I tried, but forgive me John, if I can’t write about
you without also writing about myself….
In her brilliant and moving tribute to John Ashbery,
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews writes:
“But at the same time, we’re all trying a little bit to get
out from under our various elitisms.
Ashbery’s later poetry tries almost too hard
to do this, revels almost too much in its “gee willikers!”
performance of nonchalance. It’s why a lot of the excerpted bits of verse
you’ll see in our collective mourning will be from the ’70s and ’80s, those
earnest decades in which Ashbery’s poetry hummed with a desire to crack the
code of itself.” I certainly will not quarrel with the many celebrations of
Ashbery’s earlier work, which has been a profound influence on my own, but
reading his later poetry leaves me with the feeling that perhaps we just
haven’t caught up with it yet.
In his review of Breezeway
(2015), Dan Chiasson writes, “the finest lyrics in this book rank with
Ashbery’s best short poems.” One of these poems, according to Chiasson, is
“Listening Tour.” Here’s the first stanza of this two stanza poem:
We were arguing about whether NBC
was better than CBS. I said CBS
because it’s smaller and had to work
harder to please viewers. You didn’t
like either that much but preferred
smaller independent companies.
Just then an avalanche flew
overhead, light blue against the
sky’s determined violet. We
started to grab our stuff but
it was too late. We segued . . .
Of the many ways that this poem can be read---Susan Schultz
reads it in light of recent American politics and Hillary Clinton’s listening
tours---I currently favor an interpretation in which the “Listening Tour” is
not a politician’s, but, rather, Ashbery’s own.
In an interview published in the New York Times on May 7,
2015 (not long after Breezeway was
published), he said: “I’m told that my poetry has influenced a lot of younger
poets, so it’s nice to find someone who might have absorbed it at second hand
and be trying to shake it off — nice, that is, for showing me how to shake off
my own influence.” This is a beautiful short description of the kind of (anti-essentialist
intersubjective) democratic mutuality the later Ashbery finds and encourages in
the process of reading and writing, as if to strip away the hierarchy clothes
and one-sided narratives of “anxiety of influence” and such that may put up
barriers between a famous poet and acolytes, imitators, the so-called “small
people”—but, rather, see if what they have to say, their concerns, etc., can
maybe influence his policies, or platform, I mean poetry, and at the same time
save him from becoming a cliché immured in a not-so-divine sepulcher of a mere signature
style. Or, you could say, in contrast to contemporary politicians, Ashbery may,
sometimes at least, campaign in prose, but he governs in poetry.
Ashbery does not simply listen, but actively engages the
“you” on his listening tour. The argument that starts “Listening Tour” is
cordial, chatty, and seemingly gentlemanly enough (even if it may fall short of
being a marriage of true minds). The “you” doesn’t necessarily disagree that
NBC is worse than CBS, and the “I” doesn’t necessarily disagree that “smaller
independent companies” are better…. Furthermore, Ashbery obviously did his
research, for indeed CBS did have to “work harder” than NBC/RCA (CBS,
incidentally, was born around the same time Ashbery himself was in 1927).
The poem invites the reader to cast his or her self into the
role of the “I” or the “you,” but, as is often the case with his later work, I
find it uncannily easy to identify with the “you” of this poem, as if Ashbery
and I had the same thought at the same time, or perhaps that he had seen an
essay I wrote (and if, so, it’s hard to avoid an embarrassment that he could be
“slumming” it in my writing, like a negative muse).
Of course, this argument about networks may not be that
important at all (abstracted as it is from body language), but is really more
of a set-up for what happens next: the avalanche!
The avalanche suggests a clean break----“and now for
something completely different” (as Monty Python would put it), as we must bow
down before necessity, perhaps, or confront mortality……but it’s no ordinary
avalanche…. for what kind of avalanche is it that flies (not falls) overhead?
Can that be properly called an avalanche? It doesn’t seem to be cutting the
very ground out from under us, but rather inspiring awe; it didn’t destroy us,
but passed us by, maybe even waving and smiling. This avalanche, you could say,
went over our head (spared us), and it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say
that this avalanche that didn’t hit us is a virtual
or vicarious avalanche, an avalanche
we wouldn’t know about without the network airwaves (to say nothing of today’s
wireless networks). Could this perhaps be saying something about the over-saturation
of pop culture? Or have we left such trivial debates behind?
Is the “avalanche” like that moment when you’re on a long
walking/talking date with a fast-talking New Yorker and suddenly s/he snaps you
out of your logorrhea and says “look at that bird” and that could humble you
into the kind of shared silence that has to happen before the kiss? Or has even
a word as powerful as “avalanche” lost its power to rouse the reader out of
complacency or the triviality of overdosing on culture-criticism and media
studies from the perspective of a poet who (as Chiasson writes in his New Yorker review of the book) “has gone
further from literature within literature than any poet alive?”
And, of course, the aesthete in me loves the color
combination, as if this represents the “shared view” beyond argument, the
sunset perhaps, but does the personified violet keep our mind off the argument,
or does it tell us something about either the “I” or the “you” (who are having,
or being had by, the argument) with which the poem started (I.e.—one is more
“light” and the other more “determined”), and why would this flying light blue
avalanche in twilight time make us want to start “to grab our stuff?”
