Month: August 2024

I have his collected poems, and I flick through it now and again, trying really just to stem my bafflement.

To utter the speech that belongs there

‘Blue Sonata’

making a poem fit to the occasion of its writing, literary and kitsch (Greenberg’s faked sensations): “To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass… And I am lost without you.” (‘They Dream Only of America’). Ashbery’s post modern use of high and low art is satisfying: it is not clear whom he is lost without, even-though each part of that short poem is perhaps disorientated, along with the allusions of the former line.

I’d suppose that the speech of my own poems belongs elsewhere, ideally to ideologically undo high and low orders.

I think that Ashbery’s poetry is great when America is kitsch (and his poetry folds that into the occasion), which might explain how he can even exist alongside LANGUAGE (poetics).

I was enjoying a lot about this collection, and I was going to remark that I was puzzled by the use of Blake and that perhaps Fisher was trying to link physics to Blake’s poems and heterodox religious views (even the music of Brixton to Blake’s art), but I got to here and the pun with ‘lead’ (gasoline) and then that all collapsed.

How they purchase will depend on their choice of food
Huge profits from ‘Landspeed’
Started with anecdote lead on conservative angst
Destruction of flora in a circle unexplained.
Splintered beauty
A kid hops the walkway,
says two elves can beat a wolf, and repeats it
Behind the front, a row of trees and flowers.

The italic quote is from Investors Chronicle (the book, ‘Gravity’, helpfully lists quotations), and while I still enjoy the use of syntactically coherent collage, I am very puzzled by how much it has lost me. Perhaps it’s something to do with neo-modernism’s relation to exclusion via parody, but that’s a random guess. But then I return to it, and though some of the materials seem forced, e.g. Pound quotations, there is an utmost tenderness to the language, so yes.