticking to that earlier date would require me to nominate Ashbery’s 1956 volume, Some Trees. Now, I was sorely tempted by that possibility. The earlier book’s not only got some fantastic poems in it (“The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” “A Long Novel,” “Le livre est sur la table”), and it not only has cool prose poems like “The Young Son,” but it also has the benefit of what must have been the freshness of a lilac-soaked May afternoon amidst the monuments of Late Modernism and the well-wrought urns of post-Modernist formalism that littered the literary landscape at the time of its appearance.
But I’m plumping for Self-Portrait. Look, it boasts a bunch of poems that show up on numerous critics’ best-of lists: “Forties Flick,” “Scheherezade,” “Hop o’ My Thumb,” “Märchenbilder,” and the title poem. More than that, though, it adds to the Surrealist play and generally Frenchy feel (you know, like when you see the human arm torch-holders along the wall of the Beast’s palace in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete) of the earlier poems a range of cultural reference that stretches from Parmigianino (whose painting inspires the title poem) to Van Camp’s Pork and Bea
ns (or a sign for same, which shows up in “Grand Galop” along with the only high-littrachah puke sound I’ve ever run across: “Puaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More vomit”).But wait, there’s more. There is, in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a seriously playful meditation on the duties of representation and the responsibilities of evading them, an ars poetica at least partially encapsulated by these lines:
We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.
But it is life englobed.
Am I wrong to read a not-so-subtle kick at Confessionalism in the penultimate line-and-a-half there? And am I not right that the last line quoted is the shit?
This somber blog will, in the near future, offer its own meditation on play in poetry and why those alliteratively conjoined terms are GOOD THINGS, but Ashbery was there first, was present, we might even say, at something like the creation of a poetics dedicated to the proposition that a Magrittean atmosphere, a Cornellesque knack for juxtaposition (Ashbery is also, it turns out, a hell of a collagist), and a healthy appetite for the strange within the familiar are perhaps more interesting than our individual psyches’ struggles laid out in self-portraits in institutional glassless mirrors.
But you know what? I’d put this book on my list for this stanza, which concludes “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”:
The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.
Kind of like this book.