And why was it too late? Was the avalanche going to hit us
after all? Were we, was “the we,” too busy enjoying the beauty of slowing down
time, of seeing the disaster as a kind of bird in flight, lost in wonder, or
what some would call “a zone,” that it become too late to save “our stuff?”Oh,
horrors; is Chiasson right, and this is the moment of death? The questions
proliferate…
But wait,
too late for what?
I mean if it can be proven
there is no death but seque
… and ellipses….
as if somehow surviving
a disaster proves
it wasn’t a disaster?
Can we fuse—ourselves--
with death—
in a breezeway
or planisphere--to see?
Is it really posthumous, or just post us having lost “our
stuff”? And what is “our stuff?” Maybe looking at the second (and final)
stanza, can help explain:
And in another era the revolutions
were put down by the farmers,
working together with the peasants
And the enlightened classes. All
benefited in some way. That was
all I had to hear.
Whatever…
So, given the contrast between the two stanzas, what do you
make of the elliptical segue, or the transition between them?
On one level, you could read it as death (as Chaisson,
apparently, does), but it could also be time travel back to another era,
presumably earlier than the present in which they’re arguing about 20th
century radio (and television) networks, a less urban and suburban, but more
rural, era, perhaps before electricity (or in a so-called “underdeveloped”
country), a more placeless and vague time, a prelapsarian, and perhaps
apocryphal, utopia.
What Susan Schultz calls this “bizarre take on revolutions”
may deserve further investigation.
In this poem, all (both manual laborers and intellectual
laborers) benefitted from the putting down of a revolution. There’s two
questions to ask: did such a thing happen (descriptive assumption) and would it
be a good thing if it did (value assumption), but since both “revolutions” and
“enlightened classes” are what we could call “loaded terms,” vexed terms (that
have been used by both left wing and right wing, the proles and the
corporatists), in order to know whether putting down a revolution does more
harm than good, or whether it has positive or negative connotations, we may
first have to define revolution is.
Long before I learned of the tradition in poetry in which “revolution”
is what Wallace Stevens calls “the pleasures of merely circulating,” my first
memory of the term revolution had positive connotations, torn between some
romanticized notion of the American and French revolutions of the late 18th
century, and the failed (or yet to happen) revolutions that Marx, Malcolm X,
The Black Panthers and Gil Scott Heron spoke about. Even though both are touted
as democratizing, in many ways, they are on opposite sides (the American
revolution, which by some definitions was really just a regime change, not only
didn’t deliver on its promise to free the slaves, but actually increased
slavery). So, the word could have as many negative connotations as positive---and
in the poem (on first reading at least), it seems to have negative connotations
(as if a revolution can keep everybody down!)
The American Revolution is also contemporaneous with the
“Scientific Revolution” or “The Enlightenment,” a paradigm shift that coincided
with the rise of “the enlightened classes” that parallels the advance of
capitalism, the slave trade, the Enclosure Acts that harmed the majority of farmers
and peasants, and paved the way for “industrial revolution” and the subjugation
of nature by “enlightened man.” But doesn’t the word “enlightened classes” make
you cringe? Would it be better to say “intelligentsia,” “public intellectuals”
or “culture workers?” Does the phrase itself imply hierarchical snobbery
(peasants and farmers can’t be enlightened)? And does this argument have
anything to do with the argument about CBS, NBC and the indies? I suspect
Ashbery is up to something else here, but before we get into what that might
be, I think it’s important to shift our attention (back to) the poem’s
relational “framing device.”
In this second stanza, you may notice how both the “I” and
the “you” (and even the “we”) are entirely absent in the first two sentences
(or 5 lines). Now, let’s pause, or at least slow down, to consider what the
transitional line unit (as opposed to the sentence unit):
“benefitted in some way. That was”
feels like the first time you’re reading it before the next
line closes the sentence. At first, you may think it’s a continuation of the
same argument about the revolution, as if he’s going to say “That was…..a
better time” or, in the plural, join Edith and Archie or Mary Hopkins, in
singing “Those were the days.” The re-emergence of the “I” in the next line,
however, is jarring, especially considering that the “you” has not re-emerged.
While it’s possible that the “I” survived the avalanche that the “you” died in,
it seems more likely that the last two sentences retroactively changes (or at
least contextualizes) the meaning of the first five lines by suggesting that
they were spoken by the “you,” and that, despite the avalanche, they’re still
continuing the argument, as if there are invisible quotation marks around the
first five lines. If it’s the same “you,” is it possible that this coalition of
farmers, peasants and the enlightened classes is to the “smaller independent
companies” what the revolution is to NBC!
In this light, Ashbery is not telling us what he thinks
about revolutions, but simply describing what a “you” he meets on his listening
tour says. “That was/ all I had to hear.” could theoretically signify
excitement, as if to continue, “and I was hooked,” but, as the final line makes
clear, it signifies disgust, dismissal, contempt, even hurt…..as if this person
the “I” meets on his listening tour could very well be like those folks wearing
a “Make America Great Again” hat, being interviewed (by small independent
journalists, if not CBS or NBC), and when asked “when was America great the
first time” can’t come up with a specific time in which “all benefitted.”
