An Actual Post About Poetry

Let's class things up around here, shall we? The only thing I've posted on the blog all day dealt with porn, and I'm feeling like I should be a bit more highbrow. After all, I've forwarded this blog to professional journalists...I don't want them thinking I'm obsessed with fart jokes, pornography and violent movies. I am, but they don't need to know that!

So let's talk about poetry.

Wait, where are you going? Hold on a second. I'll keep it as interesting as possible.

There's a poet named John Ashbery with whom you may be familiar. His poems are exceedingly difficult, impenetrable some might say. I should know, because one of my best friends, Dave, is a poet himself and a great admirer of Ashbery, so I spent many a lazy evening having some of the man's more bizarre, conceptual verses read aloud to me, often while I was playing "Coolboarders 4" and listening to Beck's "Midnight Vultures" album.

I'll fully admit that, most of the time, I have no clue what the guy is talking about. To be perfectly frank, I usually find Dave's lyrics mystifying to the point of utter incomprehension. He read one at the Armand Hammer Museum a while back called "A Page About the Project" that I kind of think I understand. It was really good, though it could have used a few more fart jokes.

I bring all of this up because Slate currently features an article explaining one method of reading and appreciating Ashbery poems. Cultural critic Meghan O'Rourke assures us that Ashbery's poems aren't really designed for complete understanding, but rather use wordplay, description, suggestion and non-sequitur to impressionistically convey the experience of being alive, what Ashbery calls "the experience of experience." She focuses on Ashbery's background in surrealism to argue that, like a Dali painting, an Ashbery poem collects stray thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires and fears to project an image of the inner workings of the mind.

He is the first poet to achieve something utterly new by completely doubting the possibility—and the value—of capturing what the lyric poem has traditionally tried to capture: a crystallization of a moment in time, an epiphanic realization—what Wordsworth called "spots of time." Ashbery has updated the lyric poem by rejecting this project, finding it fundamentally inauthentic (though he'd never put it in such somber terms).

It sounds good when you're reading the article, but after thinking about her theory for a while, I'm left a bit unsatisfied. I mean, couldn't you say this same thing about almost every famous poet? They're all trying to pick up on verbiage that expresses the unexpressible, ethereal workings of our conscious and unconscious minds. Granted, most Frost poems have a beginning, a middle and an end - they're about something concrete, like taking the road less traveled in life or what have you. But most of the poetry with which I'm familiar, and granted that's not an abundant library of work, feels like it shares this intent, whether or not it's actually anything like Ashbery's poems to read.

Take this O'Rourke-ian observation:

Ashbery becomes a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter, so that the poems are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long.

That's how I feel about almost all poetry. Okay, not Shel Silverstein, but certainly most of the contemporary poetry with which I'm familiar. I don't feel like the article gets terribly specific about what makes Ashbery himself such a revered figure in modern verse.

Maybe that's because it's basically impossible to describe. That's kind of the point. In simple prose, I can't get to Ashbery's point. If I could, the poems wouldn't exist. He would have just written a small blog entry, if blogs had existed when he first started writing.

It's undeniable the man has a special gift with words. Take this brief excerpt from his poem The Improvement.

We never live long enough in our lives
to know what today is like.

See, that's a terrific insight.

It's buried within a poem that I can't say I understand, but for that one little point, when I'm reading those two lines, it's like...hey, yeah, I get it! And I feel good about myself. And then I get to the part about transparent leopards and ice tea I'm all mixed up again.

I'm sure, if Dave's reading the blog tonight, he's rolling his eyes clear to the back of his head at my primitive, caveman-esque take on his favorite poet. Most likely, I could mash the keyboard with my left palm and come up with equally insightful comments about modern poetry. But, hey, you can't say I didn't try to bring you guys a little culture in between the reviews of 1981 films and the anecdotes about my failure to score in college.