Charles Altieri and the Challenge to Affected Naturalness

In Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, Charles Altieri investigates the dominant mode of contemporary American poetry (in the 1980s), which he suggests is made up of poems that affect a sort of naturalness and move toward a moment of visionary closure. (He gives a nod to Jonanthon Holden, who made a similar diagnosis earlier). Altieri argues, however, that the very rhetoric needed to achieve these ends undercuts them. He provides a model of reading that seeks to understand the pressures that lead to such rhetorical strategies rather than getting swept up in the desired effect of the strategies.

In a sense, Altieri asks for a metapoetic reader, one who considers the tensions that give rise to the poet's rhetorical performance. That is, the poem's content does not constitute its meaning; the story of the poem's creation does. The poetic speaker is not natural, but is, rather, the result of a collection of concerns within a dominant rhetorical framework.

This perspective explains why Altieri values John Ashbery's work, which according to Altieri establishes a self of "various desires and [...creates] a mobile field of lyric attachments" (19). But it seems to me that Ashbery is so diffuse regarding the subject that tension dissolves. The reader is left with only the play and not the results of the examination. After one of Ashbery's diffuse performances, the reader (and critic) is left to wonder what has been mobilized. What does the blur of these transitory attachments mean? How does a poem, like "Laughing Gravy" for example, become anything more than a blank?

"Laughing Gravy"
The crisis has just passed.
Uh oh, here it comes again,
looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I...

All these people coming in...
The last time we necked
I noticed this lobe on your ear.
Please, tell me we may begin.

All the wolves in the wolf factory paused
at noon, for a moment of silence.

We cannot attach ourselves to the fate of the crisis because it goes unnamed. The "you" is generalized and is not more perplexing than the wolves, who are not given a relation to the speaker or the unidentified "you." In short, these attachments are too "mobile" to gain purchase on the reader. In a way, many of the discrete statements in Ashbery's work are like philosophical declarations or conclusions to arguments in which we can't participate and which deal with experiences and consequences that aren't provided.