Breezeway
John Ashbery
Ecco, New York
John Ashbery is a modernist’s illustrator through and thru ("Gimme a break / No I don't feel used"). He makes it look easy to be clean, sleek, obtuse.
Time’s up. Let’s call some “gaga experiments” a crown of ruses. When you conclude
Whatever... in 2015 you may not be kidding but we’ll take note of the use-by date. Other satirical belatedness:
OMG; The past / loves you, baby; Gold Dust; neat-o; Howdy-Doody; Do I wake or sleep.
Almost a dozen poems end in parentheses or ellipses, it seems.
The letters b-r-e-e-z-e appear on nearly every page, frequently in that order.
Lassitude — don’t worry about it (“I used to sing a song”) —
Results from programmed abundance (“I’ve done five of that”). That’s it.
A headache means at least a dozen things, socially (“Throw the book at him”).
John illustrates a freaky mastery of techniques that cut up what you might imagine he contains.
For five lines he throws out ‘whatever’ our way,
Mr Coffee Nerves / Help me with this / the price of eggs / Etc...
Then in a central quatrain from “The Price of Eggs”:
Who was that plant from?
She, somewhat evaporated... Would I laugh?
You are not to be concerned about fish.
Extreme ants polished our definition.
“The Price of Eggs” is nearly a sonnet in breadth and length (and if the penultimate and antepenultimate lines were indented, it’s a sonnet). In the stanza cited we get a glimpse or more a flicker of “She [who] somewhat evaporated,” renamed a “fish” polished off by eusocial insects. We learn she was caught up in a “hooded phase, a second ago” and “may have broken loose” — but that’s all we get. We hope she made it to another side of her future or past, either way cut into, here, by five more lines that seem deliberately down low
among the treatises / work / dandies, a princess, / buggers / dry goods sold.
Dry goods. John’s invaded by Britishisms, it’s playful as nettles. Besides, he’s always letting us in on the whole fabulous joke. My favorite title: “Gravy for the Prisoners.” Favorite two consecutive titles: "Homeschooled" and "The Sponge of Sleep"; runners-up: "The Undefinable Journey" and "The Pie District."
Reading
Breezeway as embedded satire about the wars, also as antidote to the ‘why read when you can sum it up in a sentence’ calculus.
You know what I think is speaking?
An absorbed being looks at currents past and present, reflects, has a fever and does everything.
I guess
Breezeway shows samples of the gallows persuasion.
But the no-shortcuts stance is maintained and sampling areas are where we drive home and choose.
Losing friends from mid century, modern tastes, music, conversation is no joke. Correction, our inferiority is.
Illustration one
: It’s mostly useful to
stay in the conceptual, unfinished era
Wrong!
(Cuckoo dwarfs! it’s all
modernism now.)