This is the real teeming
of the mind, this
lucid rain.  Just as I sang
that song for you, before my lips
gave out:  so the field
of poppies blew, and every one
made its soft presentation
to the air.  You
are all surface, even
to the inmost.  The light
that cleaves around you
dulls, exhausts itself
with searching, the path
is overgrown!  but you were gone
before we started, and there was
no one looking
anyway.  There are no
more voices but the rain's
to hear.  Love, you must learn
to be absent even
to yourself:  let the air
claim you.  It has nothing
but its need, its time, its will.

posted by michael  10:10:12 PM  
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I've been writing a decent amount the last few days, but none of it here: I registered over the weekend with a couple of poetry-workshop forums (Gazebo, and Poetry Free-for-All), and I've been spending time there, writing critiques and recovering the pleasure of actively engaging in criticism. (And trying to decide whether I'm going to post my own fairly un-workshoppable poetry for review.) It's a bit of the kid-with-a-new toy syndrome—even if the new toy in this case is incredibly geeky. So, I've been neglecting the Times and the politics, but not abandoning—it's just that there's only so much writing I can manage in a day before my head starts to throb.

Oh, and also I'm trying to figure out the making-a-living thing in my spare time.

Anyway, pending another dive back into the media-critique waters, I'm posting this here, from a forum session discussing how to read John Ashbery. Because I like what I formulated, and because it's one of the very few pieces of actual literary criticism, short though it is, that I've written in a long time:

The trick with Ashbery—I think he's said it himself—is to avoid focus. It's not the ordinary way you read poetry, at least not if you're an engaged reader, and if you come to the poems with the ordinary expectation of getting clear about them you're likely to hurt yourself. I think of one of those stereograms, if you remember that fad, where the only way to see the image was to focus past the image on the page. My touchstone here is "Loving Mad Tom," from Houseboat Days, which seems like Ashbery's instructions to the reader—his creating the taste by which he's to be enjoyed:

You thought it was wrong. And afterwards
When everyone had gone out, their lying persisted in your ears,
Across the water. ... Their word only
Waited for you like the truth, and sometimes
Out of a pure, unintentional song, the meaning
Stammered nonetheless, and your zeal could see
To the opposite shore, where it was all coming true.

That's the great pleasure of Ashbery, for me: the "pure, unintentional song" (how beautiful is that phrase?) that, at moments, is on the verge of bringing something into focus on the opposite shore—and the focus fading again without ever having quite coalesced, without leaving any certainty that the thing was actually real. That flux of attention and insight is Ashbery's response to the Wallace Stevens dictum, about the task of poetry being to make the visible a little harder to see.

posted by michael  9:35:03 PM  
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