Indeed, while the argument about Networks could seem a
little more relevant to the present, the argument in this stanza is even more
vague and general than the historical shifts with which Ashbery starts
“Definition of Blue,” from Double Dream
of Spring (1970):
The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism
And the individual is dominant until the close of the
nineteenth century.
In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the
personality
By ignoring it, which has caused it instead to branch out in
all directions
From the permanent tug that used to be its notion of “home.”
Somehow between the stanzas of “Listening Tour,” the
argument became more one-sided, more monologic, and more impersonal. And the
final two sentences makes it clear that the “you” has lost the “I” as if the
argument the “you” proffers is like that avalanche flying over the head of the
“I” and frankly of itself, as if the avalanche had bombed it back to the stone
age….or puts up a Trumpian wall, as if the “you” needed to get the last word,
and fell into what Paolo Friere would call “the banking model” of conversation.
If it is the sentence, “All/ benefitted in some ways” that
triggers Ashbery’s disgust, the final “Whatever….” hits hard, as if you can
hear him muttering beneath his breath the word “dude!” as in “whatever dude.”
In this light, the line break “That was/ all I had to hear” can also be read as
“that was was all I had to hear” (as
if to say, “get out of the past, and help the present!”)
You could even say the word “Whatever,” in this poem at
least, has more power than the “avalanche” did to shake one of habitual
thinking. One reader (who prefers not to be named) told me that the didactic
point of this poem was to contrast poetry with cultural criticism, but he’s not
condemning all cultural criticism here, just particular ones with a tendency to
make too easy generalizations about eras. His permissiveness ensures that the
disgust is more with a particular kind of argument, not necessarily the person
making it.
Furthermore, going back at least as far as “Definition of
Blue,” Ashbery has over and over used poetry as a tool to rebuke the temptation
for any sense of “the good old days” (that sometimes haunts his poems, for
instance in Where Shall I Wander) in
his relentless futurity (which even at age 88 had not abandoned him!). Reading
this poem makes me realize how, in a history of radio and the record industry I
wrote for RadioSurvivor.com, I fell into the tendency to over-idealize at
least one sector of what economists call “The Great Compression” (1945-1965)
era, in an abstract way, being that I didn’t live through it. John, unlike me,
did live through that period and certainly knew damn well that all didn’t
benefit: Jim Crow, for instance, and Ashbery’s own lived experience of having
struggled against homophobia in that normative closeted era.
In my essay about NBC, CBS and smaller independent radio
stations and record labels, I was trying to master a rhetorical strategy one
often finds in economists like Robert Reich and Joseph Stiglitz, historians
like Howard Zinn, or cultural and music critics like Nelson George: that the
people’s movements that helped create the middle class paralleled the
grassroots building of a cultural infrastructure in mid-20th century
America, and took a stand against the corporatists (like CBS and NBC) who used
words like progress to signify their “revolution!” My argument about the
networks and the independents takes place in this mid-century context, and a
sense of nostalgia informs it, and, as everyone knows, it’s easy to be
nostalgic for a time before you were born.
In this essay, I make exactly the same argument the you of
the first stanza of “Listening Tour” makes; I wrote this essay for a different
audience in 2011, after the illegal corporate takeover of a local community
radio station. I felt that somehow spending 6 months researching a “people’s
history of radio and the record industry” in the 20th century would
help me ground my argument to help in the fight to save KUSF! It didn’t occur to me that John might read
it, but it’s hard not to wonder, especially given the fact that he liked my old
poetry, and even though I hadn’t seen him in a decade since I moved to
California, he might have checked out what I’m up to (and this is the era of
Google).
Given what he says about reading writers who are influenced
by him and watching them try to shake off his influence to show him ways to
shake off his own, I could flatter myself to say that, stylistically, this poem
may be a tribute to the “careless brilliance” JA admired about my work: I’m
pretty sure I have at least one poem that begins with “we were arguing.” One
may also notice Ashbery’s use of (clunky) lines with feminine endings, which
I’m told was part of my “signature style” (much to Marjorie Perloff’s chagrin).
A Rock critic once wrote that Lou Reed’s Transformer
was Reed trying to imitate Bowie who was trying to imitate him, but if indeed
Ashbery is imitating his imitator here, it must clearly be said that “he does
Stroffolino better than Stroffolino.” So any pride I feel, if flattered, is
mixed with enough shame and embarrassment (was I a negative muse?) that the two
may cancel out to leave a sense of futurity---and even though that final
“Whatever” may hurt like a door slam shut, there’s always the ellipses…..the
poem is a gift I cherish, even if I have to use the personal allegory to enter
into it. Meanwhile, onto the next…..person? channel? .
In the end, I read “Listening Tour” as a poem about an
argument, or conversation, that goes wrong. For, this isn’t ultimately a mere
poetic flight of fancy, but a hard-nosed realist anti-utopian anti-nostalgia
generalization poem….
Chris
Stroffolino
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