WHERE IS POETRY NOW? Every few months or so, pundits like to pound their meaty fists and proclaim that poetry is dead, or that refrigerator magnets have saved it, or that public education refutes its complexity. Every other issue of Harper’s magazine bewails embedded didacticism or subverted advertising in poetry. So where is it now?
John Ashbery is a poet who doesn’t really care where poetry is now. His own work, so braided by complexity that the pages seem erected in vigor, has itself been accused of giving poetry a bad name. He has no brook with difficult reading — his work is most often described as “opaque” or “oblique,” and it runs the rampart of cultural references. But in a 1985 interview with John Tranter published in Scripsi magazine, Ashbery said, “Well, if my poetry is oblique, it’s because I want to slant it at as wide an audience as possible, odd as it may come out in practice. Therefore, if I’m writing a love poem it won’t talk about specifics, but just about the general feeling which anybody might conceivably be able to share.”
In fact, Ashbery’s poetry is only difficult if one means to “get” something from it, and therein lies the difficulty with our scholarly idea of poetry in the first place. Ashbery has obstinately refused to contribute to anthologies in which poets deconstruct their own work with explanatory essays, because this is to deny the basis of poetry, which has more to do with free association than with delineation. Ashbery’s very romanticism tends to refute the whole “poetry is dead” lament, because clearly he, or any poet whose lifeblood is found in that art, finds things to be romantic about or to despair about or to delight in, and puts them into words. The consistent link between Ashbery’s work and the “death” debate may prove that some element of public reaction to poetry is in fact alive and well for more than one month out of the year (Poetry Month be damned!). Hear this walking institution read and speak in a rare appearance Thursday, October 21, at 7:30 pm in the Roethke Auditorium (130 Kane Hall) on the University of Washington campus. Free.